'FIU will be going up to $35 million dollars into debt to finance [a new stadium].

In the documents it submitted before the Board of Governors when it sought permission to issue the bonds, FIU outlined a detailed proposal for paying back the money. According to the proposal, the bonds would be repaid from the stadium's revenue.

In theory, the source of this revenue, besides ticket sales, would be the sale of 14 luxury seats, advertising deals and network-distribution contracts. As the plan goes, crowds would sell the tickets out, high rollers would spend $5 to $10 million on luxury seats, advertisers would put placards on the sidelines and networks would pay big bucks to televise our football games.

It's a foolproof plan, on paper. In reality, though, foolhardy is the more fitting description.

The prospect of getting any major revenue from tickets is dubious. Though Phase I of the expansion would add 10,500 new seats, previous seasons' attendance records suggest that we should be so lucky if as much as half of them are filled.

The mid-game fight against the University of Miami produced the only media visibility the team got last season. If the team hasn't been able to secure media attention on its own merits - by winning games, for example - it's unlikely that a media contract will materialize.

Without media attention or half-decent attendance, it's hard to imagine that many advertisers will be eager to spend money on putting their names on the new stadium.

Finally, if no one wants to spend the $1 million a year for five to 10 years that FIU President Modesto A. Maidique expects to charge for the luxury seats, it's hard to blame them. Few people will want to spend that much on air-conditioned seats to watch a team go 0-10.

According to the BOG proposal, there's a contingency plan in case the stadium's revenue comes up short: the bonds would be paid for with student fee money and funds from the FIU Foundation.

There's already talk of raising the athletic fee by $1.39 per credit hour. The fee is currently $10 a semester. It's unclear whether the increased fee would be assessed on top of those $10 or instead of them.

Either way, for a student taking a full course load, the fee would go up by at least one hundred percent.

Falling back on student fees to pay back the bonds was supposed to be a last resort, but the administration is already counting on them.

Out of the $1.1 million the fee increase is supposed to bring in annually, the administration already committed $655,000 toward repaying the bonds.

Defaulting to the last-resort measure from day one not only seems like a premature admission of defeat, it's also disturbing, considering students haven't even voted on the increase yet.'