City Whiffs on Determining Nissan Stadium Liability

While the mayor pushes for a new domed arena for the Titans, Nashville still doesn’t know what it would cost to renovate Nissan Stadium.

In June, Metro councilmembers attempted to fund and commission a study to determine the city’s obligations to renovate Nissan Stadium under its current lease. The study, a last-minute addition to this year’s budget, was taken over by the mayor’s office and furnished by Brentwood-based Venue Solutions Group. Rather than an independent assessment of Metro’s obligations under the current lease, the VSG study is an independent review of the Titans’ proposed renovations. 

At an October press conference, Mayor John Cooper offered the study as proof that renovations are cost-prohibitive. He relied on an advanced brief of the study’s findings to justify abandoning a renovation scenario and pursuing a new stadium.

“To tell us how expensive a renovation would be for taxpayers, we worked with Metro Council to hire our own independent consultant,” Cooper told a packed press room on Oct. 17. "That is Venue Solutions Group. I can report today that VSG estimates Nashville would owe the Titans $1.75 billion and $1.95 billion over the remaining 17 years of the current stadium lease.” 

Councilmembers hoped to rely on the study as an assessment of the city’s minimum obligations under the current lease.

“We are not qualified to make that determination,” Russ Simons, a partner at VSG, tells the Scene. Instead, says Simons, he was tasked to evaluate the Titans’ proposed renovations, prepared by architecture and design firms Gensler and Hastings. “VSG did an independent analysis of the Gensler renovation design to provide an independent assessment on how much moving forward with that plan would cost Nashville," he says. Simons emphasizes that his company was not qualified to offer any alternative scenarios or determine what would or wouldn’t be compliant with the terms of the 1996 lease, which requires the city to maintain a stadium in “first class condition,” a legal standard that Simons considers outside the scope of VSG’s work.

The study also evaluated renovations to Hard Rock Stadium in Miami and assessed the city’s maximum exposure for maintenance of Nissan through 2026, when a new stadium would theoretically come online, at $37 million.