Louisville City must be playing in a soccer-specific stadium by March '20 to remain a member of the USLHOK
USL club Louisville City FC has the "green light to use tax-increment financing to subsidize its soccer stadium after the state gave the plan final approval," according to a front-page piece by Danielle Lerner of the Louisville COURIER-JOURNAL. The Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority voted Thursday to give the club and Louisville Metro Government $21.7M to "create a 20-year tax-increment financing district" for the $193.1M project in the Butchertown neighborhood. Details of the plan "remain unchanged from the version the state preliminarily approved in January." Louisville City "must be playing in a soccer-specific stadium" by March '20 to "remain a member" of the USL. Construction is "expected to begin in August." Louisville City co-Owner Mike Mountjoy said, "I used to tell my developers, 'Don't open the champagne bottle until the job is finished.' We have come a long way but we have a long way to go. ... We'll rest in 2020 when we open the doors." The venue was "initially supposed to have 10,000 seats," but Mountjoy said that it "will have 11,300 seats after officials decided they could add extra seats around the top rim without significant additional cost." The stadium will be part of a 37-acre mixed-use development that also includes "two hotels with 308 combined rooms as well as 20,000 square feet of retail space, 50,000 square feet of restaurant space and 340,000 square feet of office space" (Louisville COURIER-JOURNAL, 6/1).
