Downtown Stadium Plan by May 30th

[sgrizzle]

quote:Originally posted by sgrizzle

Taken from other thread:

Anyone want to identify the other stuff in this picture (other than the stadium and the PSO area)

[spoonbill]

quote:Originally posted by sgrizzle

quote:Originally posted by sgrizzle

Taken from other thread:

Anyone want to identify the other stuff in this picture (other than the stadium and the PSO area)

The buildings at the lower right seem to be retail??? but they are 5,000 sq/ft each, and oriented so that each bay would only be 35' deep with some kind of court yard or service access in the center that only measures 21' x 21'.  

They would require a parking count of 66.  Depending on the layout and orientation this would translate to 16,000 to 22,000 sq/ft of parking lot.

[Breadburner]

quote:Originally posted by sgrizzle

I like how everyone suddenly thinks the Jenks ballpark is a done deal. No-one has put a billion dollars of private money into anything in Tulsa yet everyone assumes these people have the cash in hand and can make it happen.

If Tulsa can do it without any cost to the taxpayer then do it. There is no guarantee a Jenks ballpark would ever happen regardless of what Tulsa does.

Bingo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[brunoflipper]

quote:Originally posted by sgrizzle

quote:Originally posted by sgrizzle

Taken from other thread:

Anyone want to identify the other stuff in this picture (other than the stadium and the PSO area)

city development block to the west...
private ownership to the south west...

the four smaller insets all show slight variations in the arrangement of the outbuildings with onsite parking lots included...

[Hawkins]

quote:Originally posted by cannon_fodder

So there is an exclusive window of 4 months for the city to make a plan to bring a stadium downtown in the East End somewhere.  They don't know when.  They don't know how much it will cost. They don't know how it will be funded.

Thanks for the excitement.  At east you're interested in downtown and baseball.  But I feel a bit let down.

Plans for downtown seem to often fail anyway, what chance does a plan for a plan have?

oh, and I'd like the plan for a plan to include a plan for the soon-to-be abandoned Drillers stadium.  The city seems to be getting into the abandoned building business lately.

I feel a glimmer of hope coming on.

Maybe we can still get the Drillers in the river development area in the South Tulsa/Jenks area.

[USRufnex]

quote:Originally posted by restored2x

I really hope this works out downtown. Part of the urban redevelopment and revival of my hometown, Baltimore, included a downtown ballpark for the Orioles. I grew up and played around that old railyard as a small kid. The area was ugly, scarred, and very dangerous (murder capital of US). Now it is an area with loft apartments, mom and pop businesses, and a smattering of nice bars and restaurants (local and chain). The hotels became very profitable and the tax base grew like crazy.

Hopefully, private developers will snatch up adjacent land to build affordable (yuppie-affordable) housing. Downtowns don't survive or progress just being a destination. That's why they die in the first place. People move out. Affordable housing is replaced by businesses that fail.

Will people come downtown? Just watch a baseball game on TV that takes place in Cleveland's or Baltimore's stadiums. Baltimore City is 70-80% African-American. Scan the stands on any gameday - 90% are white people. Where did they come from? Not the city - most come from "Jenks", "Broken Arrow", "Owasso", etc. Some come from the yuppie rowhouses the city sold to them for $1, contingent on them renovating with a city-carried renovation loan.

Brilliant.

Now if we could just come up with something a little more comprehensive as far as affordable development of the area around the proposed new stadium. (NOT WALMART)

But Camden Yards has a capacity of nearly 50,000 seats... for the first 6 or 7 years from its opening, average attendance was 45,000 fans per game.  A stand-alone 6k seat minor league ballpark isn't going to magically spur economic development on its own...

Ripken Stadium, Aberdeen, MD, pictured below... five years after it opened in 2002...



Comparing a major league ballpark at Camden Yards to a new Texas League AA ballpark isn't comparing apples to oranges... it's comparing apples to, say... watermelons.

This park should be compared to new ballparks in Springfield, North Little Rock, Frisco, TX, and Springdale, AR... are the benefits going to be worth the costs on a city-owned ballpark?

Here's a cautionary tale:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/harford/bal-te.ha.stadium14jul14,0,3949744.story

quote:Special report: Minor league, major troubles
The Harford County community owes $6.7 million in stadium-related debt, and millions in interest, on a payment schedule stretching to 2022. The city's stadium fund has posted operating losses that total more than $1 million since 2001, forcing Aberdeen to dip into its treasury.

