The team ownership wants an answer by the end of October.
The National Football League’s Jacksonville Jaguars’ franchise owner, Shad Khan, is getting impatient with local leaders who are not coming up with public money to rebuild the business’s present home stadium. There is also a poll conducted by the University of North Florida that indicates that Jacksonville residents really don’t want to see taxpayers’ money go into Khan’s private business. Only six percent of those polled are fine with giving Khan about a billion dollars to have the best NFL stadium money can buy. Khan’s business president Mark Lamping wants no part of a referendum on spending taxpayers’ dollars for the franchise. “If there’s a referendum, the ballot question should be. Do you want to keep the NFL in Jacksonville?” Lamping said. “Look, if Jacksonville loses an NFL team, they’re never going to get another one. And if the Jaguars have to relocate from Jacksonville, those of us that went down there would have failed. OK? And none of us want to face that.”
Khan is proposing to build a stadium-village because it is the village part that makes a big-time sports franchise owner money and Khan wants the one billion dollars as part of a two-billion-dollar project. The Jaguars organization’s lease with the city will be done after the 2029 season. While that is more than six years away, in the stadium game six years is not very far in the future. Khan’s business does not play a full home schedule. In 2022, Khan received the go ahead from NFL owners which allowed his team to play an annual game at London’s Wembley Stadium through 2024. The Jaguars’ financial department claims that the business generates about 11% of its local revenue by playing in London. The Jacksonville stadium had a $180 million facelift from 2012 through 2019. Khan wants the money by the end of October.
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