(offpriceshow.com)As I mentioned yesterday, Mayor-Elect Lloyd Winnecke has a golden opportunity with Roberts Stadium to display to the citizens of Evansville his fiscal responsibility. During last week's meeting, Lloyd mentioned that he doesn't want to commit anymore government funds to Roberts Stadium, but if you look closely, we ALREADY have the funds to undertake the most expensive part of renovating Roberts Stadium- raising the floor. How is this possible?
Let's take a look at an article from WTVW- Local 7...
http://tristatehomepage.com/fulltext?nxd_id=294817
"Mayor Weinzapfel has included $200,000. in next year's budget to be used for the demolition of the stadium or as a down payment on renovating the facility. "
Thanks to mayor Weinzapfel (no I'm not being sarcastic) we've got just what he said- a down payment on renovating the facility. Of course, raising the floor is estimated to cost between $400,000 and $500,000 which still puts us $200,000 to $300,000 short of raising the floor.
However, according to some city officials, the city has also budgeted utilities for Roberts Stadium for the first quarter of 2012. If we go by this Courier & Press article, it's $95,000...
http://www.courierpress.com/news/2011/sep/19/no-headline---ev_roberts/
"Rector said about $95,000 is budgeted for the first three months of 2012 to keep Roberts operational in its minimized state and in case any equipment breaks."
If we begin construction on Roberts Stadium's floor within the next month or so, we will be saving this $95,000 as the pumps will be shut off permanently and the building will be shut down while renovations are underway meaning no equipment will break. So now, we are up to $295,000 of funds that are already in the budget meaning that we are still $105,000-$205,000 short which is in the range of a mere $1 to $1.50 per resident (not counting those in the county).
To get these remaining funds, we will need to sell the 6,000 or so seats that will be removed during construction. We can either sell these seats to the public on the open market as game used memorabilia or sell them to the EVCB who would use them in their ball fields project like Mesker Amphitheatre uses the old bleachers from Roberts Stadium.
I feel like these seats would sell for $100 a piece but even if we sold them for $50 a piece we would net $300,000. To get $205,000, we would only need to sell the seats for $34.17 a piece which is cheaper than an Aces replica jersey. To get $105,000, we would only need to sell the seats for $17.50 which is only $3-$5 more than a ticket to one single game at either Roberts Stadium or the Ford Center.
For the record, in the meeting last week Lloyd Winnecke did say that he is very interested in exploring the sale of the seats that would be removed. This is where Lloyd's marketing degree and experience will begin to pay dividends for Evansville as I have 110% confidence Lloyd can find a buyer for the seats at a mere $17-$34 a piece.
With all of that being said, there are several other aspects to this situation that make exploring the path much more reasonable than demolition. These aspects include the following...
1. If you watched the video on the WTVW- Local 7 article you will see that Councilwoman Missy Mosby admitted that $400,000, not $200,000, was originally budgeted to demolish Roberts Stadium. The figure was lowered because the city got an estimate from Klenck Demolition Co. that it would only cost $200,000 if we ASSUME that the salvage materials will sell for the price they are estimated to sell at.
It's quite a stretch to go from the ECVB estimating demolition of Roberts Stadium to cost $1.25 million to lowering the figure to $200,000 in the city budget just because there was "an estimate" of salvage materials.
Look to Corpus Christi, Texas to see what happens when you ASSUME something during demolition...
http://saverobertsstadium.blogspot.com/2011/05/arena-that-divided-whole-city.html
http://saverobertsstadium.blogspot.com/2011/08/we-cant-afford-to-duplicate-corpus.html
If Corpus Christi doesn't convince you, just drive downtown to the lot of the former Executive Inn and you will see this firsthand. Klenck Demolition already had to walk off the job once...
http://www.courierpress.com/news/2011/jul/15/klenck-returning-debris-removal-executive-inn/
With this plan, there is no assuming. Before we start raising the floor, we will have an exact estimate and an exact amount of funding from the 2012 city budget and the seats which would already be sold.
2. There is no estimate on how much it would cost to construct a park on the lot. I asked Lloyd Winnecke how much maintenance would run on the park, and he said he was unsure. The truth is, no one knows how much it would cost to build a park and maintain it. With this plan, we have our floor raised and will be ready to host mid-sized events (I will talk about maintenance funding at the bottom of this post).
3. Demolition of Roberts Stadium would drain the $95,000. Before the city could advance to the stage of actually demolishing Roberts Stadium, they would have to process all of the paperwork as well as plan on what they would do with the lot. This will take several months while the expenses at Roberts Stadium will continue to rack up.
There are many benefits of this plan that Lloyd Winnecke can sell city residents on such as...