Every game has been a sellout since the 6,000-seat stadium opened in 2002. Companies such as Bank of America have paid to be sponsors.............

Over the years, city leaders never fully made public the extent of Aberdeen's financial strains. However, interviews and a review of thousands of pages of records reveal that their disenchantment was growing behind the scenes. S. Fred Simmons, Aberdeen's mayor, expressed concerns while he was a member of the board that oversees the stadium.

"What I am about to say may sting a little bit," Simmons said in a 2005 e-mail to some of his fellow board members. "But I think it needs to be said.

"We were not present when the original deal, full of winks and nods, was formulated. ... We do not control either the income or the direction of marketing at the stadium. ... We have [a] dysfunctional relationship with our 'partners' at the stadium."

Simmons concluded, "Municipalities, especially this one, shouldn't be in this type of business."

Former Mayor Douglas S. Wilson, who was defeated by Simmons later in 2005, defends the way the city handled the stadium complex during his tenure. "I still think we did the right thing. Hindsight is 20-20. The reason the city is so far behind is [certain elements] just didn't get built on time."

Memos and e-mails obtained by The Sun show the city has for years sought more money from Ripken entities whose payments have fallen short of the city's expectations. The two sides have talked periodically but have failed to resolve differences.

The City of Tulsa has 4 mos...

[USRufnex]

quote:Originally posted by Kenosha

1) There is 40 million set aside in that TIF for a   sports facility of some kind...Why does it have to be a baseball stadium? (Rufneck?  Where aaaarrrre you?)

2) I don't think the stadium is a dealbreaker for the River project in Jenks.  Especially if you look at their location of the stadium.  They obviously could have integrated it into the development concept more completely, but to me it looks as if you could just wipe it off the plan and still progress with a pretty amazing development.

3) I think Chuck Lamson would prefer to be downtown if they can make it work, otherwise the  trigger would have already been pulled.

"Rufneck?  Where aaaarrrre you?"



The 6th & Elgin site has been the Drillers first choice since at least August 2005-- and they really wanted to piggyback off of Global Development/Kissler after the MLS deal fell through sometime Jan/Feb 2006... I still think the Drillers have been using the Jenks site as leverage to prevent the city of Tulsa from cornering them into accepting a compromise site --- one between a couple of refineries (I don't think Tulsa Landing passed Lamson's "smell test") or another site just north of the IDL around OSU-Tulsa...

But Jenks has a viable plan and I wouldn't blame the Drillers if they took it...

But if that anchor sporting goods store for the Jenks project is Dick's Sporting Goods, who knows?  They are a major sponsor of MLS these days and got naming rights to Denver's new stadium in Commerce City.  $40mil ain't gonna buy a state of the art 22k capacity stadium, but that seems like wishful thinking these days anyway... especially after the death of Lamar Hunt, Tulsa's managed to fall off Major League Soccer's post-Beckham/PoshSpice radar screen... for at least the next few years... possibly forever...

So, if Jenks ends up building a Union-Tuttle style high school football stadium for the Trojans with a capacity around 10k and add a few extra yards on either sideline to make the field soccer-friendly, it'd be a great facility for a USL1 team... it could have a concert stage on one end, and if you wanted to add a pipedream or two, make the stadium site expandable in the future to 22k-plus capacity...

Problem is, the only Tulsa people pushing publicly these days for a place to play pro-soccer outdoors would be Coach Ali Abidi (sponsored by Amini's Galleria?) http://www.okfalconsfc.com/index.php and two un-named folks pushing for a women's soccer team-- if I had to guess, it'd be the Luettes from Thrifty who bankrolled the Oklahoma Outrage women's team who played at Metro Christian for a couple of years... Luette's Okla. Outrage were lucky to draw a few hundred fans per game (although they did manage to draw over 4300 fans for an exhibition against the New York WUSA team at Broken Arrow HS)... Abidi coached the Tulsa Roughnecks men's team in the USL D-3 which folded after the 1999 season... they were lucky to draw 1,000 fans per game.

Small potatoes in my opinion.
Depressing, really.    

