Paying the bills on JPJ
The news that the University of Virginia is still trying to finish out the fund-raising portion of its campaign to build a new basketball arena is not exactly of the breaking variety.
Times-Dispatch reporter and friend of the "Nation" Jeff White reported today that the school is about $18 million short of its $130 million goal - which it had hoped to have met by the time the new John Paul Jones Arena opened this summer.
"It's been a challenge," Dirk Katstra, the executive director of the Virginia Athletics Foundation, the fund-raising arm for UVa. athletics, told the T-D.
"A $130 million building, all privately funded, with a pretty short timetable to get it done. Every gift you miss on, you've got to make up someplace else," Katstra said.
The political climate in the Commonwealth is a big part of the reason the fund-raising part of the project is behind schedule. Recent arena-construction projects at North Carolina State University and the University of Maryland were done with significant public-funding support. The UVa. project, as Katstra referenced, is being done entirely by the school - to the point that the university picked up the tab for a connector road linking JPJ to the U.S. 250-U.S. 29 bypass to its west.
"To do what they're doing at Virginia would certainly be challenging," said Joe Hull, the senior associate director of athletics at the University of Maryland who was the project manager for the development effort that led to the opening of the Comcast Center in 2002, in an interview done for Mad About U, a book that I am coauthoring with "ACC Nation" cohost Patrick Hite that is slated for release on Oct. 5.
The $126 million, 17,500-seat Comcast Center was financed to a great degree by Maryland taxpayers - with public dollars accounting for $58 million of the $108 million arena-construction costs and another $18 million in transportation costs, according to figures provided by Hull.
"Primarily what it does is it affects how you go about doing what you do. Because we didn't have as many pressures related to the money that we had available at our disposal, we were able to make decisions with respect to the construction of the building based on what was for the best of the building and the best of the university without having to worry as much about the impact on the bottom line," Hull said.
That's where Katstra's focus is right now - on the bottom line.
"We're going to keep needing to raise money to support the project. We're hopeful we can get to $130 [million] soon and then figure out where we go from there," Katstra said.
- Chris Graham