The proposed 23,000 seat, roofed stadium at Macquarie Point in Hobart has undergone a jump in cost, with the latest estimates indicating a price tag of $775 million.
Construction is now expected to cost $60 million more than the $715 million figure previously estimated.
Despite the increase, Macquarie Point Development Corporation chief executive Anne Beach says that the project could still be completed within the original budget.
According to Beach, the higher cost estimate is intended for planning approval purposes, and the project team will undertake a “scoping and value management exercise” to align it with the allocated budget.
“There’s a few strategies that we have. It’s really normal in a project like this to work through value management,” she said.
“Some of that is working through the contractor and identifying areas where we want to see innovations from them in how they deliver the project and there’s some areas in the design.”
“So at concept design we’ve had to make some assumptions. We’ve built in contingencies in that and just built in a bit of a buffer as we go through a detailed design.”
Beach said the adjustment does not reflect an actual cost increase.
“It’s not an increase in cost, this is working through a design process and it’s normal for a project of this size to work through ‘what do we want to achieve?’ and then how do we work through that,” she said.
“This is a costed design, this isn’t just a ‘working to we have $750 million and therefore we’ve drawn these drawings’.”
“We went through a scoping exercise and that’s when we came up with this figure and now we’re working to budget to work out what we can deliver with the budget we have.”
The stadium’s roof alone, which will make the it the largest stadium with a timber roof in the world, is estimated to cost around $190 million.
Construction is scheduled for completion in time for the 2029 AFL season.
“With a build of this complexity there’s a number of things that drive the timeline,” Beach said.
“One is time. So with this structure really important elements like the roof and making sure we have time for the grass to grow and as we sequence that out so timeline will drive the cost.”
