The most expensive stadium in the country just got a little more costly as the voter-approved $62.8 million McKinney ISD stadium cost increased by $7.1 million for a new total of $69.9 million. District officials announced the price increase during the MISD board of trustees work session on Aug. 16. Cody Cunningham, MISD chief communications and support services officer, said the district did not anticipate the jump in costs. “We adopted the price of the stadium and it came in way over budget primarily because concrete has gone up 50 percent,” he said. “We had a choice of either reducing the scope of the stadium or building it as committed to the public.” MISD officials said the 11 percent increase comes from a $5 million rise in concrete; $2.5 million rise in mechanical, electrical, plumbing material and labor costs; $2 million rise in road construction costs, and an overall market inflation of $1.3 million for construction and labor costs. “When we saw this come in we immediately started meeting with Manhattan [Construction] and Stantec to see where we could cut costs in a way that would not diminish the scope of the project or the experience of the fan,” Cunningham said. “We were able to trim $3 million in additional increases. Ultimately, we had to make a decision to deliver what we had promised to the voters when they approved the stadium in May. We felt we had an obligation to deliver to the community what we had originally promised.” For the initial $62.8 million price tag of the stadium, MISD officials combined $50.3 million from May’s bond package and an existing $12.5 million from a 2000 bond to fund the stadium’s construction. Now, MISD officials said another $4 million leftover from the 2011 bond will also be added to cover the costs. Cunningham said the district will remove some shorter lifespan items from the 2016 bond package and pay for them through the maintenance and operations portion of the budget. Those projects includes, $2 million for its One to the World program, $1.4 million for athletics equipment and fine arts, $.3 million for technology upgrades and $.3 million for furniture and total $4 million. “A lot of times the reason you will put [shorter lifespan items] in a bond is if you have a strain on your M&O budget,” Cunningham said. “It’s not uncommon for districts to put some technology items, uniforms and band equipment in a bond program. However if you can pull it out of the bond program and pay for it out of M&O then the advantage there is that you are not paying the interest. So in this particular case when the valuations came in higher than anticipated that provided additional M&O funds that were not initially anticipated and we were able to use those to pay for some of the things we had in the bond package.” The district had already purchased the $8.6 million tract of land for stadium, located at SH 121 and Hardin Boulevard back in 2011 and 2014. During the work session, MISD officials also discussed another decrease to the school district's property tax rate by another half cent making the new tax rate $1.62 per $100 taxable value, $.05 cents less than last year. This decision will be voted upon during the Aug. 23 school board meeting. The stadium is set to break ground in September and will be complete at some point during the 2017-18 football season, weather permitting.