Yardley's plan, which he drew up free of charge for councilman Stimson, includes other amenities. At the two rear corners of the building, where the Dallas Stars hospitality tent and the Reunion parking garage are located, Yardley proposes adding a second story on top of the new concession areas. One of the additions he envisions would be a restaurant with 265 seats that would look down over the arena floor; the other would be 7,200 square feet of office space for the sports teams.
The $18.5 million renovation would also include new larger and better retractable seating (something the Dallas Stars had promised to do when they moved to town but didn't) for the first nine rows off the floor, adding 438 seats at the lowest level. Including the 412 seats in the 46 luxury boxes, that would give the renovated Reunion Arena a total of 850 new seats, raising its seating capacity for basketball from 17,502 to 18,352.
In contrast, a new arena, according to a $500,000 city-commissioned consulting study, would contain 60 luxury suites and 22,000 seats, at a cost of $140 million. (This doesn't include the cost of tearing down Reunion, paying off its remaining debt, or debt service on the new arena.)
Yardley acknowledges that there is one potentially significant drawback to his plan--one that might make business people looking to lease private luxury suites balk. "The down side of this is that suite holders would not have a private concourse," says Yardley. "You don't want the great unwashed opening your suite door and coming in--or rapping on your door on the way to get a beer. The people in the suites would also have to use the same toilets as everybody else and stand in the same lines for concessions."
For a savings of at least $121.5 million, that doesn't sound like a tremendous sacrifice. Plus, there's no reason an architect couldn't find a way to build a partition of some sort around the entrances to the luxury suites.
That architect won't be Jack Yardley.
Because of the strange ways of Dallas politics, where the private interest of businessmen Don Carter and Ray Hunt (whose property is slated for the site of the new arena)--rather than the public interest--is dictating events, HKS last year was flatly ruled out as the architectural consultant on the arena project.
HKS applied last June for the job of working on the new-arena feasibility study, along with more than 300 other architectural and construction management firms. But the Kansas City firm of Ellerbe Becket was chosen instead.
HKS lost after making it to the final five--and performing $140,000 in pro bono work for a private panel put together by a group of businessmen promoting a new arena.
City documents show that on April 26 of last year, while HKS was doing the free work and no one at city hall was even soliciting paid consultants yet, it was already clear HKS wouldn't get any future work. Handwritten notes taken by interim Public Works Director Jill Jordan during a one-on-one meeting with First Assistant City Manager Cliff Keheley reveal that Keheley wanted HKS eliminated--because the Mavericks didn't like the firm. "HKS--will not design," Jordan wrote.
The Mavericks' dislike for HKS stems from a five-year-old incident in which the firm declined to oversee, and take responsibility for, installation of a new, heavier scoreboard at Reunion that the Mavericks had purchased. A New York firm that HKS had hired as a subcontractor in 1978 had done the original engineering work on the arena roof--and felt confident the roof would hold the new scoreboard. But HKS didn't feel it was worth "one day's fee for all that liability," says Yardley. Yardley had to personally give the bad news to Mavs president Norm Sonju, who didn't take it well.
Consequently, the Mavs don't talk to--never mind like--HKS. (The Mavericks do not dispute this.)
They do, however, like Ellerbe Becket, with which they developed a relationship last year when Ellerbe was advising Lewisville on how to build an arena. So Ellerbe got the consultant work. And HKS didn't.
"People are going to say this is just sour grapes," comments Yardley, of his renovation plans. "But we are not vying for any arena work because the city already has an architect--and a good one, I might add. Stimson just asked us to do this, so we did.
"And there is a real simple way to do this without spending a whole lot of money that will keep Reunion going for some more years. I don't think anyone's naive enough to think Reunion's going to be here another 50 years--the sports world is changing too much for that. But five, or 10? No problem."
That is, if the citizens--not Carter and Hunt--get their way.
