ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, May 15, 1996 TAG: 9605150081
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: STAFFORD
SOURCE: Associated Press
Investors hoping to bring Major League Baseball to Northern Virginia say their plans are on schedule despite a month's delay in the bidding for a new stadium.
``We think there is plenty of time to have a stadium site, the financing and enthusiastic Northern Virginia fans in place by the end of the season,'' when investors expect to go shopping for a team, Virginia Baseball Club spokesman Mike Scanlon said Tuesday.
Scanlon's boss, telecommunications executive William L. Collins III, hopes to lure the Houston Astros or another financially ailing team to a new stadium in the Northern Virginia suburbs.
The 45,000-seat ballpark will generate millions for the state and the locality that hosts it, Collins has promised. He also said the park will be a showplace similar to Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards or Denver's Coors Field.
Collins wants to begin building later this year and predicts the stadium would take about two years to complete. In the meantime, any team he can buy would play the 1997 and probably the 1998 seasons in Washington's RFK Stadium.
The Virginia Baseball Stadium Authority, worried that only Stafford County would bid for a Northern Virginia ballpark, gave other localities until June 17 to submit applications.
The deadline for applications and a $150,000 application fee had been today. Of four counties expected to compete for the chance to host the stadium, only Stafford was ready to bid.
Stafford is proposing a site about 40 miles south of Washington along Interstate 95.
The stadium authority still plans to pick a site by Aug. 15, authority Chairman George Barton said Monday.
The stadium authority once expected to have six to eight potential sites to review between May and August. Because it now appears that only three or four sites will be in the running, the authority should have no trouble meeting the August deadline, Scanlon said.
``We think extending the deadline was a prudent decision,'' Scanlon said.
The timetable was set up to give Collins maximum negotiating room with major league owners, Scanlon said.
The stadium authority had little choice but to extend the May 15 deadline because Fairfax and Arlington counties were ready to drop out of the bidding. Problems with the most promising sites in both counties have cropped up in the past month, and lawmakers said they could not address those problems and still meet the May timetable.
A deadline extension ``may provide a greater range of choices,'' Barton wrote in a letter to Fairfax County Executive William J. Leidinger on Monday.
Barton had earlier said he opposed extending the deadline, fearing that more time would only give stadium opponents a better chance to organize.
Loudoun County's Board of Supervisors took the locality out of the running last week, saying they could not act in time to meet the deadline. The extension could put Loudoun back in consideration, Scanlon said.
Fairfax is considering federally-owned land in Springfield. Some neighbors are opposed, and the county has not negotiated federal approval for using the land.
A prime site overlooking the Potomac River in Arlington could interfere with planes taking off and landing at Washington National Airport, the Federal Aviation Administration has said. Some neighbors also are opposed to a stadium on that site.
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