North Carolina’s game plan for renovations to Kenan Stadium is almost complete. UNC officials are hoping that they will be able to execute it before the start of next football season.

UNC is planning to replace most of the remaining aluminum bleachers in the stadium with chairback seats, a change that would reduce capacity in the stadium by about 15 percent. A budget of $7 million has been approved for the project.

“We’re working with the state construction office and a vendor to see if in fact we can get the seats designed, ordered, and in place by the ’18 season,” UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham said on Thursday. “Assuming we can get yesses on all those questions, then we’re going to begin the process within the next month to start. We’re within a couple of weeks, if not days, of getting our final answers on that.”

If UNC can proceed with its plan, an official announcement likely would come later this month. Time is short because UNC must give its season ticket holders a chance to choose seat locations. Reseating occurs every three years, and 2018 is slated to be the first year of a new cycle.

“We have to have the design done so that when people select their seats for the 2018 season, we know how many seats are in every row,” Cunningham said.

If UNC can move ahead with the renovations, Cunningham said the number of new chairback seats would be roughly 34,000 or 35,000. He said that except for the student section, every bleacher seat in the stadium would be converted to a chairback seat.

UNC did a test run of sorts during the 2017 season, converting some bleachers in sections 110 and 111 (near the goal line on the north side of the stadium) to chairback seats in an effort to improve seat comfort and the overall gameday experience. The school’s plan was to collect feedback from fans in those sections to help determine if similar renovations on a wider scale would be worthwhile. UNC officials received a positive response from fans who sat in the new seats — and from fans who didn’t.

“We got a lot of feedback from people who were sitting in other sections that they would like for us to expand it to as many parts of Kenan Stadium as quickly as we possibly could,” UNC senior associate athletic director Rick Steinbacher said.

Chairback seats take up more space than the bleachers they replace, so the proposed renovations would drop Kenan’s capacity from about 63,000 to somewhere in the low to mid 50,000s. In an era when spending and the size of facilities in college football continue to grow, Cunningham said he was not concerned about diminished capacity in Kenan.

“What we want to do is create a great gameday atmosphere,” he said. “We want it to be a comfortable environment.”

The Tar Heels drew an average of 50,071 fans for their seven home games in 2017. Five of the games produced crowds between 43,000 and 50,000, and the two biggest crowds showed up for games against Duke (59,000) and Notre Dame (57,000). If the current plan for renovations is executed, crowds approaching 60,000 no longer will be possible.

Such a change would have the potential to affect UNC’s bottom line because football ticket revenue is a significant source of funding for the athletic department. But Cunningham said UNC could make adjustments to avoid losing revenue if the stadium has fewer seats.

“We can modify pricing to reflect the convenience and comfort of the seats,” he said. “We want to have a stadium that’s the right size for us, and we think that is a good size for us.”