Details are beginning to leak out about the Rams' stadium demands to the St. Louis CVC. As we know, the terms of the city's stadium lease with the Rams require the Edward Jones Dome to be a "top-tier" facility. The CVC presented a $124 million upgrade plan earlier this year to fulfill that requirement; the Rams' counteroffer, which has been kept secret so far, was submitted May 1st. If the two parties don't have an agreement by June 1st, the matter goes into arbitration, where it will likely be tied up the rest of 2012.
The Rams and the CVC have agreed to keep the Rams' counteroffer under wraps, but because the state of Missouri is still paying part of the bill for the construction of the Dome, the state Attorney General says the negotiation falls under the state's sunshine laws and is going to make the Rams' demands public on Monday.
If the current leak is representative, the two sides are very, very far apart. Stan Kroenke reportedly wants a new, retractable roof on the Dome. This is despite the fact that engineers have already said it can't be done. The current structure won't support the weight of a retractable roof, and if any rain gets in, there's no way to drain the place. It could take as much as $300 million to retrofit the Dome into a convertible.
(Stan's a little old for a midlife crisis - why should the taxpayers have to buy him a $300M convertible? He can get a Lamborghini Aventador for under $400K!)
Joking aside, like everything else the Rams are doing these days, Kroenke's lifting a page from the Atlanta Falcons' playbook. Despite a recent renovation to the Georgia Dome, Arthur Blank's still not happy with its revenue-generating ability and wants a new stadium, even though the Georgia Dome's barely older than the Ed. The joint proposal with the city of Atlanta started out as a new open-air stadium next to the Georgia Dome, but when everyone decided that was ridiculous economically and every other way, it changed to a plan to tear the Georgia Dome down and replace it with a retractable-dome stadium. Finances, you ask? Atlanta's planning to put in $300 million that would come from hotel taxes, and are hoping Blank puts down the other $650 mil. Yeah, good luck with that.
We're heading toward the same scenario in St. Louis. Kroenke's request to convert the Ed into a retractable-roofed stadium is going to prove so unfeasible economically and architecturally, that it'll be agreed the only feasible way to keep the team beyond 2015 will be a completely new stadium. The region is probably eventually going to be tasked with putting up at least a half-billion dollars to keep the Rams in town, and I just don't see the economic ability or civic and political will here to make something like that happen. Which is wildly different than Atlanta, where Blank and the Falcons are highly popular and the hurdles toward their stadium deal don't appear to be too high at the moment.
What I'll be interested to see Monday, assuming it's in there somewhere, is how much Kroenke says he's willing to put up as he escalates the price of the "first-tier" requirement. If he plays it like the pure businessman everyone always says he is, don't look for the Rams' first home game in their next new stadium to be here in St. Louis.
I guess the arbitrator could always pick the CVC's plan with the new scoreboard and the beer garden, though.
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Associated Press photo
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