Venue News & Notes: Land Shark Rolls Over for Sun Life

The Miami Dolphins treat stadium names like quarterbacks, changing them often. Beginning this week, the team’s home is Sun Life Stadium. A five-year naming-rights agreement with Toronto-based Sun Life Financial was confirmed at a news conference Wednesday at the stadium. The deal is for at least $4 million a year and perhaps more, depending on postseason success for the Dolphins and Florida Marlins, the stadium’s baseball tenant through next year. The name change takes effect in time for Miami’s upcoming high-profile NFL games: the Pro Bowl next week and the Super Bowl on Feb. 7…

…Kansas City Wizards ownership group OnGoal LLC announced this week that approval has been granted for a state-of-the-art soccer-centric stadium for the Wizards and a nearby youth-soccer complex. Construction is set to begin this week at the stadium site, located across from Nebraska Furniture Mart and The Legends in the Village West district of Kansas City, KS. The Wizards, a founding member of Major League Soccer, will become the first major-league professional sports team to play its home games in the state of Kansas and the 12th MLS team to play in a venue built for specifically for soccer…

…City officials in Portland, OR, have announced an agreement to renovate PGE Park for pro soccer without touching Portland’s urban-renewal or general-fund finances. “This plan creates jobs, protects taxpayers from risks, brings MLS excitement … and will showcase Portland and a transformed PGE Park to the world,” Portland Timbers owner Merritt Paulson said. City Commissioner Randy Leonard called the stadium negotiations a done deal. “It has been a long and tough negotiation to achieve an agreement with adequate safeguards for the city, but the protections for the city in this deal are unrivaled by similar agreements around the country,” he said in a press release…

…The week following the San Diego Chargers’ playoff exit, the team and the city said the loss won’t slow efforts to build a new stadium. But dejected fans leaving Qualcomm Stadium called the loss a speed bump on the drive to build a downtown stadium with hundreds of millions of public dollars. “I think, if we had a win today, we’d have much more positive support from citizens and fans,” said Jeff Bouchard, 41, a process engineer who lives in Bay Park. San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders and his staff have been meeting privately with team officials for months, and a 15- to 18-month process of obtaining approvals to pump future property taxes into a stadium site in a downtown redevelopment zone is under way…

…The Maryland Stadium Authority voted this week to approve a $100,000 feasibility study to examine the financial viability of building a soccer stadium that could be used to lure a Major League Soccer franchise. The study, after a lengthy negotiation between the city of Baltimore and the Maryland Stadium Authority, will be paid for entirely by the city. In September, Mayor Sheila Dixon wrote a letter to the Maryland Stadium Authority asking that it consider a 42-acre waterfront Westport project as a potential site for a soccer complex that could hold between 17,000 and 20,000 people and be used to attract D.C. United into making Baltimore its permanent home…

…At the new Florida Marlins stadium’s construction site, virtually all waste is recycled, most building materials are made locally, and pieces of old concrete from the demolished Orange Bowl are repurposed into support beams. Developers say these moves are part of a proactive plan to “green” the entire construction process, build an environmentally conscious stadium, and get official recognition from an organization that gives environmental ratings to buildings. The new ballpark, scheduled to open in 2012, would be the first LEED-certified stadium with a retractable roof in the country, said Edwin Perkins, spokesman for Hunt/Moss, the Marlins’ contractor…

…The city of Evansville, IN, will begin demolishing downtown buildings this week to make way for an 11,000-seat downtown arena going up on the site, project Director John Kish said Thursday. Crews will take down the taller buildings over the weekend to prevent dust from disrupting class at nearby Signature School. “We expect to begin demolition this week and have all the Main Street buildings taken down to street level by Monday morning,” he said, adding that he does not expect the demolition work to create any new street closings or traffic changes.