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New Titans Stadium (60,000 capacity dome, ground level retail, directly east of Nissan Stadium)


markhollin

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It would still be nice to have a MLB team in Nashville.  I was an avid baseball fan growing up; at first NOT Braves but then became one with Dale Murphy's last years. I am not so much now b/c I'm not near a team (I'm 70 minutes from Truist Park and a "half day" away) and the strike of '94 just soured me on the whole league. Recent years got me interested in Vandy/SEC baseball.   However, I still love the whole event of going to a game with family/friends.  Who doesn't?  Always thought it was such a missed opportunity when The Braves built their 2 most recent parks and didn't put them in a pedestrian friendly area, and  IMHO adjacent to downtown. We're so spread out that it's not fun being in Atlanta.  I hope Nashville doesn't make the same mistake.  I think the next MLB teams will be in Charlotte and Nashville.  CLT will get a relocation team (LV the other) and Nashville an expansion (Austin the other).  That's my gut and based on nothing more.  MLB is still digesting the last two expansions, but the flood of South American/Latin immigration of the past two decades will help that happen more quickly; so 5-10 years.  

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I think Cooper's leaving could hurt the project. Really expensive projects need to be in a mayor's second term. At least one candidate will oppose it, if mainly to appeal to the never spend voters. I could see the other candidates maybe get so far as being favor of the project, but only after "extensive studies", which would draw things out. Maybe I'm too cynical.....

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Titans switching the Car Hole to artificial turf:

https://www.paulkuharsky.com/news/titans-installing-high-tech-artificial-surface-in-nissan-stadium

Not sure I buy the transition zone argument, they could switch to a more cold-tolerant strain of Bermuda (Kansas City and Washington get as hot as Nashville and they use a strain that doesn't seem to cause problems in the winter).

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  • 3 weeks later...

Again, this is just one opinion. The same conversations take place every time a large scale municipal property or project comes along. Large cities take risks all the time, this is not the first time, or the first city to do so. Everyone was saying the same things when Mayor Dean proposed the Music City Center, and look at its success! And recently we had all the back and forth on the Soccer Stadium, wash rinse repeat. 

And yes, I own properties in Davidson County. So I’m a taxpayer, I have skin in this also. 

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While there are certainly things I don't fully agree with in the memo - including the items mentioned above by @nashvylle - I do completely agree that there is not enough information out there to agree to the deal. Based on inflation and knowing the amount of renovations needed for Nissan, I would say we should absolutely cap the Metro financial involvement at $760 million. Whether that involvement is a renovation of Nissan or a new Stadium is up to the Titans to decide, because they are the ones who should be on the hook for anything beyond the $760. Now when we look at that $760 + $500 million from the State (which is not contractual yet, so the state could very easily pull via their pettiness) + $200 million from the NFL stadium fund gets us to $1.46 billion. That would leave the Titans on the hook for $640 million (lets say $700 million). As Mendes points out, billionaires don't become/stay billionaires by giving away hundreds of millions of dollars. So the Titans are looking for every which way to have Metro pay for things, including holding the idea of leaving town over their heads. If we look back at the most recent NFL relocation - St. Louis Rams to Los Angeles - the owner of the Rams and the NFL were collectively sued and were forced to pay $790 million back to St. Louis. Now $275 million went to attorney fees, but $512 million ($519 after interest) went back to the city. Now there are extenuating circumstances in that case, I'm sure, but nonetheless the city should be looking at this kind of carrot for the Titans not to leave and play better ball. One angle I could see taking is the Titans have all of this valuable land that they are marketing back to the city if they get a new stadium, yet this valuable land was never developed. This is because it benefitted them and them alone because of revenue generated by parking was a low risk-high reward for them. The city could use this as evidence that they don't actually give a flying fuck about the city and only their pockets. I have said this from the beginning, but the new stadium location does the exact opposite of what the communications have said. They have said they want a new neighborhood, that connects the city, yet when they reference the neighborhood (they reference East because they have also said it won't be an extension of downtown) they place the new stadium directly between the existing and new neighborhood. This is the exact opposite of what they are saying. 

My opinion above doesn't even take into account the stadium maintenance and infrastructure maintenance funds that are so conveniently not included in the cost models. Additionally, the footprint of the new stadium is massive. Put the damn parking underneath the stadium. They use under the field for logistics for events, sure, but there is still plenty of room to put parking another floor(s) down. And we cannot use the flood plain argument against this idea, because in flood events there would be no cars under there. THEY ARENT HOSTING EVENTS DURING FLOOD EVENTS! The Oracle plan called for all parking to be subterranean because they understand this idea and know that the garage would be a sacrificial level in the event of a flood. 

To me, the stadium does not make financial sense. If it was purely a construction cost approach issue, the $760 figure lines up more to being acceptable (this works out to about 12,700 per seat compared to 7,800 per seat at the MLS stadium). Unfortunately, we have the maintenance funds unaccounted for. We have the parking costs unaccounted for. The urban approach to the new stadium's location doesn't work. The additional costs of remediation (under the new stadium only, PSC shouldn't come into play here) doesn't work. Too many big, unchecked boxes to realistically support this deal. Typically I take the approach of approving in order to get things more finalized, especially in real estate world because things are so variable, but we know so much about stadiums and how little they actually benefit communities. These boxes that are uncertain are known commodities that we just are not getting the full information on. 

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