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Why Greensboro got its ballpark right and Winston-Salem ... well, we'll see

This week's column.

Following the recent rains in Winston-Salem, there wasn’t much joy in Mudville. Just mud.

The latest bad news: The owner of the city’s minor league team was strapped for cash and needed help from the city to complete a stalled new downtown baseball stadium.

That’s in addition to $12 million the city already had committed in taxpayer money to the project.

Compounding what has turned into a lost season for the Winston-Salem Dash has been an abject lack of interest in the team, which plays on the same level as the Greensboro Grasshoppers, and is in first place in its division.

The team opened the season with a new name and had hoped to play at least some of its games in the new 5,500-seat ballpark.
The stadium broke ground in October 2007, but construction suddenly stopped this spring. There were massive light stanchions, the beginnings of the grandstand — and a lot of muddy red clay.
The team requested and last week received city help. The city will take out a loan for $12.7 million to help finish building it. The Winston-Salem City Council approved the deal unanimously. But not without hearing an earful from some citizens who questioned both the city’s priorities and the soaring costs of the project.

The stadium originally was supposed to cost $22.6 million. Now it totals $40.7 million, a nearly 80 percent increase. Counting the other phase of the development, which would contain shops, offices and restaurants, and the total cost expands to $58.7 million.

Further, the city had no choice but to bail out the Dash’s owner, Billy Prim, who also is developing the stadium and planned commercial property adjacent to it. The stadium is too far along to allow it to just sit there, unfinished.

Meanwhile, the city council meetings about the stadium financing drew nearly as many people as the team, which as, of last week, was a distant last in its league in attendance, averaging only 691 fans per game.

Winston-Salem officials had visited what is now NewBridge Bank Park in Greensboro in preparation for their stadium project.

Jim Melvin, president of the Joseph M. Bryan Foundation  and a prime mover behind the Greensboro stadium deal, says the Hoppers were happy to oblige and even shared blueprints.

“We’re pulling for them,” Melvin said last week. “We’re truly sorry they’re having to go through this.”

But one key aspect of the game plan the folks didn’t follow in Winston-Salem was perhaps the most important element to Greensboro’s success: The stadium here was privately built and is privately owned.

That’s a better way to go from the standpoint of both principles and practicality. Taxpayers should not have to underwrite a private business, especially a sports franchise.

Further, the attachment of public money adds political baggage, as it is doing right now in Winston-Salem, where most of the risk is borne by the taxpayer.

Prim has put only $2 million of his own money in the project, other local investors, another $5 million, plus $25 million in bank loans. Winston taxpayers’ total investment in the ballpark: $27.7 million.
And if Prim defaults on the $12.7 million loan the city will secure for him, the city will have to pay it off.

The ballpark in Winston-Salem may well succeed after all, and the overall breadth and ambition of the plan is impressive.

There certainly is plenty of room for two Triad stadiums to succeed using two different approaches. But at a cost of $21.5 million for 6,500 seats, NewBridge seems the bigger bargain by a long shot.
Not that we didn’t have our own messy issues over baseball.
Winston observers probably wondered what was going on over here, too, when the City Council opposed the original stadium site at South Elm and East Lee streets. Or when a passionate group of citizens bitterly opposed the Eugene Street and Bellemeade site to the very end.

But the community worked through all that. The park seemed to symbolize a new way of thinking in town.

“We’d gotten to believe we couldn’t do anything,” Melvin said.
And the fans are still turning out. Even though the park is four years old, the Grasshoppers were first in the South Atlantic League, averaging 5,996 fans.

Here’s hoping Winston is able to achieve that same goal (although I can’t imagine skeptics in Greensboro not skewering city officials here if they’d made such a one-sided deal).

But as the story unfolds over there, the appreciation understandably does grow for what we accomplished here.

We fussed and bickered and came up with all kinds of creative ways to make our downtown stadium not work.

But in the end, we got it right.