DUNDEE owner Tim Keyes remains fully committed to the Dens Park club’s proposed new stadium at Camperdown Park despite the latest delay to the ambitious project, managing director John Nelms has stated.
The Premiership outfit submitted a planning application in principle to Dundee City Council back in February and Nelms has been liaising with officials to address their queries in the months since.
However, the American stressed that Texas-based businessman Keyes is still determined to see the plan come to fruition despite the application hearing being pushed back from December to January next year.
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“It's the process, isn't it?” he said yesterday. “The council have been working hand in hand with us. There's a couple of technical things that they've been working through.
“It's a long arduous process. Our environmental assessment study is 15,000 pages on its own and that's just one aspect of the whole thing. So, of course, if you go through the whole thing, you're going to have questions.
“So they'll ask questions and they'll have queries. There's different agencies that they put it out to as well to make sure that it fits with what they want. And the majority of it does.
“But there might be some queries. They might say, ‘This is what we want the air quality to be. Can you say with the amount of cars that are going to be coming in how much it changes?’. And they might say, ‘We asked you this, but actually we need a little bit of this as well’. So we have to go and do that. But there is no hostility, these are all just technical matters.
“I was in a meeting a month and a half ago with 23 people in the room and the endeavour was to potentially get the hearing in December. But most likely it is, because of the holidays and things of that nature, going to be January. We're hopeful.”
“Neither one of us would ever do that [abandon the new stadium plan] now. Once we decide we're going to do something, we're going to see it all the way through until you tell us we can't do it. And then we'll fight that as well. That's just the way we are.
“We've been here 11 years. We try not to say that we're doing anything unless we think we can actually make it happen. And that's what we've done. If we get deterred by processes, then we'd never continue to move forward.
“We’re trying to get things moving, we're impatient. We want things to happen much quicker and we are constantly driving. But we have to respect the process and that's what we're doing. if we have to wait a little bit and be a bit patient to secure the next 100 years for the football club, I think it's worth it.”
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Doubts have been expressed about the surrounding road infrastructure being able to cope with the traffic on match days since the plan to build a new stadium at Camperdown was first floated. However, Nelms does not envisage that being a stumbling block.
“I don't think it's insurmountable at all,” he said. “We currently do this now. We're not bringing a new team into Dundee. We actually go, to use a Dundee word, past four other circles (roundabouts) to get to Dens Park as it is.
“To get to and from Camperdown, it's much easier ingress and egress. The police are much happier with it being there. Operationally, it's a much easier site to deal with. So I don't think anything's insurmountable. There's not been a huge red flag. In a project this size, you usually do have red flags.
“By the way, the city brought us this site. They think that this is a great site for a stadium. They brought it to us in 2015, or maybe even before that. We've had these conversations about traffic before we pulled the trigger to actually purchase it, just to make sure that we felt comfortable enough that we could get this project through.”
Nelms continued: “So from a technical standpoint, we're quite confident. From a vote standpoint, we just don't know. That depends on who's voting at the time.
“If we get a positive outcome in January, you will see things starting to happen on site in the third, fourth quarter of next year. That process should move a lot quicker. It should be more streamlined, because of our, as I call it, planning permission in principle on steroids.
“Then from the time that we actually get in and put a brick or anything down on the stadium, it'll be 12 to 14, potentially even 18 months once it actually comes out of the ground.”
