Colorado Springs, CO — City for Champions is a menu of projects backed by tourism dollars funded by tax-increment financing. Projects including a sports medicine center for the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, an Olympic Museum and an Air Force Academy visitor center are forging ahead. But a plan for a downtown sports stadium and events center has stalled.
Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers all but drove a wooden stake through the stadium idea this month. “There’s a gap in funding (for the sports and event center) that local tax dollars would have to make up, and I just don’t see that happening,” Suthers told The Gazette.
The aviation museum could be a substitute for the scuttled stadium. The most-often asked question about putting National Museum of World War II Aviation downtown is also one of the easiest to answer. It turns out that hauling warbirds down the highway is actually no big deal.
“Just pull the wings off,” explained Bill Klaers, the driving force behind the museum and one of America’s top restorers of classic planes.
Pulling parts off planes would be the easy part for Klaers, who has been doing it since 1982. The hard part is getting all the pieces, politics and parts to align to make the downtown museum a reality under the City for Champions program, which would allow some state-backed financing for the facility.
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