council want to talk to Town about new stadium

Was only ever going to be financially viable with enabling development and with the demise of retail and now an endless supply of cheap housing land in NELC that bird flew 10-15 years ago.The owners have put it in the ‘ to difficult ‘ pile as they have no alternative.

Quoted from HerveJosse

Was only ever going to be financially viable with enabling development and with the demise of retail and now an endless supply of cheap housing land in NELC that bird flew 10-15 years ago.The owners have put it in the ‘ to difficult ‘ pile as they have no alternative.

Your useless mate might have failed miserably to deliver his new stadium, but the new owners are genuinely successful self-made businessmen. A new stadium will happen in the medium term because it has to.

The club cannot thrive at BP and the owners will only get their money back through increasing the value of their equity in the business by the club having a new, modern stadium. That simply won’t happen at BP.

Quoted from GollyGTFC

Do you own a house? How did you pay for it? Cash? No, a mortgage.

That’s how you finance a new stadium. And those moaning about could we afford a mortgage, didn’t we only finish paying off the Findus Stand a couple of years ago?

But by incorporating facilities that generate income into the stadium it will help pay for it. Examples: There’s a gym built into Chesterfields ground providing a rental income. Preston North End built an NHS walk-in centre into their final new stand at Deepdale which brings in around £500,000 a year in rent and only added an additional £4m to the construction costs.

And just like getting a mortgage on a house, the payments stay the same throughout the term of the mortgage. What seems like a big repayment amount now won’t seem so big as each year passes by.

I do own a house but the difference is that my house is a secure investment for the bank should I not be able to pay. I don't quite see a new stadium in the heart of a town 45 minutes from anywhere else offering the bank a similar level of security. The cost of paying for it has to come from somewhere and inflationary benefits won't kick in for a number of years so how are those initial repayments going to be found? Are those initial repayments going to be at the detriment of the playing budget? I haven't seen the data from other clubs but could we self-fund it with improved attendances and that elusive 365 day income? What happens if we hit a bad run of form and the new fans disappear?

Your example of Preston is great in the here and now but what happens when that NHS organisation decides it can get similar facilities cheaper elsewhere or there is capital funding from central government that they use to build their own facility? Locally we have a few large medical centres that aren't fully utilised.

Our council have been very unsupportive for years, granting us a stadium now would make their mate John Fenty (Cons) look a bit daft.

I don't disagree that we need to play in better facilities but it's very difficult to see how it can happen and I think the board are managing our expectations somewhat here.

Quoted from ska face

Thought that bid was just for the link road?

Any housing developments would still be subject to the standard planning contribution saga.

But the relief road would be needed if you wanted to put a stadium in there, not that they did want to, but they failed to meet the criteria , didn't get funding and have said it isn't a priority for the next round of bidding. In the meantime the landowner can start building houses on there.
As soon as you start getting homes on there then any opportunity to alter the local plan and pop a stadium in there will be ever diminishing.

The council are inept, the previous lack of local plan has allowed developers to build pretty much anywhere without fear of challenge, Toll Bar area is now being heavily built around with two new estates ongoing and a third soon to follow.

The town centre works have not really gone anywhere, were announced with a fanfare of hundreds of jobs, hundreds of homes, new businesses......none of which have appeared to date.  I would love to see the expenditure so far in and around Garth Lane against any delivery of targets.

Quoted from GollyGTFC

Your useless mate might have failed miserably to deliver his new stadium, but the new owners are genuinely successful self-made businessmen. A new stadium will happen in the medium term because it has to.

The club cannot thrive at BP and the owners will only get their money back through increasing the value of their equity in the business by the club having a new, modern stadium. That simply won’t happen at BP.

A new stadium can only happen if we have a progressive council that are willing to let it happen. You can't just erect a 14,000 seater stadium, hiding it behind some conifers for 7 years before unleashing it to the world with an "oh look what's been here for lots of years and you can't make us demolish it."

Quoted from jamesgtfc

I do own a house but the difference is that my house is a secure investment for the bank should I not be able to pay. I don't quite see a new stadium in the heart of a town 45 minutes from anywhere else offering the bank a similar level of security. The cost of paying for it has to come from somewhere and inflationary benefits won't kick in for a number of years so how are those initial repayments going to be found? Are those initial repayments going to be at the detriment of the playing budget? I haven't seen the data from other clubs but could we self-fund it with improved attendances and that elusive 365 day income? What happens if we hit a bad run of form and the new fans disappear?

