Remember the days when then-Mayor Anthony Williams claimed that a new stadium for the Washington Nationals would only cost $400 million? Yeah, so do we. Unfortunately, those days are long gone.

According to the Examiner, higher-than-expected costs for land acquisition around the new stadium along South Capitol Street have pushed overall costs up by $43.2 million, meaning that by opening day the new stadium may end up costing closer to $700 million. The increased costs are being attributed to lowball estimates for land acquisition reported by the District’s Chief Financial Officer, Natwar Gandhi. Of course, this shouldn’t be news to any of us — in 2005, Council member David Catania (I-At Large) raised the issue with Gandhi, noting that land costs were likely to be higher than Gandhi was claiming at the time.

The increases, though, won’t technically bust the stadium’s $611 million cost cap, because land costs never figured into the construction budget:

Land acquisition was not included in the stadium’s $611 million price cap, meaning the sports commission can bridge the budget gap with excess revenues from the ballpark fund — composed mainly of stadium sales taxes and a 1 percent tax on D.C. businesses. It also means that while the project is technically over budget, it has not breached the statutory cap.

“The cap was never a real number,” said at-large Councilman Phil Mendelson, a stadium critic.

It’s always encouraging when a cost cap on a publicly funded project — especially one with a cost equal to almost 10 percent of the city’s entire budget — isn’t actually much of a cap at all.