Bucs See Red Over Pink

The home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers is in the pink – or, at least, its seats are. And it’s got the Tampa Sports Authority that runs the stadium seeing red.

The Florida agency has filed suit against a Maine seat manufacturer, claiming poor craftsmanship has caused the once bright red seats to fade to an unsightly shade of pink and paint on the seat stanchions to bubble and peel, according to Maine’s Bangor Daily News.

The suit charges that Hussey Seating Company promised last year to replace the seats before the start of the 2005 National Football League season, but reneged on that promise in January.

“It’s not only pink, but they’re kind of streaked,” authority attorney John Van Voris told the paper. “Some of them have almost turned white. They just look bad.”

Hussey Seating has manufactured seats for several professional football and baseball stadiums over the years, as well as for movie theatres, convention centers and other venues.

The seat-maker reportedly installed the red seats, which matched the Buccaneers’ uniforms, in Raymond James Stadium prior to its 1998 opening with a 10-year no-fade guarantee.

The company ran a series of tests and discovered that a subcontractor failed to add ultraviolet inhibitors to minimize sun damage to the seats, the Daily News said.

In November, Hussey and the authority agreed that the manufacturer would replace all the plastic seats by early June. Hussey was also to correct the problem of peeling paint on the cast iron seat stanchions, the paper said.

But two months later, Hussey said it had not begun making new seats and could not finish the replacement process until 2006, according to the court complaint filed by the sports authority.

Meetings are reportedly scheduled between Hussey and Tampa Bay Sports Authority reps in hopes of resolving the problem out of court.