Facelift in aging stadium’s future
Liberty Bowl tenants, city working on plan, way to pay for upgrades
Representatives of the three major tenants of Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium met with Memphis mayor A C Wharton last Thursday to list what they would do to improve the facility, which will soon turn a half- century old.
In a bit of a coincidence, the meeting was scheduled well before the University of Memphis an- nounced a day earlier that it would join the Big East Conference in all sports in 2013. But the impending move — and the heavy hint to the football program to step up its game — seems to have given “probably a lot more urgency” to the conversation, said Fred Jones, founder of the Southern Heritage Classic and one of the participants in the meeting.
Jones said the group discussed a new video board, sound system and elevators, and improvements to the field, suites and press box.
The price tag? Too early to say. Jones said Wharton asked the men to reconvene in a couple of weeks, at which point he hoped to have a better command of the costs and potential way to pay for it .
Robert Lipscomb, the city’s director of housing and community development, said Tuesday that “we’re working on a couple of things” to facilitate the improvements but wouldn’t elaborate.
George Little, the city’s chief administrative officer, mentioned the possibility that the tenants could help fund the improvements.
But Little also said that the city’s focus is on ongoing Americans with Disabilities Act compliance issues that have been raised by the Department of Justice. “Frankly, we don’t know what the price tag will be to that ,” Little said.
And here’s the catch, according to Little: If amenity improvements are made to the stadium, that raises the probability that the Justice Department would ask why that money wasn’t spent on ADA compliance.
“We’re sort of caught between a rock and a hard place with that one,” Little said.
Memphis athletic director R.C. Johnson wasn’t at the meeting but sent three associate ADS. He plans to attend future meetings. Johnson said he feels the program’s recent Big East announcement has raised the profile of the improvements, but that most everything on the list was something the Tigers