Daytime baseball games during the week

March 27, 2014

The baseball team leasing 600 parking spaces at the county parking garage downtown might be workable for evening and weekend games.

Surprise!

The April 28 and 29 games are scheduled at 7:05 PM and 6:35 PM respectively.  Then we have a surprise.  The Wednesday, April 30, 2014 game is scheduled for 11:05 AM.

That’s in the morning.  They have another game scheduled Tuesday, May 13 at the same morning time.

At first I thought that they plan to play the morning games in order to accommodate the visiting team’s travel schedule.  Both games are the last game in a series.

The Wednesday, May 28 game is in the middle of a series and is scheduled to start at 11:05 AM.  The visiting team will remain in town and play against us the next day.

The remainder of the season doesn’t seem to have any daytime mid-week games scheduled.

Maybe someone can tell us what this is about.

Traffic mess

What will happen to downtown traffic when they play a mid-day game in the middle of the week?  What will happen with the parking situation?

We deserve better

Brutus

10 Comments | Ball park | Permalink
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Two sets of rules

March 26, 2014

The Gateway Hotel has been closed, evidently because of city code violations.  If the violations are real and public safety is endangered I guess it should be shut down.  Some wonder if this is a case of selective enforcement.

Code workarounds

Our new ball park is going to be open for the April 28 game we are told.  The construction contract the city signed requires the park to be completed by the end of August.

We have been told that the park will be “baseball ready” by April 28 and that there may have to be some “code workarounds”.

Look for extra costs for policemen and firemen to help manage the crowds and keep them out of trouble in the unfinished facility.

Certificate of occupancy

How will they get a certificate of occupancy for an unfinished construction project?  Look for the rules to be bent.  Evidently it will be judged fair to do it for the stadium but not for the residents of a hotel that needs to be brought up to code.

We deserve better

Brutus

12 Comments | Ball park, City government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

More ball park parking issues

March 25, 2014

The news broke last week that our new baseball team is considering an agreement with the county to lease 600 of the 800 parking spaces in our county parking garage for use by the ball park’s game day employees.

Some reports indicated that the parking spaces were wanted for game days, while others led us to believe that they were wanted only after hours and on Saturday game days.

Bankruptcy

Granted that I know little about operating a ball park, I am hard pressed to believe that the team will employ 600 extra employees for each game.  With ball park capacity somewhere around 9,000 that would mean that they had one extra employee (beyond the full time employees) for every 15 spectators.

If that is the case then either the per spectator income will have to be very high or the ball team will not make a profit.

More likely to me is that the team may want 600 spaces so that they can resell them to spectators, presumably at a profit.

Citizen inconvenience

Leasing the county spaces to the team could lead to significant inconvenience to those that need to go to the county building.  If that happens I suspect the the public outcry will be significant.

County staff evidently called a meeting to discuss the situation.  The baseball team officials did not show up.

Draw your own conclusions as to why.  Are they not used to doing business in public, or are they having second thoughts about what might happen?

We deserve better

Brutus

 

19 Comments | Ball park, County Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Budget trick

March 24, 2014

Item 11.2 on the regular agenda of the March 25, 2014 city council meeting is a triumph of fact over fiction.

Decrease General Fund appropriations of various City departmental budgets in the total amount of $5,864,151 as per the attached schedule.

Of course there is no schedule attached.  In fact the agenda item is listed as “Discussion and action to approve the following budget transfers”.  City council’s own rules require that the backup material for an item like this must be posted when the item is place on the agenda.  In this case that was last Thursday.  Rules are evidently for you and me, not for our city government.

Good news

The unfortunate good news is that city staff is taking steps to take money out of the budget.  They should.  My guess is that revenues have not met the levels they told us they would when they passed the budget.  Many of us could see that coming.

What departments will be cut?  If the required backup material was made available we would have had an opportunity to know in advance.  As it is we will have to sit back and watch them cut without regard to public input.

By the way, do you remember this February statement from our city manager?

“All of our revenues are meeting our projections so I don’t know what they’re talking about”

We deserve better

Brutus

1 Comment | City government, Open Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Meteoric rates

March 23, 2014

Yesterday we talked about item 8.2 on the March 25, 2014 city council agenda and how it introduces a potential ordinance that would govern downtown parking districts.

Ball park

Item 8.3 on the agenda would introduce another potential ordinance that would allow the city to extend the hours where fees can be charged for parking at a parking meter.

Currently fees in the city apply from 8 AM to 6 PM Monday through Friday.

They want to extend the time to 10 PM and also include charges for Saturday as well.  This would only apply to “the Baseball Park District”.  At this point I have been unable to find out what geographic area the baseball park district encompasses.

Need more money

Item 8.4 introduces yet another ordinance that would allow higher parking meter rates in, you guessed it, the “baseball park district”.

How high?  They will charge 50 cents per 12 minutes.  That brings the rate to $2.50 per hour.

With the average game lasting 2 1/2 to 3 hours and you needing to get to the parking spot earlier, you can expect to pay the city $10 dollars for the privilege of parking at a meter.

We deserve better

Brutus

37 Comments | Uncategorized | Permalink
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