A deal that could bring a baseball stadium downtown has been in the works for more than a year with local officials backing a plan that would keep the Missions in San Antonio.
On Thursday, the public got its first chance to weigh in on what the team’s owners and private developers say will be good for the city and cost taxpayers nothing.
“Our goal remains steadfast, which is to keep the San Antonio Missions in our city and to offer an affordable sporting event for everyone,” said Hope Andrade, a Missions team owner. “The new ballpark will not only serve as a sporting and community venue, but will also stimulate development in a much-needed area of downtown, all at no cost to the taxpayer or the city budget.”
Major League Baseball (MLB) has given owners until Oct. 15 to come up with an agreement for a new ballpark that would meet its standards and replace in 2028 the 30-year-old Nelson W. Wolff Municipal Stadium.
But the issues raised Thursday by council members and residents of an apartment complex who will be displaced by new development around the ballpark put into question whether that deadline can be met.
Details of the plan were first revealed two weeks ago when City staffers told City Council that the proposed $160 million ballpark would be built on mostly vacant parcels of land next to the San Pedro Creek Culture Park at North Flores, Camaron and Kingsbury streets.
At that meeting, several council members asked for a public hearing before considering the proposal as scheduled on Sept. 5.
The Aug. 29 public hearing brought out support for the proposal from leaders of the Northside Chamber of Commerce, UTSA, Centro San Antonio and a downtown resident who serves on the Main Plaza Conservancy board of directors.
“As we grow our UTSA presence downtown, it is critical that our downtown provides vibrant and attractive housing and entertainment centers, which this project does well,” said Lisa Campos, UTSA Athletics Director.
Pete Pina, who lives in the Five Points neighborhood north of the urban core, said he looks forward to having baseball on his front door.
But members of the community advocacy group COPS/Metro Alliance and residents of the Soapworks Factory apartments spoke against the plan at Thursday’s meeting.
“We don’t believe for a second that the taxpayers of this city will not have to pay for the proposed stadium,” said Sonia Rodriguez, a COPS/Metro leader.
Financing plan
The city’s chief financial officer, Ben Gorzell, described during the hearing a financing plan that secures guarantees from the team and developers, “not promises.”
Under the terms, Designated Bidders, a group of local investors that includes Andrade, Bruce Hill, Graham Weston and David Robinson, will kick in $34 million for the stadium and make $1 million annual lease payments.
The team will pay a $250,000 annual maintenance fee and charge a $2 per ticket fee that goes to the stadium owner, the San Pedro Creek Park Development Authority which is led by the team, the City and County.
Cost overruns during construction of the ballpark also would be paid by the team.
Team owners would select the contractor and earn all revenue from games and events. Minor league baseball clubs are worth anywhere from $3 to $25 million, based on several variables, according to the MLB.
Developer Weston Urban, which owns the land where the ballpark is to be built, has agreed to a four-phase, seven-year plan to develop the property surrounding the stadium.
The new development is described in the agreement as multi-family housing and hospitality and is projected to raise property values by $1 billion. The first two phases are expected to cover 86% of the cost of the ballpark, Gorzell said.
“At the end of the day, we’ve got new development paying for the ballpark along with the team’s equity contribution and team revenues,” Gorzell said.
As the stadium owner, the Authority would release tax-exempt and taxable revenue bonds to pay the remaining $126 million cost of building the ballpark. A revenue bond is a municipal bond supported by the revenue from a specific project, such as a bridge, highway or stadium.
In this case, the bonds would be paid off through team revenue — ticket fees and lease payments — plus funds from an expanded Houston Street Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone (TIRZ) and a newly created San Pedro Creek Municipal Management District (MMD).
The MMD creates an assessment on top of property tax dollars, similar to a public improvement district, or PID.
The entire deal is based on guarantees, which makes it unique from other kinds of development agreements in which a developer makes promises to build something, Gorzell said.
“We asked for a bit more here,” he said. “In the event that those revenues come in under what our projections would be next year for those two phases, the team is responsible for making up that difference.”
In addition, there will be no work on the ballpark until the first phase of development begins, City Manager Erik Walsh said.
Been here before
The concept of a downtown stadium has been floated for almost a decade or more. Former Mayor Ivy Taylor threw her support behind it in 2016.
But the idea lost momentum when the team’s owners at the time said they would not pay for it and private partners never came to the table.
Taxpayers are also reluctant to support the cost of new sports venues, pointing to how the Alamodome and Frost Bank Center projects never spurred the kind of economic development that was promised by politicians.
The use of public dollars for sports venues is fairly common across all leagues in the U.S. There have been eight new MLB and other league stadiums or arenas built since 2020, costing about $3.3 billion, according to a Journal of Policy Analysis and Management article summarized by The Journalists’ Resource.
About $750 million in public funds went toward those construction projects, it stated.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who has opposed funding a baseball stadium with public money, said he strongly supports the proposed plan.
“We’ve seen what happens with the Frost Bank Center on the East Side promising economic development,” he said. “Those things didn’t happen. In this case, the development, the improvements, occurs first. In fact, it’s not for the promise of development. We actually put that in writing.”
Nirenberg said the guarantees in the agreement also give him confidence.
“This is structured in a way that that will not happen because there [are] two backstops, and the backstop at the end of the day is the personal finances of the owners themselves,” he said.
A Double-A affiliate of the San Diego Padres, the Missions are operated by Ryan Sanders Baseball, which also owns the Round Rock Express and Corpus Christi Hooks teams.
For now, the city-owned Wolff Stadium is still in play but its future beyond that is uncertain. Until the new facility is complete, the team will continue to operate, maintain and play its home games at Wolff Stadium, according to the agreement.
