Ehbpc 2013

Krakow bid

             So, I've just met with the lady who is the managing director  in Wisła Kraków for the area we're interested in. She was mildly  enthusiastic, wanted us to skip our lovely, carefully prepared  presetnation entirely (so we handed her the thick folder) and cut to the  chase immediately.

She's willing to lend us the entire parking lot for very cheap (€250 a day), which is fantastic.However, there are two main difficulties. That's why she was very hesitant to make any commitments.

1) They don't own the place. The enity which is the actual proprietor of the land is known as ZIKiT (Zarząd Infrastruktury Komunalnej i Transportu w Krakowie). They handle all the things connected with infrastructure in Krakow: roads, public transportation, sidewalks, city monitoring, parks, etc. ZIKiT is a huge, bureaucratic, unwieldy monstrosity. It's really hard to get anything done there. We spoke to them last year and they offered to rent the space based on the area of the court for €1000 per court per day (which is their lowest-"pro-NGO" rate). That's €9k for the entire 3-day tournament excluding the two days needed to assemble and disassemble the courts. I believe this would have triple our budget. Yay. The thing is, to our knowledge there hase been no contract between Wisła Kraków and ZIKiT regulating the usage of the whole ~€100 million Stadium for the last two years, which is quite normal for Poland.

2) Wisła Kraków doesn't have the schedule for games in July yet. The league is to end in the beginning of June. But there should be some cup matches starting in mid July. The lady said there is absolutely no way to organise EHBPC during the weekend a match is to be played. She usually gets the fixed schedule in April, which is VERY late for us (and surely for all of you as well). She also told us that there should be no problem (apart from the ownership of the land) with throwing EHBPC if we're flexible with the dates (that means a possible change in the time of the tourney two months in advance).

So, as you can see, it's hard for us to commit as well. We're currently looking into different venues and different areas of approach (including the City President Office and the Club Owner) for much needed leverage to get the afromentioned parties to commit a little more.

We'll let you know ASAP when something unfolds.
Peace,
Kamil