1. This plan takes no additional funds from the city budget that aren't already budgeted for.
2. This plan takes no Casino Aztar money.
3. This plan opts to invest the $295,000 of taxpayer money wisely by investing in Roberts Stadium instead of wasting it on demolition and water pump expenses.
4. This plan would not receive any Innkeepers Tax funds directly. The only way the Innkeepers Tax would be involved would be if the ECVB purchased the seats for their ball fields project. This plan would both generate funds for Roberts Stadium while making the ball fields project cheaper at the same time as the ECVB will be able to purchase the seats at a better price from Roberts Stadium than the open market.
5. As a result of the above 4 points, we will still have funds to explore other projects such as the ball fields which will be significantly cheaper because they can use materials from Roberts Stadium.
Next up, we need to figure out how to maintain Roberts Stadium. Repairing and renovating Roberts Stadium by raising the floor is half the battle, the other half is making sure that we maintain it. Remember, we will need to invest $3-$4 million in our Central Plant System between now and the end of 2016 (5 years). This equates to $600,000-$800,000 a year.
Please note, this system is running just fine right now. In fact, it is believed that many of these repairs have already been made such as most of the pumps. This is only an estimate of future repairs. Once this Central Plant is completely replaced by 2016, it will not be racking up a $600,000-$800,000 bill a year. The current Central Plant System only needs to be replaced because it has been intact since the 1990 renovation and is nearing the end of its useful life. This is a once every 25 years expense.
I talk about this in the post below which looks at the HNTB report line by line...
http://saverobertsstadium.blogspot.com/2010/12/hntb-existing-roberts-stadium-building.html
This is where we need Lloyd Winnecke to sit down with Mr. Chip Rosetti (the investor I've talked about), the USI Athletic Department, and others who want to rent the facility for an event(s) and iron out an agreement that is beneficial to both sides. This shouldn't be too hard due to the following reasons...
1. If we lease Roberts Stadium, the tenants can pay for security and utilities while they are using the facility.
2. To break even with the Central Plant, we will need to make 2,191.78 a day in revenue. In contrast, the Aces pay $10,500 to rent the Ford Center while the Icemen pay between $6,000 to $7,000 per game plus revenue sharing. This figure is assuming that it will cost the high amount of $800,000 to maintain the Central Plant.
3. Chip Rosetti, for instance, has said that he is willing to sign a lease, share ticket revenue, share concession stand revenue, AND work with the city to generate any other additional funding.
4. If we go after all 11 of the ideas I discussed yesterday, we will have the facility rented out well over 90-95% of the time.
5. We still haven't calculated...
- Naming rights to the gates
- Leftover funds generated from the selling of the seats
- Revenue from selling the old Ace's court
- Revenue from fundraisers with UE Alumni (and USI Alumni if we bring them on board)
- Revenue from selling bricks and plaques to the general public who would like to help out by buying a brick with their name on it. Remember, it was fundraisers like this back in 1984 that paid for most of Roberts Stadium's renovations back then!
Once the Central Plant is taken care of, the rent-per-day ratio goes down even more drastically. In turn, this will allow future administrations to become even more aggressive in their recruiting of big time events to package Roberts Stadium and the Ford Center with.
Lloyd Winnecke has an enormous opportunity to display fiscal responsibility at a level we have never seen before. He can take the existing money budgeted for Roberts Stadium, couple it with funds generated by selling the seats, and raise Roberts Stadium's floor once and for all. This will eliminate those infamous and expensive pumps that many have cited as reason to demolish Roberts Stadium.
But to do this, we have to act fast. We have to commit ourselves to breaking ground on raising Roberts Stadium's floor by January or February at the latest to save most of the $95,000 budgeted to maintain Roberts Stadium. We also need to be aggressive in raising funds to pay for the maintenance of Roberts Stadium for the next 5 years.
As usual, we have two paths we can go down...
1. We can waste at least $295,000 + to demolish Roberts Stadium, pay an undisclosed amount of money for an artificial expansion of Wesselman Woods, and pay an undisclosed amount of money to maintain a park that will never profit.
2. We can commit to renovating Roberts Stadium, commit to exploring the additional avenues of funding that will pay for future maintenance, and commit to filling Roberts Stadium with tenants for at least 90-95% of the time each year. In turn, we will be ensuring future success and profitability of Roberts Stadium that will in turn generate economic development for all of Evansville. We can do this just by using our $295,000 city budget funds wisely and by being aggressive in selling our additional assets.
Mayor-Elect Lloyd Winnecke is a smart, dynamic, and an innovative leader. He didn't get to this spot by not learning how to manage funds, projects, and people. By making the simple step of going down path 2 instead of 1, he will be setting up Evansville, Roberts Stadium, and his career on a long path to success. We all need to rally behind Lloyd to get this done.
We can move quickly, we can use existing funds, WE CAN SAVE ROBERTS STADIUM!
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