Venue News: San Diego Chargers Detail Financing for Proposed Downtown Stadium; Ohio State Considers Football Stadium Renovation

Provided you want the Chargers to stay in San Diego, the downtown stadium proposal the team will make public this week appears to be a good deal, writes the San Diego Union-Tribune. Members of the Chargers’ stadium team on Tuesday night detailed financing plans for a $1.8 billion stadium-convention center that includes a $1 billion stadium with a likely opening in 2022 (a date the team acknowledges is more realistic than its stated goal of 2020). In essence, the team and NFL will pay $650 million of the stadium costs, with the remaining $350 million for the stadium and the cost of building the convention center being raised through a net 4% hike in the hotel tax…

…In a $42 million renovation project announced in late March, Ohio Stadium won’t get bigger — in fact, it will lose more than 2,000 seats. But it will add suites and loges as it becomes better-equipped for the changing landscape of spectator sports and entertainment, writes The Columbus Dispatch. If the proposed project is completed in time for the 2020 football season, Ohio Stadium will remain the third-largest college football stadium in the country even as its capacity drops to 102,854 from 104,944. That total was reached in 2014 with the expansion of the south stands. If approved by the OSU Board of Trustees, work will begin in early 2017…

…A process that began with a few drilled holes one afternoon at the east end of U.S. Bank Stadium has come to fruition, resulting in a wave of purple seats around the bowl of the venue.  A crew from Irwin Seating that ranged from six people to 35 has finished the nine-month installation of nearly 64,000 seats — and did so two weeks ahead of schedule — for the venue that remains on track for completion in July, writes the Minnesota Vikings. The panoramic of purple includes more than 58,000 fixed seats and nearly 6,000 that are on what Eric Grenz, a construction executive with Mortenson, said is the biggest retractable system in the U.S. The size of the retractable area will lend itself to the multipurpose features of the $1.1 billion venue…

…Construction magnate Stephen Ballard will submit an unsolicited proposal to Old Dominion University to demolish most of Foreman Field and replace it with a 25,000-seat football stadium that would open in 2018 – in time for the Monarchs’ first home game against Virginia Tech. His proposal would provide ODU with a stadium years earlier, and at a reduced cost, than what the university could build with the conventional bidding process, Ballard said. His 200-page bid, parts of which he shared with The Virginian-Pilot, proposes an aggressive construction schedule, with the stadium completed in less than two years, and without interrupting the 2017 season.