The $60 million Eagle Stadium, built by the Allen, Texas Independent School District for the city’s powerhouse high school football team, has been closed for repairs only eighteen months after opening.
Allen is an affluent and growing suburb north of Dallas, which had a population of 84,000 according to the 2010 Census.
As MaxPreps reported, “In May 2009, the city [of Allen] approved a $119 million school board bond project that would provide a new auditorium, transportation center and stadium for the suburban Dallas school.”
The 2009 local election had a low voter turnout, as only 8.8 percent of eligible voters in the city of Allen cast their ballots on the bond issue, passed by a vote of 2,363 to 1,349, a 63.6% to 36.3% victory.
According to ESPN “[d]istrict officials defended the cost — an eye-popping figure even in football-mad Texas, home to hundreds of schools playing under the ‘Friday Night Lights’ — by calling the stadium an investment for generations of future Eagles fans and a much-needed upgrade from the district’s previous 35-year-old field.”
Allen Independent School District information director Tim Carroll told MaxPreps two years later, “I think the community felt overall it was necessary, it was time.”
On Friday ESPN reported that Allen Independent School District officials released a statement on Thursday that the $60 million Eagle Stadium “will be shut down indefinitely 18 months after its opening…due to extensive cracking.”
The stadium “seats 18,000 people and sports a 38-foot-wide video board.”
Pogue Construction built the stadium, which opened in 2012.