The arena is pretty controversial; the city's going to be on the hook for any losses, the parking situation around it is close to nonexistent, and while the taxpayer is picking up the tab some of the local developers and the owner of the local OHL franchise (that would be the Kingston Frontenacs) are not taking on any of the risk and stand to do very tidily from it, thank you very much. If you want to do a search on "LVEC Kingston" (with particular attention paid to results from the Whig-Standard, the local paper) you can get a feel for what's going on locally from it.

That said, at this point it's a done deal, and I hope that they manage to make a success out of it, because if it doesn't make money it'll potentially cripple the city's finances for a generation.

We're taking some heat for this one; the poster's worked a treat from a PR perspective. It'll be interesting to find out if the local rock radio station (which is a big backer of the project) will trash us for it or blacklist us or some such. I showed it to the sales manager yesterday and he was literally speechless for close to five minutes. I've known him for like twenty years and afterwards we had a long discussion on it... if you're a local the poster works on quite a few different levels. He said he was going to "take it upstairs" at the end of the conversation so we're waiting to find out what the reaction is going to be like.