Your example of Preston is great in the here and now but what happens when that NHS organisation decides it can get similar facilities cheaper elsewhere or there is capital funding from central government that they use to build their own facility? Locally we have a few large medical centres that aren't fully utilised.

Our council have been very unsupportive for years, granting us a stadium now would make their mate John Fenty (Cons) look a bit daft.

I don't disagree that we need to play in better facilities but it's very difficult to see how it can happen and I think the board are managing our expectations somewhat here.

Take a look at how AP has made his millions. He couldn’t ask for a better co-owner to make a new stadium happen when the time is right (back in the EFL).

And Fenty was/is a Tory. It is only recently (2019) that his “mates” have controlled the council. And by that time we were 17 years in to his dictatorship and Fenty had already given up and was actively trying to sell the club.

You might want to tell Dale Vince how impossible a new stadium is because FGR’s new stadium site is about to start construction. There have been archaeologists on part of the site in the last month digging trenches around the site of a Roman Villa.

Quoted from GollyGTFC

Take a look at how AP has made his millions. He couldn’t ask for a better co-owner to make a new stadium happen when the time is right (back in the EFL).

And Fenty was/is a Tory. It is only recently (2019) that his “mates” have controlled the council. And by that time we were 17 years in to his dictatorship and Fenty had already given up and was actively trying to sell the club.

You might want to tell Dale Vince how impossible a new stadium is because FGR’s new stadium site is about to start construction. There have been archaeologists on part of the site in the last month digging trenches around the site of a Roman Villa.

Just because Pettit has a great background in property doesn't mean he will be able to deliver a viable solution in Grimsby. I hope he does of course but we have an abundance of available retail space locally and the town doesn't need the second cinema they are insistent on building, never mind a third.

It is much easier to deliver an innovative and financially appealing solution in Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, London etc than it is in Grimsby unfortunately. The Boston ground for example is part of a wider development of houses built by the chairmans company Chestnut Homes. The labour market has changed completely so the need for office space is likely to reduce. The only way I can see a new stadium going ahead is with an enabling development and the only realistic enabling development locally is probably housing.

Having a politician at the helm was never going to help when those in power were the opposition and then when he got his regeneration job, he messed it up by introducing his corrupt mate. I'm not sure how friendly the current lot on the council are with Fenty but given he had a decent role with them and Stockwood seeming to have more left leaning views, there is also an element of needing to wait for the right moment.

One thing I will add is that the board seem to have engaged with myEnergi (I'm sure that coding programme resulted in a job interview with them) so maybe they could be part of an enabling development?

Surely the positive is the fact the current custodians aren’t spunking club cash on a project they know will never get off the ground, Fenty never really explored genuinely viable options, only options which benefited him.

There’s also a suggestion that perhaps the council would never green light it because they took one look at the club and the state of its directors and realised that they couldn’t deliver a flipping pizza let alone a stadium…

Quoted from aldi_01

Surely the positive is the fact the current custodians aren’t spunking club cash on a project they know will never get off the ground, Fenty never really explored genuinely viable options, only options which benefited him.

There’s also a suggestion that perhaps the council would never green light it because they took one look at the club and the state of its directors and realised that they couldn’t deliver a flipping pizza let alone a stadium…

That’s a bit unfair. We used to get Dominos Pizza delivered all the time as a post-match meal for the players under Fenty’s dictatorship.

Although I’ve been told we were the only customer left who ordered over the phone and paid full price and not via the app with a discount code.

I suspect a modern training complex with artificial pitches that can be rented out will probably earn the club more money than what they could ever get in from providing conferencing facilities at the stadium. Can't say I've ever bought into the argument that a new stadium makes us more sustainable, if it's mainly based on the argument that we could providing conferencing facilities. There are loads of places that offer small scale conferencing/meeting facilities and the amount of money involved is not huge by any stretch, unless you are holding major conference events - but any major event would normally be held in a big city in a central area of the country to make it easier for people to get to.