While Atlanta leaders wrestle with how and when they will get a College Football Hall of Fame built here, the attraction's current home in South Bend, Ind., is sticking with plans to close its doors at the end of the year.
Lisa Klunder, the museum's executive director, says the hall will likely be shuttered after Notre Dame, located in South Bend, concludes its football season this fall, the Associated Press reported Friday. A final date has not been set, the news service said.
The news comes just two days after John Stephenson, chief executive officer of Atlanta Hall Management, the organization overseeing development of the hall here, told the board of the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau that AHM is reassessing all its plans for the facility, including when it will open, what its size will be and how much it will cost.
The Atlanta hall, which was announced in September 2009 with great fanfare, was supposed to open this September. Initial plans called for a $50 million, 50,000-square-foot facility, but the size and cost later expanded to 75,000 square feet at about $82 million.
The building is to be constructed on the "green" parking lot at the Georgia World Congress Center.
The National Football Foundation, which owns the rights to the facility, agreed to move the hall here because leaders believed Atlanta, which was on a downtown attraction roll with the Georgia Aquarium and the new World of Coca Cola, could lure more visitors than South Bend, which had never lived up to NFF expectations.
But slow fund-raising and a series of missed deadlines in Atlanta forced AHM to reset and reconsider all aspects of the project.
AHM is expected to submit a new plan to the foundation board at its meeting in April, Steve Hatchell, president and CEO of the foundation, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Wednesday.
He also said that other cities had expressed interest in becoming the new home of the facility, but that the NFF had not pursued any of them.
"We're still very committed [to Atlanta]. ... We feel we serve the sport better by being in Atlanta," Hatchell said.
-- Staff writer Tim Tucker contributed to this article.
