SYRACUSE — Two members of a workgroup that Syracuse University (SU) Chancellor Kent Syverud assembled to review options for a “Carrier Dome Backup Plan” provided an overview of its findings on June 19. Rick Burton, a sports-management professor and workgroup chair, and John Yinger, a trustee professor of public administration and economics, represented the group […]
SYRACUSE — Two members of a workgroup that Syracuse University (SU) Chancellor Kent Syverud assembled to review options for a “Carrier Dome Backup Plan” provided an overview of its findings on June 19.
Rick Burton, a sports-management professor and workgroup chair, and John Yinger, a trustee professor of public administration and economics, represented the group in speaking to the assembled media in the school’s Schine Student Center.
Syverud in late February appointed a five-person committee to conduct an analysis of the Carrier Dome and consider the many factors involved should the facility be rendered unusable for short- to long-term periods.
Besides Burton and Yinger, the group also included Jeff Rubin, associate professor of practice in the School of Information Studies; John Sardino, associate chief of the Department of Public Safety; and Bridget Yule, director of student centers and programming services in the Division of Student Affairs, according to SU.
He asked the group to develop a contingency plan that would allow the university to “quickly” respond should the need arise, quantify the costs involved, and better understand the potential negative economic impact to the region.
Not related to new stadium talk
When asked if the group’s work was related to the possibility of a new stadium to replace the Carrier Dome that made headlines earlier this year, Burton replied,
“No sense of that at all.”
“We received the request to put together this report for him and there was no indication that it was tied to anything other than [Syverud] fact finding as the new chancellor,” Burton added.
Syverud’s request, in Burton’s mind, was “really very simple and very straightforward.”
“It was a fact-finding mission on his behalf as the new chancellor to look at the ways in which … the Carrier Dome roof could fail, what our backup plan would be were the Dome to be made inoperable,” Burton said in his remarks to the media.
Economic impact
If SU rendered the Dome unavailable for a single men’s basketball game against a top opponent, and the game was played outside of Central New York, the loss of income would total as much as $2.6 million and the region would lose as much as $8.3 million in economic activity, according to the group’s findings.
The group had “good information” on the sales in the Dome at a game, where people come from, and the numbers attending a given game, Yinger said.
“If you take a game of 30,000 or 35,000 people and you take it out of the Syracuse economy and you put it somewhere else, well then, there’s not a flow into the Syracuse economy and some of the people who would spend their money in Syracuse, otherwise, now spend it somewhere else. We try to account for those things,” he added.
The group determined that SU will “likely” need to replace the current roof on the Carrier Dome in the next seven to 10 years at a cost that would approach $25 million.
That cost figure would include likely improvements to the lighting and audio system.
The current roof covers about six-and-a-half acres, Burton said, which does require maintenance in the event of a major snow storm.
“You’ve got to undertake or consider a controlled deflation of the roof just because of the weight that’s sitting on the roof of the Dome,” he added.
Besides any problems with the roof, the university could render the Carrier Dome inoperable in a power failure, Burton said.
The group also considered how a similar scenario would impact a full home football schedule, with games scheduled outside the Central New York region.
Under such a circumstance, the region would lose economic activity totaling in a range between $23 million and $44 million, with the loss of income ranging from $7 million to $14 million, according to the memo.
The group noted that Central New York doesn’t have another facility that could accommodate the 30,000-plus attendance for an SU football game. The closest location would be Ralph Wilson Stadium in Orchard Park, near Buffalo, Burton said.
“On all of the contingencies, it’s a function of whether or not they’re available,” he added.
When considering the SU men’s basketball program, the group noted the program has more than 24,000 season-ticket holders.
“If the Dome was unavailable, there’s really no place in New York state or even really in the East that you could move the game to and accommodate that entire 24,000 season-ticket holder base,” Burton said.
No existing NBA arena has the capacity to seat that many spectators, he added.
Details on the group’s work first surfaced as part of a memo that Syverud distributed to the university community in May 30.
The school also posted the memo to Syverud’s blog, which is part of the SU website.
“We took this challenge very seriously, but our purpose was solely to collect facts that we thought would be relevant to the chancellor and his responsibilities for this university,” Burton said.
Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com