Gorzell said Designated Bidders and the city have talked about redevelopment opportunities and uses at the existing stadium on the Southwest Side.
District 6 Councilwoman Melissa Cabello Havrda said she’s met with the team owners and “come to appreciate their vision,” for the new park. She said she is excited about the redevelopment potential of Wolff Stadium and the 42 acres of property in her district.
Displacement
Members of COPS/Metro and the Soapworks Factory residents said they have not met with anyone about the deal. They complained at the hearing about the city’s lack of transparency in coming up with a plan that affects them.
“Shame on you,” said Graciela Sanchez, raising her voice. “How can you talk about a community benefits plan without talking to the community?”
Sanchez also asked whether other projects in the Houston Street TIRZ wouldn’t be funded because of the ballpark and why the Westside TIRZ would be losing parcels to it. “This project is all about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer,” she said. “This deal is rotten.”
Weston Urban President and team owner Randy Smith, president of Weston Urban, which owns the innercity apartment complex built in the 1970s and ’80s said it has come up with a displacement plan for residents and recently notified them of the plan with a flier on doors.
Some can initially be moved to other parts of the complex and later to the nearby Continental Hotel development now under construction, he said. For those who want to live elsewhere, relocation services and financial support will be provided, he said.
The threat of displacement is not new for residents of the Soapworks Factory apartments, a market-rate complex which is adjacent to the $300 million county-owned San Pedro Creek linear park. After new owners acquired the property in 2016 and raised the rent, the residents, many who live on fixed incomes, went to the City for help.
Celia Coronado said she’s been residing at the apartments since Nov. 2023 and feared what would happen if she can no longer live there. “We don’t have anywhere to move other than the streets,” she said. “We’ll have to sell most of the items that we attained in order to make our home at Soap Factory.”
Luis Alvarado said he was homeless before moving into Soapworks and does not want to move.
COPS/Metro leader Rena Oden said affordable housing in San Antonio is scarce. “Why aren’t you fighting for them?” she asked the Council. “There is an affordable housing crisis and this project is adding to it.”
COPS/Metro representatives distributed a flier at the hearing with various demands related to the deal, among them full disclosure of all the details and putting the issue to a public vote. District 8 Councilman Manny Pelaez said he didn’t think the requests were unreasonable.
District 1 Councilwoman Sukh Kaur, whose district is where the displacement would occur, said she wants to meet with residents and come up with a plan they can agree on.
She also asked Smith if the developer would commit to providing affordable housing in the third and fourth phases of the project.
“I share the frustrations and the perspective of people here today — that downtown needs more affordable housing,” he said.
While half of the 250-unit Continental Hotel project will be affordable, it’s the hardest thing he’s had to accomplish in his professional career under current economic and regulatory conditions, Smith said.
“To know what that looks like five years down the road is something I’m not prepared to commit to today,” he said.
TIRZ impact
District 5 Councilwoman Teri Castillo asked why the deal is structured in a way that is contrary to affordable housing policies the city has in place. If the development has to be market-rate housing to sustain the ballpark, the city should ask for more, she said.
“Yesterday, we had a very robust discussion and debate about [housing] and here we are removing deeply affordable housing and it’s not going to be replaced with the same affordability,” she said. “It’s just alarming.”
Soapworks is a market-rate development, meaning it does not offer income-based “affordable housing.” The monthly rent ranges between $690 for a studio and $1,286 for a two-bedroom, according to the real estate site Zillow.
Castillo also asked about the ballpark’s effect on the TIRZ, both in her district and downtown, and how those funds could instead be used for streets and sidewalk improvements her constituents are asking for.
“Not acknowledging that the TIRZ is capturing money that could be going into the general fund is dishonest,” she said.
Castillo is also concerned about the Westside TIRZ losing four parcels to the Houston Street TIRZ to secure the bond and said that “divesting from the West Side that has been historically divested from is extremely concerning.”
The agreement calls for moving the parcels to the Houston Street TIRZ because structuring the bond deal in a single TIRZ, which includes both the ballpark and planned new development on the West Side, will be positively viewed from a bond credit perspective, according to a state provided by a city spokeswoman.
Gorzell said that to offset the impact to the 1,531-acre Westside TIRZ, the agreement proposes to increase the city property tax participation rate from 90% to 100%.
The net effect is an increase of $230,000 in Westside TIRZ revenues, Gorzell said.
County Judge Peter Sakai said separately that the ballpark and related development is a good thing for the San Antonio ISD, “that is most in need of revenue.”
Not final
District 2 Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez said he wants to support the ballpark idea but would like to see town hall meetings scheduled to hear constituents’ concerns. He asked why the proposal is being rushed.
The MLB gave the team until Oct. 15 to come up with the terms of an agreement, Smith said, and given the scope of the project is necessary to meet in order to be complete for opening day in 2028.
Design meetings with the public and hashing out other details of the agreement, including remedies for those who are displaced, could be accomplished in the coming months, said Bruce Hill, principal manager of Designated Bidders.
“This is just the first step in the agreement on the key terms,” Walsh said.
“I think it’s incumbent on owners to help the public understand [the deal] better … that it isn’t going to be a tax burden,” said District 9 Councilman John Courage. “We want to have the community wrap their arms around this and say, hey, we love this.”
The Council was scheduled to consider the agreement at its next meeting on Sept. 5. Walsh said after the public hearing that given the number of requests by council members for changes or additions to the agreement, that date could change.
Reporter Andrea Drusch contributed to this report.
