Michigan Stadium Renovation Facing Many Problems

After the Ohio State game is finished, plans are for the renovation of Michigan Stadium to get started very soon after. The project that has been years in the making finally was approved earlier this year and as I already said, plans call for construction to begin after the Ohio State game. Although more delays once the project is underway should be expected just because that always is the case in construction, the actual beginning of the construction itself may have a hard time getting going. Why exactly? Well, for starters, there is great opposition to the renovation at the University of Michigan and on top of that, U-M is facing a lawsuit from the Michigan Paralyzed Veterans of America and now may be in danger of losing federal funding if changes to the stadium aren't made.

Let's first start with the opposition to the actual renovation within the University.

More than 600 faculty and staff members at University of Michigan submitted a petition opposing the $226 million renovation to Michigan Stadium, calling its approval process "deeply flawed" and damaging to the university's reputation.

"We are calling for a reconsideration," Irwin Goldstein, U-M professor emeritus of biological chemistry, said before Monday's meeting of the faculty Senate Assembly, which passed a resolution urging the university to stop moving forward with the plan.

"We got 615 signatures without much effort. It shows how upset people really are about it," Goldstein said.

I guess if the professor emeritus of biological chemistry says that the renovation should be reconsidered, we all should listen. Right? How about no. This whole petition thing from faculty members is ridiculous. The fact that there's even a story about this is ridiculous. Their say in what the renovation should consist of ought to be limited to absolutely nothing unless it is actually from someone that goes to games there on a regular basis. Rather than just talk up a petition with over 600 signatures worrying about the renovation, do something productive, because this petition does nothing but create more issues than there already have been.

Throughout the entire process of coming up with these renovation plans, there has been opposition. Some say that building luxury boxes will make people feel unequal and create a disharmony between fans in them and fans in the stands. I won't even begin to get into how utterly stupid that statement is as football fans don't really care if the seating is equal. It's not like we all would pay the same price and only some of the fans got to sit there. It's a person's choice to buy tickets in the luxury boxes or in the stands. Don't feed me any of this B.S. about equality being an issue.

For this newest opposition from U-M faculty, which basically opposes the way the approval process was handled (vote on plan slipped into regents meeting at last second), it sounds like they are calling for the entire renovation of the Big House to be reconsidered. Listen, Bill Martin has come all this way to make Michigan Stadium a better and more modernized place to watch a football game, and because of the politics behind it the staff members want it to be thrown out the window? Give me a break. We as fans have waited long enough for the renovations to get started, and now it needs to do just that.

The most recent issue that may continue to pop up in the coming weeks is in regards to seating for disabled people at Michigan Stadium.

Millions of dollars in federal financial aid to needy students at the University of Michigan may be in jeopardy because the university continues to discriminate against wheelchair users at its football stadium, according to the federal government.

U-M has 10 days to respond to a scathing report released by the U.S. Department of Education on Oct. 26, chastising the university for providing inadequate access to wheelchair users at its Michigan Stadium football games.

Calling the report surprising and unexpected, U-M leaders vehemently disagreed with the department's findings, maintaining the university is fully compliant with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and committed to accessibility.

The problem right now is that this "report" finds that Michigan Stadium doesn't have enough seats for disabled people and also doesn't provide enough accessibility for them. I don't disagree with the fact that disabled people need to have more accessibility once these renovations take place, and I believe the upgrades to the stadium will address that problem. I do, though, find one thing to be asking too much. The article mentions these two things:

• The stadium has 88 wheelchair seats, far fewer than required. U-M demolished and rebuilt the concrete bowl over the last decades, affecting 90,000 seats and triggering a higher compliance rule that mandates 1 percent of seating be accessible.

• Wheelchair seating is not dispersed throughout the stadium, as required by law, but is limited to one row in the end zones.

The renovations call for "at least 230 new wheelchair-accessible seats" to be put into place. Even with that addition, the stadium would still fall well short of the requirement that asks for nearly 1,100 seats of that kind to be included. I imagine Michigan will have to negotiate something and settle on a new requirement, but there is no way 1,100 seats that are wheelchair-accessible could be added. With the configuration of the bowl, I just don't see how 1) that many seats could be built, and 2) how they would be dispersed throughout the stadium like the quote above mentions. Another point to raise is the question of if these seats would even be filled. To add over 1,000 wheelchair-accessible seats means seats elsewhere in the stadium will be gone, so the capacity and attendance at games could fall.

We'll have to keep an eye on this whole situation as it plays out, but things could get ugly. With these lawsuits and this report coming out, the renovation plans may be in trouble. I'm not saying that they would be thrown out the window completely, but they probably will have to be altered in one form or another to get everything to go away so construction can begin. As I said, just keep an eye on this developing story.