As if proposing $1.2 billion in upgrades to the Cincinnati Bengals stadium with no idea how to pay for them wasn’t enough, Hamilton County officials have now also run the thought experiment “What if we built a dome on it, too?”
That is indeed what the Bengals’ stadium could look like with a dome on it, thanks, crack renderers for the Gensler architecture firm! And how much would this add to the price tag?
Construction companies Turner, Messer, Mortenson, AECOM and Hunt pitched their estimated costs of how much putting an enclosure on Paycor Stadium could be. The answer: Anywhere between $903 million and $1.05 billion.
Hrm, yes, well. Thank you for your time, but surely Hamilton County doesn’t have a billion dollars lying around just to put a dome on a stadium that’s used maybe a dozen times a year—
Bringing in additional major events could help cover the operating costs, [Hamilton County Administrator Jeff] Aluotto explained, such as WrestleMania, NCAA basketball tournaments or large-scale concerts.
I’m sorry, what? To pay off a billion dollars in expense, Hamilton County would need to bring in maybe $70 million a year in new tax revenue, on top of what it currently gets. WrestleMania and the NCAA tournament each happen only once a year, and rotate to different cities each year. Maybe if you’re lucky you could get two or three additional concerts a year from artists afraid of rain because they’re made of sugar. The local share of sales tax in Hamilton County is 2.05%, and 0.5% of that already goes to the Bengals and Reds to pay off stadium construction costs. So the new events alone would need to generate something like $4 billion in annual spending to make the math pencil out, something that doesn’t seem likely even if Taylor Swift clones herself and goes on ten tours at once.
And county commissioners can do math too, apparently, with county vice president Denise Driehaus saying at a presentation yesterday, “From my standpoint, we just can’t afford it.” Commission president Alicia Reece said she wants to keep discussing the idea, though — hey, maybe if you talk about it long enough, math will change, it could happen!
I looked recently at setlist.fm and saw the domes in Detroit and Indianapolis host no more than a few concerts each year. Minneapolis was an outlier by hosting 7 concert dates in 2024 and 9 concert dates in 2023. Cincinnati has already hosted 4 in 2024 and hosted 4 in 2023, so they are basically at their maximum now.
The “build a dome so we can get Wrestlemania” bit is hilarious. Orlando’s exposed-concrete-and-steel sewer dump of a stadium hosted Wrestlemania *before* the renovations, and even the renovated venue was deemed to be okay enough to get a second bite at the event.
These officials are just throwing names out there to try and gin up any enthusiasm toward the project (which they would be dumb to fund and pull off, but you never know).
I would come to Cincinnati for WrestleMania and a few concerts a year, the question is more can Cincinnati handle the influx? One event won’t pay it off, but add a few more major events and maybe you can break even at best.
Just don’t become Soldier Field
Ah, but even without a dome, Soldier Field hosts more events than the Bengals Stadium. And neither is ever likely to host a Super Bowl.
Cool, so instead of the usual vaportecture, we get some Spider-Man web-itecture, just in time for Halloween!