The state Higher Education Coordinating Board has approved the University of North Texas’ plans for a new football stadium, and the boys in the athletic complex have broken out the sparkling Gatorade.

Board approval was the last hurdle for the $78 million project, and now that it has been jumped, construction should begin on the new stadium next month, with completion in time for the 2011 season. Let the naming-rights bidding war begin.

We have favored the construction of a new stadium for one reason and one reason only: Fouts Field is a wreck.

If the university wants to continue playing football at the major-college level — and there is no indication that it doesn’t — the 57-year-old Fouts Field has to be replaced. It is a bedraggled eyesore that is beyond renovation.

That said, we have been less than gratified at the way the university has proceeded — and continues to proceed — in furthering the project, and we need to get these quibbles off our chest before assuming our seat as second-chair trombone on the stadium bandwagon.

We are not expert in the arcane art of public relations — our talents run more to alienating people than making them love us — but we cannot help but believe some of the selling points for the project trumpeted by UNT were pretty thin gruel.

When a tiny percentage of the UNT student body turned out to approve a $10-per-semester-hour student fee to help pay for the stadium, UNT officials seemed perfectly willing for people to believe that a majority of the university’s 30,000-plus students had volunteered to pony up for the new stadium.

In point of fact, only about 10 percent of the student body turned out for the election, and we’d bet that most of them were fully aware that they weren’t voting to raise their own fees, but the fees of students who would be arriving on the campus after the stadium is completed.

The vote was not exactly the selfless vote of enthusiasm that some stadium boosters portrayed it.

Second, UNT President Gretchen Bataille said several times — once before the editorial board of this newspaper — that a “great” athletic program was an absolute requirement for a “great” university, instantly relegating such schools as Harvard, Columbia, MIT and Cal Tech to the bush leagues of higher education. We really don’t think she believes that, and we wish she hadn’t said it repeatedly.

And UNT has stumbled a couple of times in its attempts to mollify residents who live near the site where the new stadium will be built.

Many of those residents are understandably concerned with how the stadium will impact the traffic in their neighborhoods, and the folks from UNT have not always responded in reassuring ways.

At a meeting in August, Dr. Bataille expressed surprise that the neighborhood residents were concerned about traffic.

“Traffic is Texas,” she said, and many residents thought that was a flippant dismissal of their concerns.

Another UNT official reportedly advised residents to simply stay at home on game days, another suggestion that didn’t go down well.

Well, we have a suggestion for UNT — and for the city government of Denton, which will play a big role in deciding how traffic will flow into and out of the new stadium’s parking lot once the games begin in 2011: Listen carefully to those residents, even the ones who sound unfriendly and unreasonable.

They are your neighbors (in UNT’s case) and your constituents (in the city government’s case).

Routes going to and from the new stadium should be chosen not just for the university’s convenience, but for the convenience and safety of the residents who live there.

We all live with the knowledge that governments (and in this case, a university) have the power to inconvenience people to a reasonable degree. That doesn’t mean they should do it with impunity.

The degree to which such institutions temper that power is the means by which we measure our respect for them.