Featherstone stadium plans supported

Plans for a new community stadium for Featherstone Rovers have taken another step forward after local planners supported the clubs outline proposals.

The club met with local planners this week to outline their proposals to develop the existing Featherstone Rovers grounds into a ‘best in it’s class’ community based stadium that would bring benefits to the whole of the Featherstone community.

This comes after the club had a very positive meeting with council officials earlier in the month to discuss ‘financial assistance’ after the Council publically declared that they would be supporting both Castleford Tigers and Wakefield Wildcats with their new stadium proposals.

Councillors pledged to support the Featherstone Rovers scheme in a comparable way to the support  that they will provide to both the Castleford and Wakefield projects.

Featherstone CEO, Andy Prout comments “The club has no intention of selling off its ‘crown jewels’ as assets for developers to get rich from. This is a community project and we will not be bringing in developers to get rich on the back of this development. That is why we are developing our stadium with a development partner who will allow us to keep all of proceeds to put back into the club to ensure we are debt free”.

The club also pledges to the community of Featherstone that any commercial element of the development would not detract from the Featherstone high street and confirmed that any commercial scheme would seek to provide additional services for the community of Featherstone and complement the services that are already available.

The community stadium development could attract more than 300 permanent jobs within the town in addition to the many temporary jobs within the community during the construction phase.