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The Saskatchewan Roughriders saw over one million dollars of their rent slashed by Regina city council.
Council approved the $1.33 million reduction in rent the CFL club owed during the 2020 and 2021 CFL seasons.
“It was a contractual matter in our lease,” said Riders president and CEO Craig Reynolds.
“There are certain clauses in our lease that address something like this. Like a pandemic – an act of God.
“We certainly appreciated working through this with city administration and then ultimately with council approving what we thought was a fair and reasonable resolution to this matter. At the end of the day, our lease defines certain services we are expected to receive.
“The reality is during the loss in the shortened year – through no fault of anybody’s other than the global pandemic – we didn’t receive those services and as a result, the city didn’t incur those costs either. It was just a matter of us working through the contract and the language on what we thought was a fair and reasonable resolution on both sides and we’re just happy we were able to do that.
“It was just a certain amount of costs that were identified that we agreed to was a fair representation of services we didn’t receive.”
When the topic was brought up at a recent council meeting, there was no delegation from the Riders’ present to address any questions from council.
“It’s a legal matter and something we had negotiated with the city administration,” Reynolds said. “After talking to legal counsel, they just advised it was best to allow city administration to take the results of those negotiations and allow council to weigh in on that.”
City manager Niki Anderson said both the Riders and the city agreed it was a reasonable compromise.
“As far as the Riders are concerned, this is as reasonable as it gets before it would move on to a court case,” Anderson said.
“Administratively, I can absolutely see both sides. But from a legal perspective, the risk of going to court and where it could land is not a risk that I would want to take financially.”
Reynolds said there was never a threat of legal action from the club.
“At the end of the day there’s an outstanding rent amount that was due. The next step would have been the city would have had to have move forward with some sort of legal action to collect that rent. There was no threat on the Riders’ side. That’s not true,” Reynolds said.
— With files from 980 CJME’s Daniel Reech
