ST. LOUIS • The effort to erect a new St. Louis football stadium is now hiring.
Thursday, the public board that built and owns the Edward Jones Dome authorized its leaders to pay consultants toward the development of a 64,000-seat, open-air stadium on the north riverfront downtown.
The resolution passed unanimously.
Jim Shrewsbury, chairman of the St. Louis Regional Convention and ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ Complex Authority, said the vote was “extremely significant.†Stadium planners have largely volunteered their time until now, he said. This gives them money to spend.
“Now, for the first time, there is a public body authorized to take steps to build a new stadium in downtown St. Louis,†he said after the meeting.
“They’re very preliminary steps,†he cautioned. “We’re quite a distance from any actual groundbreaking; we have many more issues to be resolved. But we’re making the statement, ‘We are beginning. We are not waiting.’â€
People are also reading…
The vote comes even as Stan Kroenke, owner of the St. Louis Rams, makes strides toward construction of an 80,000-seat stadium near Los Angeles. Monday, Kroenke’s organizers filed twice as many signatures as needed to force a public vote in Inglewood, Calif., to change project zoning.
The Rams were bound by the team’s lease at the Jones Dome to stay in St. Louis until 2025. Local officials, however, failed to keep the dome in the “top tier†of NFL stadiums, as required by the lease. That allowed the Rams to go year-to-year. The team sent a note to dome managers on Monday, committing to stay in St. Louis only through next season.
Thursday’s vote by the St. Louis sports complex authority gives Gov. Jay Nixon’s two-man task force a bit more ammunition in the fight to keep the Rams in St. Louis.
Robert Blitz, the authority’s attorney and a member of Nixon’s task force, said that the National Football League would be making a decision regarding new league stadiums sometime before the end of the year. The local effort needs to move at “mach speed,†he said, to develop the specifics of a plan.
“We need to get this into a position where our plans become definitive,†Blitz told the board, “and the NFL can see that we really do have a stadium that can be built for what we say it can be built.â€
So far, Shrewsbury said, only Blitz’s firm, Blitz, Bardgett & Deutsch, has been paid for its work on the project — about $28,000, paid by the sports authority.
Blitz and stadium task force co-member David Peacock, a former Anheuser-Busch executive who also attended the meeting on Thursday, told the board that they already had some consultants in mind, but hadn’t yet hired anyone.
Board members did not discuss dollar figures. They passed a second resolution requiring Shrewsbury and authority staff to regularly report back to the board regarding hires.
Shrewsbury speculated later that they could spend several hundred thousand dollars to begin with, and that the spending would increase as the chances of keeping a football team improved.
The money is necessary, he said: "I think in November of this year, when the NFL meets, there will be a significant decision made.
"So we are full steam ahead. We have to clearly send them a message that we are in play and there's an entity here taking action."
