Spurs Sports & Entertainment announced on Aug. 25 that Minneapolis-based Mortenson and San Antonio-based Bartlett Cocke General Contractors will jointly lead construction management on the new downtown Spurs arena. Not a national builder with a local sub. Joint leads.
Who’s on it
Bartlett Cocke was founded in San Antonio in 1959, is employee-owned, and runs offices in San Antonio, Austin and Houston. Chairman and CEO James Anderson called the award “especially meaningful.” Mortenson brings the portfolio that wins these jobs: Chase Center, Allegiant Stadium, Climate Pledge Arena, U.S. Bank Stadium, Energizer Park, the Thunder’s Continental Coliseum and the Las Vegas Athletics ballpark. Logan Gerken, VP and GM of Mortenson Sports + Entertainment, described the pairing as bringing “the scale, resources and specialized expertise of one of the industry’s most experienced sports construction teams.”
San Antonio landscape architecture firm MP Studio joins as local landscape advisor on the surrounding district master plan, working alongside Sasaki. The additions build on a project team announced earlier in 2026.
The local-partner structure is becoming standard
SS&E CEO RC Buford tied the selection to a commitment that local firms get meaningful scope. That framing is now routine on publicly-supported sports and civic work, and it’s worth understanding why owners keep writing it into awards. A national sports builder demobilizes when the arena opens. The trade relationships, the prequalified sub list and the workforce it trained either stay in the region or leave with it. Naming a local firm as co-lead rather than a subcontractor is what keeps them.
The same pattern shows up in aviation. On the John Glenn Columbus International Airport new terminal, Columbus-based Elford, Inc. is integrated into the CMaR delivery team with Hensel Phelps rather than carried below it, and Elford calls the job the largest in its 1910-founded history.
What it sets up
This is the construction management award on one of the largest U.S. sports projects now in preconstruction, and it fixes the trade-partner buying structure for hundreds of San Antonio-area subcontractors. Prequalification packages will follow from here.
Construction Dive puts the arena at $1.3 billion, a figure that isn’t in the Spurs release. The city’s $489 million public contribution has already survived a San Antonio City Council vote against sending it to referendum, which removes the largest remaining approval risk. Mortenson’s description of itself as a top-10 developer and builder is a company claim.
Arena construction at this scale is a global business with a small bench. Marina Bay Sands’ IR2 expansion in Singapore is building a purpose-built 15,000-seat indoor arena as part of an US$8 billion package, and it went to Woh Hup, a local contractor with the right heavy-civil resume, on the same reasoning.