Finishing Stadium on Time Became an Olympian Task

With tractors roaring in the distance and hard-hatted workers roaming the periphery, a U.S. Justice Department official recently stood on the playing field of Atlanta’s new Centennial Olympic Stadium and pronounced it “the most accessible stadium in the world.”

But, while members of the city’s disabled community were on hand to praise the sight lines and ramps in the $230-million facility--which will host opening and closing ceremonies for July’s Olympic Games--the nagging question in a lot of people’s minds was, when will the stadium finally be finished?

Workers still were putting on the finishing touches Friday, hours before a light show was scheduled to mark the grand opening this weekend. The general public will see the inside of the stadium for the first time today for the Atlanta Grand Prix international track meet.

International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch will attend the event. But when journalists toured the stadium this week, his VIP box was still unpainted and uncarpeted. At midweek, mountains of seats waited in the corridors to be installed, yellow construction tape marked off areas of the facility and workers still were painting VIP boxes.

A Justice Department official joked that it appeared doubtful the facility would be ready in time.

From the start, the construction of the 85,000-seat stadium has been mired in problems--from political hassles with the surrounding communities and local officials to complaints from the disabled to conflicts with the Atlanta Braves, who will inherit the facility after this summer’s Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The stadium also has been plagued by safety concerns and questions of construction quality.

But most of the controversy began to recede as the stadium neared completion. Even those in the neighborhood whose opposition almost caused the stadium to be built outside the city now praise it for helping spur a small construction boom in a depressed area that has not seen a new home built in 50 years.

That is not to say that all concerns have vanished. A number of construction accidents have some asking whether corners have been cut in the rush to finish on time.

Last year, a 150-foot light tower fell, killing one worker and injuring another. Builders reinforced other similar structures in the stadium and investigators declared the facility safe. But in March, almost a year to the day after the accident, a five-ton truss fell from a roof being built over a seating area for an outdoor pool. No one was hurt, but workers temporarily abandoned the site.

Only Tuesday, as 300 journalists were preparing to tour the stadium, a workman was injured when a section of pipe fell on his head. He was treated at a hospital and released the same day.

Lynn May, a spokeswoman for the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG), dismissed the incident, along with the accident last March, as the type of minor mishaps that always occur at construction sites. She complained that the media have magnified problems that otherwise would go unnoticed.

The stadium also has been plagued by lawsuits. The company that designed it is suing local Olympic organizers for $4 million in overtime pay that it says was caused by haggling between ACOG and the Braves over what the facility should look like. ACOG has countersued for $6 million in cost overruns that it says were caused by the designers’ negligence.

A lawsuit filed by the worker injured when the light tower fell last year was settled May 10 for an undisclosed sum.

An organization of disabled persons that was concerned about the stadium design did not file suit, but its concerns resulted in the Justice Department’s overseeing design of the largest Olympic facilities and negotiating an agreement to assure that they are accessible.

After the Olympics in July, the same venues will be used for the Paralympic Games in August. After that, a number of facilities--$500-million worth of stadiums, pools, dormitories and other venues--will be turned over to local universities or other local bodies.

The stadium will be altered to become the new home of the Braves. Some have stepped forward with plans to save Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, but officials plan to tear down the 30-year-old facility to make room for 2,700 parking spaces.

The parking revenue is needed to help pay for stadium maintenance. Also, residents of the surrounding neighborhoods strenuously opposed the stadium being built until they were assured that only one stadium would remain after the Games. Development plans for the economically depressed communities had been stymied over the years by the proliferation of illegal “gypsy” parking lots in the area to accommodate sports fans, they complained.

The old stadium, which displaced many neighborhood residents when it was built in the 1960s, was seen as a curse by many who lived nearby. But neighborhood leaders have been able to use the new facility to leverage a range of improvements and development projects. The Olympics--and the stadium--are being looked at as saviors.

Not only are neighborhood streets and sidewalks being repaired and storefronts being spruced up, but more than 200 new housing units will be built by the start of the Games. One hundred of them will be low-cost single-family homes. But some of the new houses will cost more than $100,000. Douglas Dean, president of Summerhill Neighborhood Inc., boasts that a doctor and other middle-class families are starting to move into what had been a crime-ridden neighborhood with few amenities.

Even so, the community has accomplished only a fraction of what it had hoped to do. Banks and private investors are paying attention to the community. But because of difficulty getting bank loans, the neighborhood association had to finance much of the new home construction itself, using $1.8 million it raised from agreements to lease the homes during the Games.

It had planned to invest that money in the construction of 200 additional houses after the Olympics are completed. Now it is at risk.

Still, Dean says, “Summerhill is in much better shape than we’ve ever been. We’ve gotten financial institutions investing in the community. That was our goal. We might not have gotten as much as we thought we could get, but we sure did make some improvements in our community.”