Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 23, 1995 TAG: 9507240122
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KIMBERLY N. MARTIN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The game of baseball is simple enough, but building the stadiums where the game is played seems trickier than pulling off a bottom-of-the-ninth squeeze play.
Just ask Keith Lupton. He's vice president of Maryland Baseball Limited Partnership. In the past five years, he's chipped in money or consulted on the building of three minor league baseball stadiums. In each of those projects, he's watched costs inch upward beyond his control or understanding.
"We always hope to bring these things in under budget, but it seems like you never can," Lupton said.
He isn't alone in that frustration. Price tags on stadiums in Durham, Hickory and Kannapolis, N.C. - all built in the past three years - also have ballooned beyond original estimates.
Salem's new stadium is no exception.
In the year since voters in an advisory referendum approved building the stadium, the cost of the ballpark has more than doubled, going from $5 million to $10.1 million.
What is different about Salem Memorial Stadium is the size of the overrun and who will foot the bill for the final product.
Of 11 minor league stadiums built in Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and Delaware in the past five years, Durham's stadium may be the most expensive per seat, but Salem's cost overrun is the largest. And of the eight stadiums with price tags of more than $4 million, Salem and Norfolk are the only ones in which a local government picked up the tab alone.
\ It was the spring of 1994 - just a few months before the advisory referendum - when Salem's stadium committee hit the road. In search of answers, they ventured to stadiums in Richmond; Frederick, Md.; and Wilmington, Del.
Their questions seemed simple enough: identify what they wanted to build in Salem and get an estimate on how much it would cost.
Very quickly, the Diamond, the 12,500-seat stadium for the Richmond Braves, became the model for Salem's smaller stadium. (Richmond is in the AAA International League, one level below the major leagues; the Carolina League, to which the Salem Avalanche belongs, is at the A level, three rungs below the majors.)
Frederick's and Wilmington's stadiums "just didn't seem up to Salem standards," Salem City Councilman Alex Brown said.
The committee liked "the functionability of Richmond. At the other stadiums, we saw things we didn't want to do. At one, the food service was at the front door, right next to the trash. And they said, 'Don't do this,'" said F.A. "Doc" Shane, the architect for the Salem project. "We've used the better parts of the stadiums we've seen."
From the Diamond, Shane got the inspiration for Salem's picnic area, concessions concourse and an extensive tunnel beneath the stadium.
The now infamous $5 million estimate also grew out of the Richmond trip.
"We had as many as nine people telling us $1,000 a seat," Salem City Councilman Sonny Tarpley said.
So, at $1,000 per seat, Salem's 6,000-seat stadium should cost $6 million.
It didn't add up quite that way for Salem. Councilmen took other factors into consideration, Brown said.
"We owned the land. The sewer was there. We thought we could do it a little cheaper" than others had, Brown said.
After the first bid - for the stadium's grandstands - was accepted from Avis Construction, the estimate did, in fact, creep toward $6 million.
Avis began work in January. Opening day was just five months away, and Salem wanted the season's first pitch thrown in the new stadium.
Finishing a stadium in five months isn't impossible - Wilmington did it two years ago.
Salem was not able to meet its goal, however. And the cost kept rising when the next set of bids came in.
"When the bid opened, everybody's jaw hit the floor," said Brown of J.M. Turner's low bid of $4.27 million for the plumbing, skyboxes and detail work.
It even shocked Shane.
"I was telling them it would be $7 million. It should've been $7 and a half to $8 million. ... I don't miss them by that much," Shane said. But "we were in a hurry to get in there. People were working overtime, working late. And it's big. It just became really big."
In Durham, too, it was the project's final bid that packed a wallop. The bid to complete the 7,000-seat AA ballpark came in $4.7 million over budget.
"We delayed for four months, and we redesigned it," said Mike Hill, Durham Bulls vice president.
The redesign helped, shaving about $3 million. But by the project's completion, the stadium, which opened a season late, still had jumped from an initial estimate of about $12 million to a cost of $16.1 million.
Jack Swallow, general manager of the Piedmont Phillies, said he has an inkling about why those types of overruns continue to occur. He blames government's inexperience with a stadium's specialized construction. The Phillies are in the process of completing their stadium, which is located in Kannapolis.
"Stadiums are one-of-a-kind buildings. In most areas, you're only going to have one of these. So governments have no experience with these buildings," Swallow said.
Rowan County and the Kannapolis City Sports Authority thought they'd found a way to beat the learning curve.
When the two governments decided to dole out millions to bring baseball to central North Carolina, they were careful about finding an architect with experience, Rowan County Administrator Tim Russell said.
They shopped around before eventually settling on a Tampa, Fla., architectural firm that has built 20 stadiums.
But even with its firm's expertise, the firm's $5 million plan wound up costing $6.5 million to build.
Russell blamed architects and contractors for the overrun.
"We don't believe we got a $5 million stadium. We think they overdesigned. And last year, contractors were taking us to the cleaners," Russell said.
