The University of South Carolina announced a major development project for areas both surrounding and within Williams-Brice Stadium and Colonial Life Arena.
The school announced it will be issuring a RFI (request for information) “solely for information and planning purposes” to ask national developers to come in and look at masses of land totaling over 900 acres around campus for possible future developments. The due date for the RFI is on Mar. 7, and the process will continue from there.
“The time that I’ve spent working on this is probably almost two years now,” Athletics Director Ray Tanner said. “To get to this point to do an RFI, it’s exciting. There aren’t any items. It’s [about’] what can we do? We have the valuable land that a lot of people don’t have, and we have a chance to move forward in a big way.”
Renovations around Williams-Brice Stadium would not directly interfere with any game day operations in the middle of a football season. The areas around the stadium will potentially see a major facelift depending on what the RFI returns, but one major challenge in the project is going to be that 847 of the acres in question around the stadium are on a Flood Plain. For now, it is unclear how the process of trying to renovate the land will evolve.
“We intend to develop a project and select a partner who has a strong track record of creating commercial projects that benefit the entire community through job creation and new businesses that will make Columbia and the Midlands more vibrant than ever," South Carolina's Executive Vice President for Administration and CFO Ed Walton said.
But there are also more planned upgrades for the inside of the stadium. There are currently only 18 luxury boxes in Williams-Brice Stadium, an allotment the school sold out and “has a waiting list of over 100 right now” for. But the build-up inside the stadium will extend beyond suites to the concourses, bathrooms, concessions and even into general seating areas.
“I would say that this concerns the average fan as well,” Tanner said. “We’re not turning the entire stadium into premium seating, but we have an opportunity to enhance the general seating. We have a lot of general seating in Williams-Brice and our other facilities as well, so that does not exclude them. We will include them as well when we move through a process of any type of phases that we go through and changes that we’ll make.
Tanner also stated his goal of the project being a “blank canvas” for developers to potentially help the school turn areas around Williams-Brice Stadium into spots people will be able to visit beyond just the seven Saturdays per season with home football games.
“There will be other things than just what goes on inside the stadium,” Tanner said. “There will be experiences outside the stadium, inside the facility on that acreage that we talked about.
“We could bring people to this area for 365 days a year, potentially. We’d maybe get a few days off in there, but it would in fact bring people to this area if it’s as expansive and impactful as we think it could be.”
The RFI returning will be the first step, but Tanner confirmed it would “probably take 12-to-15 months” as a best case scenario before any work could finally get underway on the project.
