Good afternoon, everybody.

Welcome to the April eighth, two thousand twenty-four workshop for the General City Council.

Mayor PJ Connolly, I'll present over today's workshop.

First I call uh our city clerk for the roll call.

Yes, sir.

Mayor Connolly.

Council Member Foreman.

Councilmember Blackburn.

Council Member Robinson.

Here.

Council Member Willis.

Here.

All right.

Mayor Connelly, you have a point.

Thank you very much.

Daniels.

All those in favor say aye.

Move right on to new business.

Thank you, Mayor.

The first item tonight is presentation on sports complex feasibility study.

This will be picking up based off of the information that council wanted us to bring back for the uh the planning session in January.

I'll now call forward our second director of recreation and parts and capital and facility planning.

Um how a twelve field baseball softball complex will look.

Today you'll hear about adding four fields to this, the operating margin, margin impact, economic fiscal impact, and also the cost of capital.

Also, we also reviewed with uh Mr.

Crowley, who's here today, uh, the operating pro forma uh that he had for baseball softball complex and took a closer look at the expenses if the city of Greenville would run that complex based on the staffing plan and uh the organizational chart for that complex.

Also looked at other revenue opportunities that would exist uh for a so-called uh sports complex.

Also, today we'll be um giving an update of direct uh director of financial services, Jacob Joiner.

Well, would what the uh fiscal impact to the city budget would be to finance a sports complex project.

So we'll kick it off uh with Mr.

Brian Connolly of Victor's Advisors to run through the baseball softball complex.

Thanks, good afternoon.

It's good to see you all again.

Uh my name is Brian Connolly from Victus Advisors.

Um the first thing that that we did after the presentation I made, I guess it was probably about six weeks ago.

Um, sat down with with Don and his team and walked through on the expense side what this baseball softball tournament complex could look like if it was specifically operated by the parks and recreation department.

So the expenses that we put together for our feasibility study were based upon looking at benchmark regional facilities in a in a multi-state region, and the one um item that that was flagged there on the expense side is the salaries, wages, and benefits.

So we made an update to that line.

Basically, the the regional benchmarks um salaries and wages were were somewhat higher than the uh salary and and wage specifications for your parks and recreation department.

So we made adjustments to that to lower the salaries and wages a little bit, and then we also removed uh we had in our operating expenses, we had a dedicated uh marketing staff member as as part of the the facility operating team.

And in talking to Andrew, um he said we could take that out because they would take on the responsibility for for marketing the facility.

So the two key improvement uh changes to the to the performance, the salaries, wages, and benefits were lower right here, so that's highlighted.

Um then the second thing that we talked about with with Don and his team is what are some other revenue opportunities that could potentially get the facility from operating at a loss to at least break even.

So when we put together our base models and we don't have a site identified yet, um there's kind of two things we don't typically include in that base model.

One of them is a uh a naming rights partner for the facility, and I think I talked a little bit about that last time.

That's an opportunity that can be worth you know 100, 150, 200,000 a year, potentially based upon comparable uh corporate naming rights deals.

Not all the communities we work with decide to sell to sell a naming rights uh deal, um, or they try to sell it and they can't find a local partner that has the capacity to make sense.

So we did not include that, and we're still not including that.

We're just showing basic advertising on this line.

Um the second opportunity for um for for potentially reducing any operating losses, potentially getting to break even is something we're working with a couple of communities on right now that are doing operational improvement plans, and that is the ability for the facility itself to charge for parking or to be able to charge some sort of ticket fee.

So, what we've shown in here now is a parking fee during weekend tournament events.

So when we don't have a site yet, we don't know you know, is the site big enough that it can accommodate uh the parking on site, that the the operating staff could also control.

So this comes with the caveat that you know when when you get to if you get to the point where you're actually looking at specific sites that you make sure the site is large enough to not only accommodate the fields but also be able to accommodate all of the parking demand and to control that parking um and charge a um a parking fee per for uh weekend events.

So during the week, local use practices you wouldn't charge for parking, but when you're doing a tournament, um being able to charge the the visitors um a parking fee uh is something that could really help in terms of uh potentially eliminating that operating deficit.

As a reminder, this is the economic impact model that we put together for the baseball softball complex.

Um I'm showing this now because we're gonna then walk through what the impacts could be of adding um four rectangular fields potentially to the to the mix.

So as a reminder, we we estimated about 44 million dollars in total economic output that's based upon direct spending for travelers coming from outside of the Greenville market to come for multi-day baseball softball tournaments, staying overnight, spending money in the community with the high high level of baseball softball event activity.

We we estimated potential for over 70,000 room nights, and then county sales and hotel taxes that go along with those, totaling more than 1.2 million dollars a year.

So then we were asked by this group to do an analysis of potentially adding four rectangular fields to the baseball softball complex to see what types of impacts that would have to the facility.

So we talked with some local um lacrosse and soccer groups about the potential for adding these fields.