Whatever the reason, Swallow wasn't surprised.
"These things never truly come in at what you expect," Swallow said.
\ Keith Lupton of Maryland Baseball can remember a time when team owners called all the shots.
"The tradition was that a ball team would come in and say, 'Build me a stadium, and we'll come to your town,''' Lupton said.
And the locality would do it. Now, he said, that mentality has changed. Instead of the once one-sided courtship, getting and keeping a minor league team has become more of a negotiation, with team owners even offering to reach into their wallets, Lupton said.
Tradition, however, doesn't die easily in Salem.
When Salem built Municipal Field more than 60 years ago, it did it alone. When it built the high school football stadium, it flew solo again.
This time around, Salem approached Roanoke and Roanoke County with a request.
Mayor Jim Taliaferro wrote the December 1993 letter that requested "$1 million each with no strings attached."
From Roanoke, he got a form letter from Mayor David Bowers' secretary. Later, City Manager Bob Herbert followed up with a promise to bring the issue before council.
Roanoke County's Chairman Lee Eddy said no to an outright gift, but responded with a letter proposing "the possibility of shared ownership, control and revenues."
Salem took that as a no.
"They weren't in a position to participate," Taliaferro said. So council decided to "just go ahead and do it."
Involving the business community never was a consideration.
"If we got all those people involved, we wouldn't have dug the first ditch," Tarpley said.
But being a stadium's primary investor was a dubious honor localities elsewhere didn't want.
In Durham, a city councilman lobbied hard to persuade professional basketball star Michael Jordan to chip in $750,000 to name the stadium in honor of his late father.
When that didn't work, the Bulls' owner, who initially had agreed to chip in $400,000, upped his ante to $3 million. But that $3 million went toward parking, completing skyboxes and other amenities, not the stadium's $16.1 million cost.
The folks in Hickory put price tags on almost everything to raise money for the $5 million stadium. They sold plaques on the backs of seats, paver bricks and, for a couple of hundred thousand dollars, the rights to naming the stadium.
Their tactics brought in half the stadium's funding, making the city's share only $1.8 million. The owner made up the difference.
In the case of Bowie, Md., "it was pretty obvious that no one entity was willing to do it all," said Bob Archiprete, chief of park and planning in Bowie. "But if everyone shared in the cost, it would be a more viable way to do it."
For the $11 million stadium, that meant the state, county and the owners splitting the cost, with the owners picking up the tab for the $2 million overrun.
By spreading out the investment, "it relieves the burden on the city or state, all the way down to the taxpayers," said Lupton, who doubles as Bowie's general manager.
That's especially important when building a stadium, because it's a difficult investment to recoup - so difficult that Tarpley, who's also a banker, said, "I don't think the city could ever get its monies back for" the stadium.
Most localities don't. Stadiums are like civic centers in that regard: they are quality-of-life investments and not perceived as moneymakers, Tarpley said.
The lease agreements that localities have with minor league owners reflect that. Those agreements dictate average annual rental payments of about $150,000. Salem's lease, which calls for team owner Kelvin Bowles to purchase the stadium's scoreboard, is on the low end of that scale.
Salem is expecting to generate anywhere from $60,000 to $80,000 annually from its deal with the Avalanche, and that includes the city's cut of proceeds from skybox rentals, Salem Finance Director Frank Turk said.
Typically, that money pays for the stadium's maintenance and upkeep, not the mortgage payments on the loans used to finance them.
That's what makes the deals struck with the Piedmont Phillies in Kannapolis and the Norfolk Tides so unusual.
In both cases, local governments figured out a way to make the team pay for the stadium.
In Norfolk, the city fronted the $15 million necessary to build its 12,000-seat stadium, but, in 20 years, the team's annual payment of $1 million will have more than repaid the city for its initial investment.
The Piedmont Phillies' deal mirrors Norfolk's, but on a smaller scale.
It works like this: The sports authority gets a flat $35,000 a year, a cut of concessions, a percentage of parking and 50 cents on each ticket sold.
Under that arrangement, if the stadium has an annual attendance of 160,000 - that's 2,200 of the stadium's 4,700 seats filled at each of its home games - the local government will have $3 million of its $4 million investment back in 15 years.
"Taxpayers saw no impact from it. No bond was floated, and taxes weren't raised," Swallow said.
That sentiment has a familiar ring in Salem. Salem councilmen have been making a similar argument since the stadium's bids came in high.
"The referendum said we'd borrow $5 million and wouldn't raise taxes. We haven't had a tax increase, and we haven't borrowed more money. That's what I was concerned about," Brown said. "We've been proven right in the past, and I hope we'll be proven right again."
Tarpley is confident that will happen on the stadium's thrice-delayed opening day.
"Everybody is lambasting us now, but they'll get over it once they walk in" Salem Memorial Stadium, Tarpley said.
PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON/Staff graphic
by CNB