Friday-night football lost on the ballot Wednesday as Liverpool Central School District residents headed to the polls.
That’s the effect on the Liverpool High School’s Warriors as voters rejected a $44.5 million proposal that included funding for a new $6.3 million high school football stadium. The proposal also included funding for renovations to the district’s elementary and middle schools. The vote was 1,924 against the proposal and 1,620 for it.
“The voters came out and voted the way they felt,” said Kevin Nuzzo, assistant to the district superintendent. “We’re disappointed, but they had their say and that’s that.”
The district’s exit polls showed that voters were turned off by the combination of multiple projects into one proposal, Nuzzo said. “When we put it up, we put it all together because we couldn’t decide which activities were more important than others,” he said. “We didn’t want to be in a situation where we put different voters of our population up against each other.”
For voters, the price tag for the stadium and renovations would have been a property tax increase. Property taxes would have gone up $38.66 a year for homes valued at $100,000. The tax increase would have lasted for 20 years.
The biggest item on the proposal was the new football stadium. The Warriors’ old stadium was condemned by the district’s Board of Education last year. Until the new stadium is built, Liverpool will play all of its home games on Saturday afternoons at Solvay High School. That means no Friday-night football in the district.
The failed proposal will leave the Warriors playing on the road indefinitely. Construction on the new stadium was scheduled to begin in March 2009.
“Friday nights are all about high school football around here,” said Liverpool head coach Dave Mancuso. “It’s a distraction playing on Saturdays. What do you do about homecoming in the middle of the day on a Saturday? What do you do about the fans who don’t show up?”
The current stadium was built 10 years ago and cost $2.4 million. Coca-Cola paid for the stadium in a deal that made Coca-Cola products the only products sold on school grounds.
The Liverpool Board of Education closed the stadium after the Warriors’ 2007 season. Architects had found that the stadium was built incorrectly and that the stadium’s drainage system has deteriorated. The poor drainage has resulted in hills and valleys on the turf, caused by expanding water stuck under the turf, said Nuzzo, the superintendent’s assistant.
“We can’t have kids playing on a field like that,” said Nuzzo. “You don’t know where they’re going to be stepping. Someone could get seriously hurt.”
The construction company that built the stadium has since gone out of business. The district was left with no choice but to pursue the construction of a new stadium, Nuzzo said.
The district is working quickly to put together a new proposal. Nuzzo suggested the new proposal would include fewer projects grouped together. The proposal will be based on the results of the district’s exit polling of Wednesday’s vote, he said.
“We have to take a long, hard look at what we have,” Nuzzo said. “We have to make sure we see what the voters want and get it to them.”
(Heath D. Williams is a junior newspaper major.)
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