The costs for building Cumberland County’s downtown Crown Event Center could exceed the $145 million budgeted for the project, so the county’s Board of Commissioners is seeking a new construction estimate, Commissioners Chair Kirk deViere announced on Monday.
And the county has hired the DavisKane architecture firm of Raleigh, deViere said, to see what it would cost to rehabilitate and modernize the old Crown Arena and Crown Theatre on U.S. 301 — the facilities that the 3,000-seat Event Center performing arts and meeting facility is supposed to replace.
DeViere announced these plans after the commissioners met in a behind-closed-doors session for about 3 hours and 25 minutes. This followed previous closed-to-the-public meetings last week for discussion on the Event Center. The commissioners’ vote to exclude the public from their Monday deliberations was 6-1, with Commissioner Glenn Adams voting against going into secret session.
In early March, construction of the Event Center was paused 30 days so that lawyer J. Scott Flowers of Fayetteville could investigate a $1.9 million architect’s fee from the EwingCole firm. After receiving what deViere said was a 1,000-plus page report on the fee, the commissioners voted April 7 to lift the pause on the project.
County Attorney Rick Moorefield told CityView by email last week that the 1,000-page Flowers report is considered to be an attorney work product and is not a public record, meaning members of the general public won’t be allowed to read it or get a copy. “When the legal matter it was prepared for is resolved, it will become available,” Moorefield said.
Site preparation for the Event Center, on Gillespie Street on a parking lot in front of the County Courthouse, began in October.
The next phase is the construction of the building, deViere said. Before the county starts that phase, it is seeking updates on the cost and how long it will take to complete. Plans had been to finish the Event Center in April 2027.
DeViere estimated information on new costs and new completion dates will come back in 30 to 60 days.
Further, deViere said, the commissioners received an update on the financing plan to pay for the Event Center.
“As you can imagine, with what’s happening across the nation right now and what’s happening with the construction costs, we wanted to have a better understanding with a couple scenarios of what are — what the financing package would sustain,” he said. “And we got some good feedback on that as well.
“So we wanted to clearly understand, if the Crown Event Center is built downtown, that the financing model that was put in place previously sustains any expected increase in cost, and we were satisfied with that.”
With that and a new estimate for the next phase of construction, “that will give us a total updated cost,” he said.
The 4,500-to-5,000 seat Crown Arena and the 2,400-seat Crown Theatre opened in the late 1960s. They used to be known as the Cumberland County Memorial Arena and Auditorium. The county began considering around 2015 whether to rehabilitate or update the facilities when it settled an Americans With Disabilities Act lawsuit from a Fayetteville woman who used a wheelchair. The woman sued in 2014 because she had difficulty getting around and using the properties in her wheelchair.
DeViere said there has not been an assessment of upgrading the Arena and Theatre since 2015. So now the county hired DavisKane to look into that.
Does this mean the commissioners are considering canceling the Event Center and instead will modernize the Crown Arena and Crown Theatre?
“We are asking for an updated cost to modernize and renovate the theater and the arena. Nothing more, nothing less,” deViere said. “When you look at all the information that’s been provided over three years — from community input, to parking studies, to all these things — the one piece of data point that wasn’t there except from 2015, was an updated renovation and modernization for that.”
Members of the public and press have asked about renovating the old facilities, he said, “and we feel that it’s a responsible action by the board to have that number [of the estimated cost].”