I've been away for a while, what is the latest on tearing down that eyesore of a coliseum in Corpus?

the city council and staff which intentionally avoided doing any maintenance on it for a few years so they could justify tearing it down and giving the land to some developer or casino (if that passed) are still trying to tear it down. The architects and some others are trying to save it. Nothing new.

i wish they would just tear it down. it is atrocious.

Joe McComb led a petition to force the city to vote to tear it down but well a few hundred votes short.

if you haven't seen it recently, this is from last fall

http://texags.com/main/forum.reply.asp?topic_id=1235379&forum_id=44&page=last&topicid=1235379

The reason it is in bad shape now is because the council quit maintaining it in favor of the new American Bank Center. Many of the regular renters of the Coliseum could not stomache the rates at the ABC (gun shows stand out here) and the lousy parking and just quit coming at all (think trade shows); Lester Bedford has said repeatedly that he would still be bringing nationally televised fight cards if he had the Coliseum or a venue of similar cost.

The council intentionally let a very usable building deteriorate in order to promote an idea that would not work---the ABC. And the reason it would not work is because convention business is drying up everywhere, partially in the wake of 9/11 but for other reasons as well.

The reason Hummell and others want to keep working at reuse is because the building was built to last five hundred years and will if maintained. It would cost a fortune to tear it down.

In the meanwhile, the ABC has lost $11 million in the last five years and there is no end in sight for bleeding.

If you want to complain about something, complain about the fact that we sank millions into the ABC for conventions that don't come and close to $30 million for a baseball park.

The future of this town is the refineries and the university at the other end of the bay. Pour money into endowed professorships and graduate fellowships in something besides education degrees and the city will prosper.

Don't do that and you have just another large town; the cities in the state that are prospering are either 1) on the border, 2)sit astride major interstate highways that connect one or more large cities to others, or 3) have large research universities. Corpus doesn't fit any of those profiles and that is why it is not growing and why it attracts double digit IQ realtors and title company execs to its city council instead of energetic people.