Nashville City Council member is against a new Nashville football stadium.
If the National Football League’s Tennessee Titans ownership was afraid an Ebenezer Scrooge character would pop up during the holiday season to derail its plans to build a 21st century state-of-the-art facility for the football team, a WrestleMania, maybe an NCAA Men’s Final Four basketball tournament, an occasional concert and a tractor pull, Bob Mendes is that guy. Mendes is against the stadium funding concept partially because he claims he has not seen the stadium funding estimates. He also has a problem with the stadium design because “there’s no way on Earth that a ‘first class’ stadium requires a three-story sports bar or a luxury songwriters lounge or a covered rooftop area with grass and trees on top of Nissan Stadium.” But the funding estimates are a problem for Mendes who released a statement explaining why he is against funding the project.
“The Term Sheet for the proposed $2.1 billion new football stadium is not ready for Council approval. The Term Sheet says plainly that it is not a binding commitment and is delivered solely for the purpose of facilitating ongoing discussions. The timing to get to a final agreement on all open terms is listed as expeditiously as possible. Representatives from the team and the Mayor’s Office have told me in recent weeks that negotiations are still going on now for the terms that were left unknown or to be determined in the Term Sheet. Titans’ ownership initially wanted a renovation of the stadium which opened in 1999 and then discovered it was not worth redoing the old place when a new facility would cost only a few hundred million dollars more to build. Politicians claim a new facility will bring in money to the area. But the new stadium would be built next to the old one meaning stadium consumer spending will stay in the same spot.
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