The cost of keeping up

 Posted on: August 22 2016

You might remember the plans for a new high school football stadium for McKinney that called for a $62.8 million price tag for the facility. Well, the cost now is close to $69.9 million, because of construction overruns, according to a story published last week by Nanette Light, a staff writer for the Dallas News.

In her article, she indicated that school board trustees learned last week that the costs are estimated to be $7.1 million more than what voters approved in May. The differences are attributed to higher concrete prices and additional road construction at the site, according to district officials. Originally the roads were to be built in phases but officials now have decided to build them all at the same time.

McKinney is not alone in the higher pricing: The bill for the new stadium in Katy, Texas, has gone up around $4.5 million from the $58 million price tag the voters approved, and upgrades to Toyota Stadium in Frisco, Texas, are being scaled back because construction bids also came in millions of dollars over budget.

Construction on McKinney’s stadium is scheduled to begin next month and be finished by Fall 2017, when games are scheduled to start there. To get the project going McKinney school officials decided not to cut back on the project—rather, they’ll get about $8 million in undesignated bond funds to make up the difference, according to the article.

It’s no coincidence that all these projects are in Texas, where high school football is very close to a religion. In fact, in checking the largest high school stadiums in Texas (http://yestotexas.com/biggest-high-school-football-stadiums-in-texas/) the largest is Alamo Stadium in San Antonio with a capacity of 23,000 serving eight high schools.

But let’s face it, not every district or every city can afford this kind of stadium spending. In fact, one inner-city high school athletic director in Cincinnati, Jolinda Lewis-Miller, had this comment on the McKinney article: “Meanwhile, we share a stadium with six other teams and my kids are barely eating dinner and nothing most weekends.”

The fact is, most every rights holder and event administrator do what they can, with what they have. New facilities are nice, but well-run events can happen, no matter how new, or newly renovated, the space is.

Comments

There are currently no comments, be the first to post one!

Post Comment
Only registered users may post comments.


Back to Blog