How much would a new football stadium cost? Sac State is slow to provide answers | Opinion
It is going to take about twice as long as planned for Sacramento State to get its first glimpse of what it may cost to build a gleaming new football stadium. The project’s first cost estimate, initially scheduled for completion in February, now won’t be done until this summer at the earliest.
Frankly, the university could use the time. It has been struggling ever since that initial September announcement to promptly provide some basic public information about where things stand with this ambitious project. The best chance for success is for Sac State to be an open book, particularly with the students who are paying a disproportionate share of the cost of university athletics.
University President Luke Wood had no cost estimate in hand when he confidently unveiled his plan to build a 25,000-seat stadium on the same site as the temporary facility that has been the football team’s home for decades. But he did set in motion a crucial analysis to get a better idea of what a stadium might cost and to assess local residents’ interest in watching Sacramento State football play some tougher competition in a truly modern facility.
That September announcement included plans to contract with a San Francisco-based architectural firm, Populous, “to create the conceptual design for the stadium.” To its credit, the university has provided The Bee with its $318,000 contract with Populous.
Initially, the plan was for Populous to quickly begin reviewing the site and holding meetings with university communities that would be impacted by the project. By December, Populous was supposed to begin preliminary designs for the facility. And by the end of February, Populous was to calculate a “rough order of magnitude” cost estimate and present the results to Sacramento State.
Cost estimating is truly a ballpark exercise at this stage of a project with little of the engineering completed. Typical guidance within the cost estimating industry is to assume that the project’s price tag could be at least 75% higher or, if lucky, 25% lower. This estimate is better than nothing, but it is a first glimpse as opposed to gospel.
Other than releasing the Populous contract, every other attempt by The Bee for information about university athletics has been slow-walked by the university. Sacramento State has been committing its own version of “delay of game,” a football penalty when the offense doesn’t get the play off in time.
For example, when Wood announced on Nov. 22 a multi-year football sponsorship partnership with the Wilton Rancheria, operators of the Elk Grove Sky River Casino and Sacramento County’s only federally-recognized tribe, he sidestepped questions about the actual partnership. It took weeks of effort to receive the partnership agreement, a public document.
The partnership turns out to be a modest financial collaborative in the range of $70,000 in annual support for naming rights to an existing VIP section of the existing stadium. It’s a welcome addition to the Rancheria’s growing investments in Sacramento. Yet it’s something the university should eagerly share — not the opposite.
In the fall, Sacramento State also would not promptly release a study it had completed a year earlier that compared the university’s athletic spending to other institutions. “The full report is still undergoing internal review,” a university spokesman emailed on Oct. 12. Only after subsequent requests was this year-old document finally made available.
The study had some sobering but not particularly startling numbers. For example, the cost of applying to join a more competitive athletics conference — $5 million — is roughly comparable to the 2022 budget for the Sac State football team. Spending on Hornet athletes has run about $77,000 per student across all sports. The university would somehow have to increase that by an additional $40,000 per student to be in the middle of the pack in the Mountain West Conference, one of the university’s targets for higher division play.
Student fees have paid for roughly a third of all athletic costs at the university. Compared to the Mountain West Conference, the student burden is unusually high. The university’s $66 million endowment (as of 2022), meanwhile, was one-fifth that of an average conference university. That’s a testament to the difference in the historical fundraising prowess of these institutions.
The delay in the Populous work only came after a Bee request for work completed to date per the timetable of the initial contract. At first, the university said that the request for the Populous documents had been placed in the university’s portal for managing the request for public records. Only after followup questions did the university say that the documents do not yet even exist.
“Our schedule has been delayed by four months,” said university spokesperson Lanaya Lewis.
Wood is attempting to achieve something that has eluded all his predecessors: pooling public and private funds into the nine-figure sum needed to build a stadium suitable for the Sacramento State and for top-division football. This feat will not be easy. Yet belief in its prospects is diminished by Wood’s administration slow-walking any request for basic information about this project.
In hindsight, it’s now pretty clear that Wood did not have much research about costs and revenues when he confidently announced his plans to build this state-of-the-art football stadium last September. He’s now learning on the fly. It would be a coup for the region to climb into the higher echelons of this treasured college sport. But given how little we currently know, it’s simply too soon to tell.
This story was originally published January 30, 2025 at 5:00 AM.