(sidschwab.blogspot.com)Yesterday, I received an email from Mr. Bill Franklin with his idea for Roberts Stadium. Like Mr. Joe Gaiter ( http://saverobertsstadium.blogspot.com/2011/04/idea-for-roberts-stadium-from-joe.html ), Bill believes that we should take a look at converting the facility to a Ray's Mountain Bike Indoor Park.
For the record, it is my opinion that a committee should be formed with the purpose of investigating 3-5 ideas. This should be one of them. Here is Bill's email to me...
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>>>>>>>>>> How would you like to save Roberts while at the same time increasing tourism to Evansville and making Evansville a “destination” city? The person or people that pulled that off would be loved and admired by all. I know this is going to sound impossible and unbelievable to you as it was initially unbelievable to me that this works so well. Before you reject this out of hand, just think how much money Paoli Peaks makes.
Anyway, let me get to the point: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=indoor+mountain+bike&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Ray rented a warehouse in Cleveland and built an indoor Mountain Bike/BMX park. It is really 3 parks; there is a cross country bike trail, a BMX stunt area, and a technical area of the course and they all flow into each other. If you follow the links and other links on the net you will see that he regularly pulls from a 200 mile radius and even has “ride and hotel packages” He was so successful that in about a year he opened a 2nd location in Milwaukee. You will notice that they are 400 miles apart. It is more or less just over 400 miles from Evansville to each of these locations. If Ray sticks with what appears to be his business plan, I predict that in 6 months he will be renting warehouse space in Philadelphia. This has been so successful that he now has a full restaurant, bike storage, locker rooms, bike sales and repair (bike shop), etc.
Ray is renting regular warehouses that can accommodate much less than 100 feet of vertical elevation change on the entire course. Roberts has the potential to triple the vertical available and could become the Mountain bike destination of the Midwest. In skiing terms “Vail”. If you are not a mountain biker you might not understand the significance of this much extra vertical. I will use the skiing analogy again. Out west they have 3000 feet of vertical, Paoli has 290. If you are a skier you know what I am talking about. You only have to look at Brown County State Park to see that now almost half their campers are now mountain bikers during the “good months”. As a sometimes mountain biker (I ride more on the road), I can tell you that they go crazy most of the Winter and every time it rains in the Spring and Fall. Many currently plan Winter trips to Southern locations in order to get some rides in during the bad months. If you build this, it would easily draw people from St Louis, Cincinnati, Nashville, Indianapolis, Louisville, Lexington on a regular basis on weekends. Also, some might choose to take a weeklong vacation here during the Winter.
My estimate is that it would take around $800,000 to build it out and that is only 1/10th what the Convention & Visitors Bureau was willing to spend on ball diamonds that were not popular and have basically been proven to not draw much tourism, and require much more maintenance. This has been proven to draw people and if it was done as a city park, there would be no taxes other than sales tax. Ray probably pays $100,000 per location in property taxes plus tax on the profits. You can also derive revenue from renting the concession of having a bike shop within the facility, the concession of having a restaurant in the facility, bike storage, locker rental, and I have a few other ideas too.
We obviously need to get other people involved in this to go forward. I have thought about this for 6 months and tried every way possible to see how it couldn’t work and I can’t see any way it could fail. I have thought this through to a much greater extent than I can put in an email so if there is interest, I can give further insight and advice.
Bill Franklin
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Thank you for your article Bill!!
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