In Halawa, a flea market with a stadium attached

If words were dollars, Honolulu would be watching live football in a stadium rivaling the Dallas monument built by Jerry Jones for his Dallas Cowboys.

Well, that’s a bit of an overstatement. Aloha Stadium opened in 1975 and cost $35 million; when AT&T Stadium opened in Arlington, Texas, the construction cost was put at $1.5 billion.

The Cowboys play in a stadium built by businessmen; Hawaii’s teams play on a field that is a symbol.

Aloha Stadium was built with the express urging of former Gov. John A. Burns, who guided Hawaii into statehood and championed the new state as an equal to all.

"Gov. Burns confronted what he termed ‘a subtle inferiority of spirit’ in the young state," sports reporter Ferd Lewis wrote in a 2009 Honolulu Advertiser column.

"He was saying, ‘Hey folks, we’re just as good as the rest of the United States, so let’s show them that we are,’ his son (James Burns) recalls."

Our stadium would never turn a profit; it was a symbol and its fate was not to make money but to be used by politicians for whatever.

For Burns, the 50,000-seat stadium showed we could compete. We could hold the Pro Bowl, we could host major league baseball, Pele could play in our stadium and so could the Rolling Stones.

As it turned out, what the stadium couldn’t do was make a dollar.

In 2008, the Legislature toyed with the idea of giving the stadium to the University of Hawaii, which would run it as a quasi-public corporation with extra profits going to the UH athletic department.

The stadium management pointed out that in 2008, the stadium got just 13 percent of its $9.4 million in revenue from UH activities.

The swap meet, carnivals and concerts generate the rest, said Scott Chan, Aloha Stadium manager.

Today, the state says the stadium needs $219 million in repairs, of which $120 million are considered "high priority" health and safety improvements.

The state also says it has scrimped together $22 million in capital improvement project money to make the repairs and hopes to get another $3 million. Remember when I told you the stadium was not about business? The stadium does not dwell in the land of balanced budgets.

A new $250,000 report suggests that a new 35,000-seat stadium would be a better investment.

That matches what Gov. Neil Abercrombie wants.

In his first State of the State speech, the Democratic governor called for a decision so that "we look at what we want to do other than sink money into a structure that has hundreds of millions of dollars of repairs … and won’t last more than another 20 years."

A 2002 report prepared by Steinberg & Moorad suggested transferring the stadium to UH and raising parking fees, rents and other charges to make money for UH.

Both Abercrombie and the late former Mayor Frank Fasi have suggested moving the stadium somewhere else. Fasi said make it small and put it downtown.

Abercrombie four years ago campaigned on the promise of giving the stadium to UH, a promise that has since morphed into a task force to consider sports development with UH officials included on the team.

At other times, Abercrombie considered somehow using the stadium’s 100 acres for development, with the developer being required to build us a stadium on state land.

While Abercrombie’s eyes light up with the words "developer and land swap," it is not likely because the federal government has two deed restrictions on the property.

For a stadium built with the hopes of elevating Hawaii to compete on a national stage, it now has become a rusting money pit with a really good flea market.

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Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.