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June 08, 2006
The stadium that keeps on spending
The Washington Nationals stadium deal may be finalized, but ... oh, who'm I kidding? Stadium deals are never final until the last shovel of dirt is overturned, and there's no reason to expect the Nats stadium to be any different. The latest: The team is now demanding that the city agree to build aboveground parking for the stadium's luxury-suite holders, instead of building underground lots. Given that the reason for the delay has been that underground lots appear to be prohibitively expensive, this isn't all bad; if you're still hoping that the city will see a windfall from that "ballpark entertainment district," however, you'd better hope that people can find entertainment in looking at parked cars.
In related news, the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission has already blown through $9.4 million of the project's $19.3 million in contingency funds in the first month of construction. "I remain confident that we can build this stadium on budget and on time," commission board member William N. Hall told the Washington Post. A little late for that, don't ya think?
The way you've characterized the parking situation is a bit off. It makes it seems like the Lerners are asking for more.
Above-ground parking was already budgeted in the final stadium agreement. The rub now is that the city has come back, wanting the garages to be buried, which would be an extra $20MM or so, and the Lerners refuse to pay. It's not the Lerners asking for anything extra, even if dumping a few million of their billions is the right thing to do!
And on the contigency fund, it's important to remember that, at least for actual construction costs, there's a max price contract. The contigency fund is used for site prep and other misc expenses, which is where this problem occurred -- buried oil tanks where they shouldn't have been.
Sure, they'll blow through it all anyway, just because that's the way these things work.
Posted by Chris on June 10, 2006 12:50 PM
As I understand it, swapping in above-ground parking for underground was part of the final deal to get the project under the council's mythical $611 million "cap." Unfortunately, the city wants underground parking for its own reasons - it wants to develop the ground-level land, not have parking there - leading to this latest standoff.
So no, it's not particularly that the Lerners are doing anything unfair in demanding that the city just build the damn parking already. But it is one more hidden cost of the horrible deal that Mayor Williams negotiated back in September 2004.
Posted by Neil on June 10, 2006 08:16 PM