KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Upgrades to Missouri football’s home stadium are officially coming.

The UM System Board of Curators approved a motion Thursday to proceed with the $250 million upgrades to the north concourse of Memorial Stadium in Columbia — the home stadium of Missouri football. 

Part of that is a now-official groundbreaking ceremony scheduled for Nov. 30, the same day as Mizzou’s regular-season finale at home against Arkansas. The project is slated to be completed ahead of the 2026 football season.

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There has rarely been, at least publicly, a hitch in the progress of getting the stadium upgrades approved. All votes concerning the stadium, including Thursday’s motion to proceed, have passed unanimously.

Now, the objective is to finish funding the quarter-of-a-billion-dollar investment.

“Rest assured,” UM System president Mun Choi said at the meeting on the University of Missouri-Kansas City campus, “we're going to work hard throughout our every sector to generate the revenues that we need to make sure that this project is done on time and on budget.”

A big bulk of that task falls on Missouri's new athletic director.

Laird Veatch, since taking over as Mizzou’s AD, hasn’t shied away from talking about the need for philanthropy to fund the renovations. He did it again Thursday at UMKC. He was approved shortly after the $250 million upgrade to Memorial Stadium was initially approved in April.

He reiterated Thursday that his department has committed to securing half of the budgeted funds for the stadium upgrades.

That means Veatch and the athletic department needs to raise $125 million. As of Thursday, Veatch said the university is “over halfway” to that goal.

• The university publicized an anonymous pledge of $50 million toward stadium upgrades, which was secured in January under former athletic director Desireé Reed-Francois.

• In June, at a meeting of the UM curators in Springfield, Veatch said the athletic department has secured “10 more seven-figure commitments, which would mean at least $10 million.

• If all of those known donations still stand, the total comes out to, at a minimum, $60 million —  a dollar figure close to the halfway number.

Veatch again emphasized the need for more philanthropy to fulfill their end of the bargain, but expressed a degree of confidence that the athletic department will reach their goal.

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“We're over halfway there in terms of overall commitments. I would say we have a lot of really good conversations going with several of our donors that will put us in a position to further that along,” Veatch said. “But we do have a lot of work to do, and we need them to say ‘yes’ and support us, but we're confident we have the capacity and passion to do it.”

If it comes to it, however, UM board of curator Bob Blitz said that the university would not hesitate from heading to Jefferson City and asking the state for funding to help complete the project.

“We're not shy about asking them,” Blitz said.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Missouri AD Laird Veatch, board talk funding for $250M stadium upgrade