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Let’s see now, the nationally ranked University of Hawaii men’s volleyball team attracts 4,497 to the Stan Sheriff Center on a busy Manoa weekend and the place is swamped with traffic, prompting some fans to turn around and head back home. Read more

Let’s see now, the nationally ranked University of Hawaii men’s volleyball team attracts 4,497 to the Stan Sheriff Center on a busy Manoa weekend and the place is swamped with traffic, prompting some fans to turn around and head back home.

And some people would have you believe the campus is the best site on which to build the successor to Aloha Stadium?

Imagine the traffic-in-knots up and around Manoa if a 30,000- to 35,000-seat stadium ever got plunked down on campus.

It would make the legendary Pro Bowl traffic messes an HOV lane by comparison.

Unless, of course, you really do believe rail will get to campus in record time — and on budget.

In planning for a replacement to the decaying 45-year-old Aloha Stadium, the current 98-acre Halawa footprint long ago emerged as the favorite for several reasons — foremost among them being the rail station adjacent to the stadium for which guide ways are already up and the opportunity for transit-oriented development.

The kind of ancillary public-private partnership development the state is counting on to help underwrite revenue bonds that are envisioned to go to defraying some of the expenses on a $350 million facility.

But just to be absolutely sure on an investment of this size — and some believe that you can never have too many studies — the state prudently went ahead with site studies on several locations. Not surprisingly, Manoa did not dethrone Halawa as the favorite.

When the state took over from the city the task of building a stadium in the 1960s, several sites were considered then and a less-crowded Manoa, including a lower campus quarry without athletic facilities, did not gain favor then, either.

When the UH athletic department announced its own commissioned study in 2014, there were reasons it came back as non-site-specific. Even officials who had dreamed of an on-campus facility going in frankly conceded the obstacles there were just too numerous and too expensive for them to push the concept.

Roads would have to be widened, additional parking structures would need to be funded and built, infrastructure overhauled and expanded. Not to mention additional land acquired or condemned.

And those might be the easy parts for the project.

It took the better part of a decade just to get the concept of what became the Stan Sheriff Center off the drawing board, permitted and approved. A lot of the headaches therein no doubt contributed to the fact that the facility had to be named posthumously for the man who spearheaded the vision.

Neighborhood folks expressed opposition, and that was just for a 10,300-seat facility. At one point things appeared so daunting that some at UH wanted to give up and accept a 4,300-seat facility.

The outcry in opposition to a stadium more than three times as large as the Sheriff Center would be deafening.

UH has issues to deal with just accommodating customers who wish to attend events at the Stan Sheriff Center, Rainbow Wahine Softball Stadium and Les Murakami Stadium in an overlapping period, as we have seen.

A football stadium on campus is a non-starter.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.