ATLANTA -- Thursday, Gov. Nathan Deal’s office got a stack of petitions from a group that wants to save the Georgia Dome. That’s the football stadium that hosted its final event last weekend and is due for demolition this summer.
The demolition of the Georgia Dome has pretty much been a done deal since about four years ago. The effort to keep it around may seem like a lost cause – and its founder admits that.
"What I’m trying to do is put the brakes on the demolition of the Georgia Dome, because once the train crashes, you can’t put it back," said Molly Read Woo of Buckhead. "I’m saying just hold off on the demolition of the Dome until we have a chance to talk about this. Let’s not throw away a multi-billion dollar facility."
Molly Read Woo sees the scheduled demolition of the Dome as central to a continuum of wasteful Atlanta disposal.
"They could play football at the Georgia Dome. They could play baseball at Turner Field," she argued...if the authorities would only listen.
She was at the Capitol Thursday to present petition signatures to Deal, urging him to spare the state-owned facility, fully realizing Deal signed off on the demolition years ago. "The governor has the ability to file an injunction on this," she said.
She has also posted a song she wrote and performed to promote her cause. When Molly Read Woo sees the two stadiums side by side, she doesn’t see redundancy. She sees opportunity. "It is insane to throw this public asset into a landfill," she said.
And she says she’s familiar with a cautionary tale in Houston, Texas, where authorities have declined to demolish the Astrodome, a stadium used in recent years as a storage facility for the adjacent NRG Field.
"At least it’s being used for something, and they didn’t have to pay to demolish it," she said.
Jen LeMaster, chief administrative officer at the Georgia World Congress Center Authority, told us it would be impractical to try to salvage the Dome.
“After a thoughtful and thorough review, and with the aid of the nation’s foremost legal, financial, property and event experts, the staff and Board of the GWCCA could not identify any viable financial options for a two-stadium solution that did not put the public’s interests at risk now and well into the future," she wrote in a statement.
The Dome is due to be imploded this summer.
PHOTOS | Saying 'Goodbye' to the Georgia Dome
