Nelson Giants basketball club is no longer facing closure, after the local council amended its contract for their Trafalgar Centre venue, enabling the team to sell food and drinks at home games for another two years.
Giants management earlier urged the Nelson City Council to re-consider its new contract with Community Leisure Management (CLM) that gave the company exclusive rights to food and beverage sales at the centre.
At a council meeting earlier this month, head coach and general manager Mike Fitchett said the decision would “likely kill the Giants,” because money raised through selling food and drinks at games accounted for about 15% of their revenue.
More than 1200 people signed a petition calling on the council to rethink its position.
Mayor Nick Smith: ‘Lessons for us to learn’
Nelson Mayor Nick Smith said the council should have engaged with the venue’s users before negotiating the contract and promised to do better next time. Nelson City Council had a contract with CLM for several hundred thousand dollars a year to manage the Trafalgar Centre.
Smith said CLM had “dropped the price significantly” in exchange for the exclusive hospitality rights.
“We didn’t appreciate in coming to the agreement of the exclusive food and beverage with CLM, a common arrangement in premier venues around the country, that it would have such a negative impact,” he said. “We should, at the time, have engaged with our regular users and there’s some lessons for us to learn from that.”
He said the prospect of the Giants not being part of Nelson was “untenable,” the region had huge pride in the team that had a long history in the NZ Basketball League and many players had gone on to become Tall Blacks.
Smith said the council had negotiated a variation to the contract with CLM until June 2027, the remainder of its term. There was a cost to ratepayers, which he would not disclose for commercial reasons.
The centre cost $2.5 million to run each year and generated about $500,000 per year in income. Smith said the council had hoped to reduce the cost on ratepayers.
Smith said the variation would also apply to two other groups that used the centre — Dancing for a Cause and Te Tauihu o te Waka a Maui Māori Cultural Council kapa haka.
“The savings that were achieved last year were significant and we’ve had to return a portion of those savings back to CLM to be able to get this exemption for these three organisations,” he said.
Smith said some community organisations would be disappointed that they were not included in the exclusion, so the council needed to think strategically about the venue’s management from June 2027.
“We need a partner like CLM that’s able to promote it as a national venue and maintain it as a premier facility, but I think we’ve got a bit of a challenge to provide a hybrid model that will also work for our community-based organisations,” he said.
Giants GM Mike Fitchett: ‘It’s a massive relief’
Fitchett said the club was overwhelmed with support, after it went public about the issue, with fans from Nelson and around the country getting in touch.
“For [the council] to find a solution for us, it’s a massive relief,” he said. “To secure our future at the Trafalgar Centre for the next few years is huge.”
CLM Trafalgar Centre manager Mark Mekalick said the organisation was glad to come to an agreement that worked for everyone.
The company had managed the Trafalgar Centre for the last seven-and-a-half years and put forward a contract proposal based on delivering the best value.
When Giants management spoke publicly about how contract would affect the team, Mekalick said the company valued the partnership and wanted to work together to find a resolution.
“Community is at our heart and the Giants are a big part of this community, so it wasn’t a hard decision to make,” he said.
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