Another problem is that there are other unidentified people who've signed confidentiality agreements... we don't know if they'd want a team in Jenks, we don't know if they have a ton of money... we don't know if they're purely interested in a Major League Soccer team or if they're downtown-only people... or maybe they were just figments of former mayor LaFortune's imagination... []

[Kenosha]

Pizza Hut Park in Frisco cost 80 million while the Rapids in Commerce City (Denver) cost 131 million, BUT those included all of the site work, utilities, roads, tournament fields etc. Not to mention, if you've ever been to either place, while the stadiums are beautiful, they are in the middle of freaking nowhere.  So they spend money on amenities because there is nothing else to do out there.  That isn't the case here...you are already building all of the amenities into the adjacent development, plus all of the engineering, road work, etc. can be absorbed into the cost of the project as a whole.  If there is room for extra soccer fields, this seems an ideal location for a major league soccer franchise.  South Tulsa is Soccer crazy for one...two, you already have 40 mill in hand for an ownership group...and any ownership group worth its salt should be able to raise the remaining cash needed for the facility.  


If I were the city leaders in Jenks, I'd be calling the league tomorrow...

[USRufnex]

Which league?

[Kenosha]

MLS, preferably...I think if you are going to get fans to the game, they are going to want to see Dallas, DC, and LA, just like back in the day with Beckenbauer, Canalgia and whatnot. I also think that an ownership group would only want to deal with the bigs...JMO.

Another thought...Sponsorship.. QuikTrip Park.  Thats got to be worth a few million bucks...

[inteller]

quote:Originally posted by Kenosha

MLS, preferably...I think if you are going to get fans to the game, they are going to want to see Dallas, DC, and LA, just like back in the day with Beckenbauer, Canalgia and whatnot. I also think that an ownership group would only want to deal with the bigs...JMO.

Another thought...Sponsorship.. QuikTrip Park.  Thats got to be worth a few million bucks...

or BoK park.  You know, last time i checked there were more than two companies in this town.  Pretty ****ing sad that everyone keeps going back to those two for sponsorships.

[Kenosha]

quote:Originally posted by inteller





or BoK park.  You know, last time i checked there were more than two companies in this town.  Pretty ****ing sad that everyone keeps going back to those two for sponsorships.

You are a crank first thing in the morning, inteller.  My point was illustrative, not literal, grumpy.

[carltonplace]

quote:Originally posted by Floyd

Knock knock.  Who's there?

A QUARTER OF A BILLION DOLLAR SUBSIDY.

The Jenks river development is made possible by a $282 million TIF.  Now, what were you saying about private enterprise?

These things don't happen without public help.  If you don't care whether they happen or not, then butt out.  I like baseball.  I like urban areas.  I like them together.  

Further, there's no "we."  I will reiterate that the suburbs, Jenks specifically, are sucking life out of the city core.  This is fueled by specific enmity from suburbanites toward the city core they left behind.  If you don't think this phenomenon exists, just go visit the Tulsa World's website and see all the disparaging comments left by citizens of Jenks, Bixby, Sapulpa, and Owasso towards this stadium idea.  It's none of their business, either, but they appear to believe they have a vested interest in kicking the city while it's down.  Apparently a crappy inner city validates their bland, "safe," suburban existence.

Finally, every time these city-hating suburbanites snag another attraction from the city core, it costs the city in terms of population loss, tax loss, and quality of life.  The worse the quality of life in the city center, the more people and jobs leave.  

A vital core is imperative for a healthy city.  A baseball stadium has been shown over and over to contribute to the vitality of downtowns.  Say what you will about other options, but a new ballpark is a relatively small investment and is always a home run.

It's going to cost less than the new city hall and bring hundreds of thousands of people to the center of town, a center in which the municipality has invested billions.  Is it fiscally conservative to allow these billions to go to waste?  No.

Great post FLoyd

Two things I think OKC missed out on with their ball park that I hope we don't replicate.
1. Why all that open concrete in front of it? Is that for street vendors on game day? gathering of citizenry? Why can't the ball park back right up to the street?
2. There is room underneath a ball park for retail. Rental space could help pay for upkeep and maybe even pay off construction costs sooner.

[inteller]

quote:Originally posted by Floyd
 Is it fiscally conservative to allow these billions to go to waste?  No.

it wasn't fiscally conservative to spend the billions in the first place so don't give me that line.

[inteller]

quote:Originally posted by breitee

Don't forget Channel 2, the worst station in Tulsa.

worst?  They have the HAWT reporters.  That puts them way ahead of the others.  Who cares what comes out of their mouth.[}:)]