HERE'S a statistic that will incense those who like to complain about the waste of public money: the empty Huntington Stadium is costing the ratepayers of York £25,000 a month.
For each month it has been empty, the city council has had to fork out £18,000 in non-domestic rates - most of which will have ended up in Whitehall coffers - plus a further £7,000 for security and emergency maintenance.
The York City Knights played their last game at the stadium last September. That's eleven months at £25,000, or £275,000 spent merely looking after an empty building and site.
With last week's announcement that work on the new community stadium has been delayed again and will not be completed until 2017, a lot more council money will be frittered away over the coming months.
The waste is all the more galling because, after vacating the stadium, the Knights were effectively homeless for months. As things have turned out, they could have played another season at Huntington - saving the council and the club money.
Of course, it is not that simple. Nobody foresaw in September that the project would be delayed the way it has. And there has at least been an archaeological dig since the Knights left.
But still, the increasing cost of these delays will leave many people very angry. The old stadium itself is now said to be a 'potentially dangerous structure'.
Stadium programme manager Tim Atkins has now suggested that some early preparatory work - including the extension of the park and ride, detailed design work, and even demolition of the old stadium - could be brought forward to save time and money.
We can't see why this wasn't done months ago.