Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield has proposed a $201 million operating budget for the 2012 fiscal year, with not a penny set aside for Finley Stadium.
The city has pumped $60,000 each of the past four years to the Stadium Corp., which manages the home of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football team. The four-year stretch includes the final two years Frank Burke served as Finley Stadium's executive director and the first two years of Merrill Eckstein's tenure as operator of the 20,668-seat facility.
"That's an absolute killer for us," Eckstein said Tuesday. "We're going to generate a very small surplus this year, around $12,000, and now we'll have to start subtracting $60,000."
Stadium Corp. chairman Bryan Patten is out of the country for most of this month.
Eckstein and Patten addressed the possibility of reduced funding at the February board meeting, but they did not expect to lose the entire amount. Hamilton County also provides $60,000 annually to the Stadium Corp., and UTC is responsible for $10,000 each home football game.
"What we anticipated, quite frankly, was that if they were going to cut supported agencies such as Finley Stadium that they would do it across the board and that we might lose 10 or 15 percent," Eckstein said. "We would have been fine losing 10 percent, or $6,000. We would have been fine losing 20 percent."
Eckstein said the Stadium Corp. will have to "go back to square one as far as the budget is concerned." He added that rental fees could increase but said the problem with that is the potential to lose clients.
Charging $10 at every parking lot this fall is the only increase the Stadium Corp. has made to this point.