If you haven't read Andrew Donohue's piece today on the Chargers search for a new stadium in the county, you should. It's a great breakdown of all the terms and options and it has a fact of which I wasn't aware:
When the Chargers proposed their first iteration of a stadium plan four years ago this month, the football structure itself was estimated to cost $400 million. That figure has now nearly doubled, with the team projecting a new field to cost $750 million.
That's expensive.
This recent story (subscription required) in The Wall Street Journal is a good read as well for anyone interested in what might happen if the region does come together to build the Chargers a new home.
The Journal focuses mainly on the construction of the Dallas Cowboys' new stadium in Arlington, Texas.
Arlington voters agreed to increase their sales tax by a half cent, increase their hotel-room tax by 5 percent and increase their car rental tax by 2 percent to raise money to pay off about $325 million in bonds needed for the new stadium.
As Donohue laid out comprehensively today, the Chargers envision a much different way of leveraging public assets to get a stadium built.
Assuming it is built to look like the drawings the Cowboys just released, the new Arlington, Texas stadium is quite a sight.
And it should be a lucrative one for the team's owner as well.
From the Journal:
The stadium design also reflects a financial reality for all professional sports -- the need for many luxury boxes to help teams pay soaring player salaries and maximize profits. Like most new venues, the Cowboys' stadium puts a premium on catering to the rich, with 200 suites, including at field level. To increase the excitement for well heeled fans, players will enter the field through one of the stadium's eight clubs. That configuration is in large part a product of the NFL's revenue-sharing rules. Unlike the league's enormous TV revenue, which is evenly shared by all 32 teams, or regular ticket revenue, which is split with the visiting team, franchises keep all of the revenue generated by luxury suites and boxes.
And that brings us to this week's sampling of the MonDiego Tube. The Cowboys, just last month, finally released pictures of the new stadium that the team hopes will be ready by 2009. Normally, of course, I choose videos with a San Diego focus for the weekly MonDiego Tube. But if you want to catch a peek of what new (billion-dollar) stadiums look like these days, here's one:
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Scott Lewis on Politics
The Scott Lewis on Politics blog, abbreviated cleverly as SLOP, is a collection of observations, insights and the occasional scoop on public affairs in San Diego. Please feel free to e-mail Scott at scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org.
Listen to voiceofsandiego.org's radio program on AM 600 KOGO: Latest Episode (October 18): Andrew Donohue and Scott Lewis talk in depth about the Chargers stadium search, municipal bankruptcy and whether residents are too dumb to vote on the City Hall project.
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