It's a big, ongoing missed opportunity - the Stampede can't, won't, is incapable, or doesn't have the authority to scale up. Likely all of the above. There's never been a future vision by the Stampede beyond incrementalism, rent-seeking behaviour, and local empire building.
To the Stampede's credit, they certainly talk the talk - every year for decades a new plan comes out to build a "year-round" event district in one form or another. And it's not like the Stampede doesn't have some numbers to justify actions - so many decades of impressive tourist, economic and attendance numbers always seeming to be growing.
These guys have been at it for 110 years developing the "greatest outdoor show on earth" - there's always been interest in expanding and evolving. What were the outcomes achieved?
- Historically, this focus and growth opportunity has manifested in the slow expansion into (and destruction of) Victoria Park as a functioning neighbourhood. The city and province helped in this regard, but the rationale offered to why the destruction of the neighbourhood was needed at all was always in the name of "expansion", "developing year round destination", "supporting large events" etc. The early days of this expansion phase is where the Saddledome and BMO Centre are today, all the areas to the north outside the grounds themselves are still mostly parking lots. Going on 40+ years since expansion got serious and, still not much to show in return for trading off a neighbourhood.
- An occasional public investment into a major event facility, like we are seeing now for this generation's turn. Previous cycles have seen the Saddledome, that nutrium(?) event centre, the Big Four, earlier phases of BMO, the grandstands etc.
- Hectares of mostly empty parking lots, and equally under-utilized race track consuming most of the site.
This always puzzles me - boosters always downplay the Stampede for failing to effectively re-development and reach their own goal of being a year-round destination, because they are really just more focused on running the festival. This is probably true, but surely capacity and efficiency of that festival and their operations should be the focus then?
They seem to have no vision or interest in decongesting or expanding capacity within their footprint. The occasional interest in randomly plopping down a major event facility with little in the way of a master plan doesn't help - they have so much land, but lots of it is hardly usable for the event they supposedly prioritize because of how inefficiently they have planned their lands. So much space, time and money going to custom-purpose buildings and back-of-house infrastructure that is hardly used.
For me, it's not the size of the grounds that's the issue. It's the operations, planning and focus of the organization that is the issue. For comparison:
- Stampede Park (excluding the BMO centre, anything north of 14th Avenue SE, and their back of house sites around the river) is about 40 hectares. It sees about 1.2 million people over 10 days.
- Munich's Oktoberfest grounds is about 40 hectares. It sees about 6 million people over 17 days.
It is totally doable to have a larger, higher capacity festival in the footprint they have - they are just choosing not to.
