If Jack Kent Cooke is looking for a quicker way to get his 78,600-seat football stadium built, moving to the Konterra site along Interstate 95 is not it, Prince George's County planners say.
For one thing, Mr. Cooke would have to wait for, and probably help pay for, a new interchange to handle the additional traffic off Interstate 95 that a stadium would generate.
That interchange is being planned for a regional mall west of I-95, but it could take as long as four years to build and cost between $10 million and $20 million, George Cardwell, planning coordinator for Prince George's transportation division, said yesterday. And most of the money would have to come from private sources, he said.
Redskins officials have been trying to move their stadium project forward as quickly as possible. Mr. Cooke has said repeatedly he wants the Washington Redskins to be playing in a new stadium in fall 1996.
Mr. Cooke has approached Howard County developer Kingdon Gould Jr. about the possibility of building a stadium in the Konterra Town Center, a 488-acre parcel about two miles south of Laurel between Interstate 95 and U.S. 1. The town center is part of a 2,000-acre development straddling Interstate 95 that includes 500 single-family homes, a regional mall and a research and development park.
At the same time, Mr. Cooke is appealing the decision of an Anne Arundel County hearing officer who turned down his application to build a stadium next to the Laurel racetrack. The team has received a two-month postponement in the appeals hearing to allow officials time to buy more land to provide additional parking to comply with the hearing officer's decision.
The appeals hearing is to begin June 6 and last for at least six months.
A threat to move to Prince George's County could be seen as an effort to pressure Anne Arundel officials to be more accommodating to the Laurel project, but it does not appear to have made much difference.
"Mr. Cooke is free to take his football team anywhere he likes," said Larry R. Telford, a spokesman for County Executive John G. Gary. "However, he will never find a better site than Anne Arundel County."
Although no traffic studies have been done for the Prince George's site, county planners said that the I-95 exits north and south of Konterra are too far away to be useful and would put fans on 2 1/2 miles of winding, two-lane roads to get to the stadium.
"It would be extremely difficult for me to envision any way to do this without having [the Konterra] interchange," said Stephen Fisher, Prince George's County planning coordinator. "I certainly cannot conceive how this could happen without that interchange."
The interchange was included in the National Capital Park and Planning Commission's 1990 master plan for that area. It would consist of collector and distributor roads between Route 198 to the north and Route 212 to the south. The collector road system was proposed because the new interchange is so close to the existing ones that it would cause a dangerous amount of merging traffic.
Prince George's planners are conducting a study of the interchange for the State Highway Administration. The SHA will submit the application to the Federal Highway Administration, which must approve any request to build access to Interstate 95.
The study, which is being paid for by the Taubman Co., the Detroit-based developer of the mall, is to be submitted to the state next month. The SHA is expected to submit its application in April to the federal agency, which usually acts within 60 days. The project would need an environmental impact study.
"Realistically, it could be there in three to four years," said Mr. Cardwell. "Most of that is predicated on [funding with] nonstate money, a lot of private money."