City owned baseball park-Harrison Square Park

The downtown fortwayne baseball website has an interesting interview with Jason Freier, an attorney and one of the owners of the Wizard.

What I found interesting was this statement,

City-owned ballpark and related development, share some revenue streams with the City and assume some of the operating costs in the City-owned facility.

So does that mean the Wizard will play their games there and that the park will be used for other activities sponsored by other groups including the city? I assume such activities such as the three river festival, German fest, etc. So, I would take that to mean that the park will be leased to Hardball Capital for Wizard Games in exchange for their dollars toward the downtown development.

Harrison Square is a mixed-use commercial development in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that is currently a concept. It will feature a ballpark that will be primarily used for baseball, and will be the home field of the Fort Wayne Wizards minor league baseball team. It will possibly open downtown in 2009 at the corner of Harrison and Jefferson, and will hold 8,000 people. A recent poll of Fort Wayne residents suggests that they do not back the ballpark component of the project

from the online encyclopedia.


The other option for Hardball would be to invest in their investment, the Wizard, by renovating Memorial Stadium, the Wizard current playing location. The interview suggest the city did not support the team or its fan with the ill maintained Memorial Stadium as much as they are ranting and raving about in hope of bringing these fans downtown to support a retail component. Matter of fact the interview cite areas which did improvement in support of their teams.

If Harrison Square, for whatever reason, does not come to fruition, our focus would turn to finding our second best option to fulfill the aforementioned commitments. That, most likely, would be to work with Randy Brown and the Coliseum Authority to renovate and improve Memorial Stadium. Memorial Stadium is a facility, frankly, that was built with a minimum of amenities to begin with and that has not kept up with the times and is showing its age. The fact that Memorial Stadium remains a great place to take a family for a game is a testament to the incredible job done by the Wizards local management and dedicated employees, led by our General Manger Mike Nutter, and to the great job that Randy Brown and his staff do managing the facility.

For us to provide the sort of gameday experience our fans deserve, a very significant investment would have to be made to bring Memorial Stadium up to date. Less was invested in Memorial Stadium when it was built than virtually any other facility we are aware of that was built during the same time frame and no significant improvements to the facility itself have been made in the intervening 15 years. As a matter of comparison, the ballpark in Lansing opened just three years after our stadium but more than twice as much money was invested in that facility. Also, the ballpark in Lansing is undergoing a multimillion dollar improvement this off-season and a commitment has been made to put millions more in over the next ten years.

One needn’t look as far as Lansing to understand how out of date Memorial Stadium is, however, you just need to walk across the parking lot and take a look at the Coliseum--compare a suite in the Coliseum to those at Memorial Stadium. If Harrison Square cannot be brought to fruition, our goal would be to make Memorial Stadium a facility, like the Coliseum, that our fans can enjoy and that the community can be proud of. We just think that the resources necessary to do so are better spent
downtown, where such a facility can have so much more of an impact on the community as a whole.

Mr. Jason Freier is exactly right, city official do not believe in supporting what the city has already. So what the city is now doing is trying to save their risky investment of tax payers dollars in the Grand Wayne Center and the Library, by trying to get the baseball games downtown. And to entice the hardball capital company to go along for this ride, the city is giving Hardball everything but the kitchen sink. Why, so the city can use the money Hardball would have used to renovate the Memorial Stadium for the Wizard fans. Instead the city wants Hardball to plop it down in another long shot using tax payers dollars.

The fact that city officials do not want to invest in our schools is another example of how the city neglect its buildings, until they are required based on federal law. Another scheme was the building of the Safety Buildings with tax dollars that could have been used on other projects in the city. You know the one I am talking, the stolen land called Southtown Centre that cost over $40 million dollars. But the city creates these scheme to try to gauge and line the pockets of their friends. But Mr. Freier you would recognize such unethical dealings, being that you are a successful wealthy businessman dealing with a city in need of some serious funds.

Great interview.