Joe Albi Stadium Demolition

The voters chose – overwhelmingly – in 2018 – to replace the Albi stadium at the current site.

But here we are today with the Albi stadium being demolished and the path forward to a replacement still unclear.

“Albi Stadium is a sore sight. The artificial turf has been stripped away, leaving a field of dirt covered by piles of concrete, rebar and aluminum. By fall, the entire site will be leveled, leaving only the memories of big concerts, Billy Graham’s crusade and hundreds of high school and college football games. And after that? No one is quite sure.”

Source: If these seats could talk: The demolition of Spokane’s Joe Albi Stadium has begun | The Spokesman-Review

In 2018, voters favored a new replacement at the Albi site, funded as part of a nearly 1/2 billion $ school bond measure. In 2020, the school board published design plans for a replacement Albi stadium at the Albi site.

Then in 2021, the school district ignored the 2018 vote and used a public survey saying the community wanted another sports plex downtown. The District partnered with Spokane Public Facilities District (PFD) to build a new stadium downtown to be operated by the PFD but with excess proceeds going to the school district.

This occurred after downtown business interests put pressure on the school district to locate the stadium, downtown. This change occurred after the school district had applied for building permits for the original Albi site. The arguments were that the downtown site was centrally located and there might be a possible partnership with a soccer league.

In the end, the reason for relocation is likely due to influence of downtown business interests. The largest landowner in downtown is the Cowles family, which publishes the local paper, runs a local TV station, owns blocks of retail and office space, and has other interests throughout the area. Other businesses also carry much weight in local government funding improvements downtown, and often not funding so much elsewhere. (For further entertainment, go look up and read about the original Spokane River Park Square parking garage fiasco!)

These decisions, like many of the recent past, relied on questionable economic models that project lots of money spent by outside visitors. These dodgy models (I have not looked at the one used for this project) made absurd assumptions, as documented on this blog. And then there were the nonsense models of the Spokane RPS parking garage!