Presentation to NFL caps big week for St. Louis stadium project
• By Jim Thomas
http://www.stltoday.com/sports/foot...cle_d84afce9-65cb-5b71-aab8-56c229745383.html
A big week for the St. Louis stadium project continues Wednesday with a presentation by Dave Peacock to members of the NFL's Los Angeles opportunities committee and league officials in New York.
"I'm not going into that too much because we're going to wait till we get out, but I am excited," said Peacock, the former Anheuser-Busch executive who is spearheading the riverfront stadium project on the north edge of downtown.
"I think anybody from St. Louis who's been involved in this project is excited about the opportunity to show it off. And we've got a good plan."
Nothing will be decided on or voted upon by the committee Wednesday. But the day's significance lies in the fact that it's the first time the league will see a formal presentation on the St. Louis stadium plan. It reinforces the fact that the process is real and that St. Louis has made progress.
Odd as it may sound, the LA committee is also charged with evaluating the St. Louis stadium proposal. Besides Peacock presenting the St. Louis plan, representatives from the Rams, the Oakland Raiders, and San Diego Chargers will make presentations on their stadium proposals in the Los Angeles area.
Rams owner Stan Kroenke plans to build a stadium in Inglewood. It's not know if it'll be Kroenke, executive vice president Kevin Demoff, or someone else making the Inglewood presentation. But past Inglewood presentations have been made by a group including Rams officials, developers, and architects.
The Chargers and Raiders, meanwhile, have teamed up on a competing LA stadium project in Carson.
When Peacock makes his presentation in New York, he will be able to provide specifics on the St. Louis construction "lineup," as a result of Monday evening's announcement that Hunt Construction Group and Clayco, Inc., will jointly serve as construction manager for the $985 million project.
Hunt/Clayco lead a joint venture that also includes KAI Design & Build, Legacy Building Group, and Kwame Building Group.
"This is a huge step," Peacock said. "If you talk about building a stadium, forgetting you need league approval and all that, this is the second-biggest step – since hiring the designer. You've got to design it, and then you've got to build it."
Peacock said it was coincidental that the construction manager was hired before Wednesday's presentations at league headquarters in New York. The two-month hiring process was well under way before the St. Louis task force was invited by the league to make a presentation.
For now, Hunt/Clayco and the other companies involved are limited to planning the construction phase and refining cost estimates as St. Louis works toward league approval. Not to mention assurances of having an NFL team in town, be it the Rams or another franchise.
"We're gonna be really relentless in our management of costs," Peacock said. "It's one of the things at least I learned from the A-B background. The smarter you are on your costs, the more efficient you're gonna be."
Even a two percent savings on materials could lead to a savings of $10 million, Peacock said.
An important feature of the construction manager selection process was minority participation. Legacy and Kwame are both minority-owned businesses, and the task force's mandate was a construction workforce employing 25 percent minority business enterprise contracts, 5 percent woman-owned firms, and 3 percent firms owned by veterans and veterans with disabilities.
"We have long said that this project is more than a stadium, we need to use it as an opportunity to improve our region," Peacock said. "If creating not just jobs, but careers through training and through minority participation, is something that comes out of this project it's something that we're gonna be committed to make happen."
According to the task force, construction of the new stadium would create more than 5,000 jobs over a four-year period.
"That's a lot of hours available to put people to work," Peacock said. "It's a big priority for us to source as much of the labor here in our market, and to ensure that we've got more than adequate minority representation."
