The first step in the stadium process.
The owners of the National Football League’s Denver Broncos franchise have identified the land that they want to buy so they can build a stadium on that parcel. The Broncos ownership group has a preferred site for the new stadium with a retractable roof at Burnham Yard, a 58-acre abandoned rail yard. The land is about a mile from the present stadium. There are no numbers on how much the stadium will cost or how the so-called public-private partnership will be structured or what the Broncos’ ownership plans to build on the site other than the stadium.
The Broncos’ ownership, more accurately The Walton-Penner Ownership Group, claims it will privately fund the purchase of the land and the stadium with a retractable roof according to city officials. The Broncos ownership has put out the usual talking points about the economic advantages of a new stadium claiming that a domed stadium can bring the Super Bowl and College Basketball’s Men’s Final Four to Denver. That is the same claim that NFL owners in Chicago and Cleveland are making about the building a stadium-village in those markets. How many Super Bowls or Final Fours are available? One a year and those events are spread out all over the country and are given to markets where taxpayers are putting up money for revenue generating stadium-villages for sports owners. Broncos’ ownership kicked the tires around the Denver metropolitan area where it thought it could build a stadium. The owners looked at Aurora, Colorado, the state’s third largest city which is located about 10 miles from Denver, to see if the city could provide stadium land. Lone Tree, a small Denver suburb also was a target for possible stadium construction as well as the present stadium property. There is a long way to go before a shovel is put into the ground.
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