The Atlanta Falcons will offer financial incentives to motivate contractors to finish a new downtown stadium ahead of schedule, the team's top executive said.
The Falcons want to open the new facility by March 1, 2017, but Falcons CEO Rich McKay said the deal with its construction team offers money if specific goals are met ahead of the deadline.
He said that among other things, meeting the opening date helps Georgia Dome legacy events, such as the Chick-fil-A Bowl and the SEC Championship, plan for the move to a new facility.
“We built in incentives for on-time and on budget,” McKay said Tuesday. “Then we put some other incentives in for (completion) one or two months early where we could then begin to prepare to take the Dome down.”
McKay, speaking after a meeting of the Georgia World Congress Center Authority, did not give the value of the incentives but said they are typical in a large construction project.
The state-operated GWCC Authority, on whose land the stadium will be built, approved Tuesday a design concept for the project that had been signed off on Monday by a stadium committee. It calls for a 1.8 million-square-foot building with a retractable roof that opens up like a flower, a wall of glass that will overlook downtown Atlanta and translucent skin that will allow it to shimmer with color at night.
Early projections pegged the cost the project at between $948 million and about $1 billion, but McKay said now that the project is getting more detailed, that could change.
“The budget was based off a projection done three years ago of what a building would cost taking a lot of generic factors in,” he said. “What we now have to do is go back and take this concept and the elements within that concept and figure out what is the cost of that. That will give a much better sense of cost.”
Hotel-motel taxes will finance $200 million of the construction cost, as approved by the Atlanta City Council.
Also Tuesday, the authority approved hiring Holder, Hunt, H.J. Russell and C.D. Moody construction companies as the project's general contractor.
Holder Chairman and CEO Tommy Holder said the company has never built a retractable-roof stadium, but added he feels confident because of the participation of Hunt Construction Group, which has built six of them.
“Bob assures me if we build the building he will make the roof open and close,” Holder said of Bob Hunt, Hunt’s chairman and CEO.
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