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| ....any talk of simply yanking dedicated Civic Center funding away for a new project, with no plan for what is to happen to our Civic Center, would be reckless and short-sighted. It would not garner my support--and that is putting it mildly. I would be vocally opposed..... |
We will soon be hearing another pitch for a field house
downtown. I believe it will be coming this
Thursday at the BCC’s Committee of the Whole workshop.
Full disclosure: I support
the field house concept under the right financial circumstances.
However—my firm belief is that we simply cannot siphon-off ANY
existing revenue stream(s) from the aging and ailing Civic Center until we
figure out what we must do with this existing county asset. I have put forth plans (here and here) to
renovate, modernize, and improve the Civic Center to get another 20 years of
usefulness from it.
But there has been no forward motion on these ideas. I tried—hard—last year when I was chairman to
move those renovation plans forward.
There are multiple forces at work and at play on this issue
though. We all know this.
But my two cents here (and for my vote)—ANY field house
proposal that is floated must come with a rigorously-vetted, detailed, and
well-grounded study justifying the need and economic viability for such a
facility going forward—particularly considering the new venues that have opened
in Foley, Panama City, and the (soon to be announced) planned facility in
Mobile. To put it bluntly: Do we
still need one given that other markets all around us have now apparently beat
us to the punch?
Also—there must be multiple financing sources contributing
to the total for a new downtown field house to be viable, in my opinion.
It is for this reason I supported the concept last summer that
was presented; it was a model that brought in multiple financing sources (new
market tax credits, triumph funds, TDC funds) and it had a financing team in
place to front-load the construction financing.
It was planned near a freeway and it was centrally-located. It also would have greatly benefitted an area
of the county that has blight, high unemployment, and a high crime rate. This would have been a great way to inject
jobs and capital into that area. It was
a project we should have moved forward.
But we didn’t.
The latest proposal I am hearing about now is a scaled-back
version of a field house that is to be placed downtown. No NMTC’s are available, and I’ve heard no
mention of a Triumph Gulf Coast ask. No
realistic and viable financing plan has been put forward, and the financing, so
far as I am
