Our first season of AAA baseball season is over and it was a grand success.
This part of the result is pleasing. We have a wonderful award winning ball park, the public is supporting the team with attendance, and we will get to host a AAA national championship game in the fall of 2015.
The disgrace of tearing down city hall and the costs of replacing it are another story.
We should be happy that the season has been successful. Otherwise it would have cost us more money.
Team management is telling us that the problems of finishing construction and getting into operation understandably occupied most of their time this first season. They tell us that they plan to do more promotion and development for the next season and we should see even greater attendance numbers.
Good for us.
Well, not actually. As I wrote in Porking, “I mentioned earlier that the city will get 50% of the parking fees, kind of. Actually there will be a revenue cap and the city will only be able to collect up to $655,000 per year “from the aggregate of the Ticket Fees, the Parking Fees and the Split Revenues” in the first five calendar years.”
Let’s hope for continued success. It’s a shame we won’t benefit financially.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Brutus, how can it be successful when the stadium lost money ?
Those titles,that the city is always winning, are part of the PR firm efforts to ensure that happens. Secondly, if the stadium was just built and is the newest stadium, it should look the best.
For the taxpayers’ sake, I hope the stadium is a success.
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I guess I did not make my point very well.
The stadium’s success was not shared by the taxpayers and will not be because of the contract.
Brutus
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Success depends on how you’re keeping score.
The city’s max revenue share plus the base rent totals just over $1 million per year in income to the city. Our interest payment alone is $2.5 million per year for 30 years.
Mountainstar covered its entire annual base before the team ever took the field because it is making millions off the title sponsorship fee alone, a fact which neither they nor the faux university sponsor dispute. City management and council did not negotiate for even a small portion of the title sponsorship fee.
Don’t forget, too, that Mountainstar will continue to generate revenue and profits from non-baseball events, while we’ll keep paying to support those events. It’s not clear if the city even shares in the revenue from non-baseball events.
You’ll also never see the scorecard for job creation and payroll excluding the people Mountainstar recruited from outside of El Paso.
Some partnership, huh. Private, millions; Public, zilch.
Mark Twain said that success requires a combination of confidence and ignorance. Foster and Hunt had the confidence. City management and city council provided the ignorance. This so-called success required a winner and a loser.
An accurate profit/loss statement for the ballpark project would prove the old adage that success sometimes has a high price tag.
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It seems that the people downtown such as the warehouse area didn’t share in the profits and actually lost business to the Stadium purveyors. Then, not only no gain but losses for the “hot tax”. All this adds to corporate welfare. No wonder they are winning awards.
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