November 30, 2010
D.C. councilman: Let's build a $2B Redskins stadium! With laser turrets!
If you've been missing D.C. councilperson Jack Evans, sponsor of stadium bills for the Washington Nationals (approved) and D.C. United (not yet), heeeeeee's baaaaaaack:
D.C. Council member Jack Evans, D-Ward 2, says Fedex Field, the Washington Redskins' home for the past 13 years, is steadily aging and will soon be ready for a replacement. He points to RFK Stadium, the team's former home until they left in 1997, as a prime location for a new, state-of-the-art facility -- and not just to host the gridiron.
WTOP reports, entirely with a straight face, that Evans wants to spend $2-3 billion to replace RFK with a 110,000-seat retractable-roofed stadium that could host the NFL, the World Cup, and the Olympics. But then, the news radio station also wrote with a straight face that bit about a 13-year-old stadium being "steadily aging" — which may be technically true, but it's not generally what people mean by "aging."
Of course, most of this is likely about sucking up to Redskins fans in the District by making a public play to get the team back within city limits. DCist sums it up nicely:
Look, FedEx isn't the greatest stadium in the world, but for what it was designed for -- to cram as many Redskins fans as possible into one space for games -- it still works fairly well. There are several stadiums in the NFL that are older and less appealing than FedEx (see: Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum). And as far as Evans' assertions about the World Cup and the Olympics go: the chances of us being a host for the former wouldn't really improve with a new stadium; the latter is, with all due respect to the Councilmember, a pretty massive pipe dream.
The Redskins still assert that they'll stick at FedEx until at least 2027 when their lease expires, and it's difficult not to believe them -- at least until politicians stop using the idea of a new stadium in D.C. as a political miracle waiting to happen (where is that $2-3 billion dollars coming from, Councilmember?), rather than pushing forward an actual plan that might be feasible.
