Nearly $200M worth of changes ordered for Mercedes-Benz Stadium

Tim Tucker at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported today that changes to the construction of Mercedes-Benz Stadium will cost nearly $200 million.

The cost of the changes is covered by the project’s contingency budget and will inflate the overall cost of the stadium to $1.5 billion. The changes will have no effect on the amount of taxpayer money committed to the project, per the terms of the original stadium deal.

There are no details as to what the changes are, but around half of them were requested in the last month. The change orders were included in the latest status report from the Georgia World Congress Center Authority dated May 31. The report does not address the stadium’s completion date, which had been pushed back to June 1, 2017 earlier this year.

Atlanta United’s inaugural season in MLS will start in March 2017 and will see the team playing its first games on the road as the stadium construction is completed.