As fans piled into the Spectrum Center for the Charlotte Hornets’ NBA season home opener last month, Donna Julian stood in the arena’s brightly remodeled lobby, a cellphone pressed to the side of her face. Her eyes were trained on a single faulty panel on a new 225-foot-long LED board snaking around the space — a black eye that only a venue manager would notice.
Julian, executive vice president and chief venues officer, stood watch over the Hornets’ Oct. 22 game against the Brooklyn Nets, the fourth event during a stretch of seven in eight days, a breathless reopening following a two-year, entirely city-funded $245 million renovation that completely overhauled the 20-year-old, city-owned arena in uptown Charlotte.
The Spectrum Center is brighter, more spacious and modern looking. It’s easier to get in and out of, with expanded premium seating options and plenty of improvements for general admission fans. Where many arena renovations take three to five years, the Spectrum Center remodel was completed in two breakneck years after the Hornets and the city closed the building for consecutive offseasons...
...The arena project began in erratic economic conditions. A simple online inflation calculator shows that to achieve the same value of the city’s $245 million in 2019, when the project was first conceived, would require $293 million by March 2023, and $310 million by the time the arena renovation was concluding this fall. Surging inflation and costs forced a sustained value engineering process to ensure the Spectrum Center renovation stayed on budget. Lease-required deferred maintenance projects, like replacing every seat in the arena, had to be prioritized.
“To still be able to build what was built with that renovation, for the dollars what they were in 2019, presented one of those complex things to figure out,” said CAA ICON Senior Director Marcus Brimley, who led his firm’s work on the project for the Hornets. “How do we maintain the vision with the dollars we had?”
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