chissitt wrote:
I'd love to discuss the success of the xscape and the Hepworth gallery along with Trinity walk and the ridings but I think your obvious bitterness towards the Cas council might have already tainted your reasoning, you like all Wakey fans want a new ground but surely you should base an argument for that on it's own merits and not on a swimming pool designed for the public use of the people of Wakefield and outlying districts.
Absolutely right - and the Hepworth is a very bad example of a frivolous investment that could have been better spent on a stadium; it's an unqualified success, and attracted more visitors in its first year of operation than a stadium would in 20 years.
With regard to Newmarket - it doesn't help that WMDC, and everyone else, refer to it as a stadium for WT; it was always meant to be a community stadium with additional facilities for sports other than RL, but nobody talks about that. As such, it's probably perceived by the wider public as a private venture, which will be of use to 4 or 5 thousand people every other week, for part of the year - hardly the kind of thing that people will get behind, in the face of competing projects in their own communities, which they would see more direct benefit from. It's perhaps a problem of PR as much as anything else.
The inevitable calls to disinvest in other things to fund the stadium are less than helpful - WMDC will never pay for it, I doubt they'll even guarantee a loan to build it, so it's a circular and pointless exercise to trawl around the district pointing out other projects that are pointless, because we personally don't benefit from them.
