DALLAS — Tulsa officials hope to lure the city’s minor league baseball team to a proposed new $70 million downtown stadium during negotiations over the next four months.
Mayor Kathy Taylor announced on Tuesday that the city has signed an exclusive agreement with Tulsa Drillers owner Chuck Lamson to work out a deal for the team to play in a new stadium to be built on a 16-acre parcel on the eastern side of downtown, six blocks west of the BOK Center.
The pact calls for a more definitive final agreement to be reached by the time the agreement expires on May 30. Until then, both sides can negotiate only with each other.
Lamson signed a nonbinding letter of intent in August with the River District Development Group to move the AA Texas League franchise into a new ballpark in the Tulsa suburb of Jenks. The 7,000-seat baseball stadium was to be the centerpiece of a $1 billion project on a 300-acre site along the Arkansas River.
Jenks recently created a tax increment financing district for the project and agreed to provide developers with a third of the revenues from the city’s 3% sales tax generated within the district. The total package is estimated at $300 million.
At the news conference announcing the deal with Tulsa, Lamson said if a final agreement is not reached by the end of May, he could reopen talks with Jenks “if they are still interested.”
Financing options are a part of the negotiations, but city officials said they expect the stadium would be built with a mixture of public and private funds that could include revenue bonds supported by an increase in the city’s 5% hotel-motel tax.
“It’s too early to tell what we will do, but an increase in the hotel tax is one of the things we’ll be looking at,” said city finance director Mike Kier. “If we do opt for an increase in the hotel tax, it would be used to support revenue bonds for the project.”
An increase in the hotel occupancy tax to 8% is being looked at, Kier said. Each 1% increase would generate approximately $1.2 million a year, he said.
Taylor said the city’s share of the stadium costs, which she estimated at no more than $70 million, will likely come from a variety of sources.
“At this point, several funding options are being fully explored,” the mayor said. “We want to ensure the appropriate balance of funding will support this project and keep the Drillers in Tulsa as a strong and permanent fixture in the community. We anticipate the final funding approach will have a component of private community-based funding.”
Tulsa may support a move in the upcoming legislative session to amend Oklahoma’s Local Development and Enterprise Zone Incentive Leverage Act to provide state matching funds for at least part of the city’s portion of the stadium project, Taylor said.
Additional public funds could come from the sale of city-owned properties around the stadium site, said Jack Crowley, the mayor’s special adviser on urban planning.
“This project will generate a lot of activity in downtown and increase the value of those lots,” Crowley said. “It is a fantastic opportunity to leverage the city’s dollars through a public-private partnership. We don’t want to miss the boat.”
Crowley said the stadium will be an important part of Tulsa’s downtown development.
“This is going to be more than a ball field inside a parking lot,” he said. “The project will include some retail, some offices, and some residential.
“With the BOK Center some six or seven blocks away, we’ll have sports bookends on each end of downtown.”
The city has options to purchase the proposed site, which Crowley said was assembled by developers for a project with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. that fell through.
The proposed stadium will include 6,000 permanent seats, luxury boxes, and additional seating on grassy berms that could bring total capacity to approximately 10,000.
If a deal is finalized, the stadium could be open by April 2011.
The Drillers, an affiliate of Major League Baseball’s Colorado Rockies, have been playing at Drillers Stadium on the Tulsa County Fairgrounds since it opened in 1981.
