Good morning. This is LEADOFF, the early buzz in Atlanta sports.
Mercedes-Benz Stadium officials provided a media tour of the still-under-construction building Thursday, pointing to signs of progress that they said signal the massive stadium is on track to open for the start of football season.
“We are in the home stretch,” said Mike Egan, senior vice president of AMB Group, parent company of the Falcons and Atlanta United. “We’ve got 2,000 workers a day on the site, working in some cases around the clock in three shifts to get the building finished.”
AMB Group announced in April that the stadium’s opening would be pushed back to a Falcons exhibition game Aug. 26 — the third delay in the opening date, all because of issues with steel work on the retractable roof. Although it was obvious on Thursday’s tour that much work remains to be done in the next 86 days, officials involved with the project held firm to the late-August date.
“One thing that people get surprised on is the progress that we can make in a single day,” said Jason Hughes, vice president of Darden & Company, the project-management firm overseeing development of the stadium for Falcons and Atlanta United owner Arthur Blank.
“A lot of people come in here and they look and they go, ‘Wow, there is a lot to finish,’” Hughes acknowledged. But he pointed to several places where considerable progress had been made in just the past day, including work on installing the 63,000-square-foot, halo-shaped video board that figures to be one of the stadium’s defining features.
Work also continues on the roof, which consists of eight movable steel panels, called petals, each weighing 500 tons.
Some other parts of the $1.5 billion-plus stadium have been largely completed, including the suites, restrooms, concession stands and the administrative offices. Employees are scheduled to begin moving into the offices next week, with 250 slated to work there full-time by the end of June.
Almost all of the stadium seats in the upper and middle levels have been installed, while all lower-level seats are scheduled to be in place by the end of the month.
But cranes and other construction equipment and materials still cover what will become the artificial-turf playing field.
“By late July,” Egan said, “we’ll have a nice, green, shiny field ready to go for the Falcons and Atlanta United to play on.”
Click here for full story from Thursday’s tour of the stadium.
RELATED: Take a ride to the roof of Mercedes-Benz Stadium
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