Ballpark Next
In which I discover that PARKS & REC is a lot closer to real life than it should be.
On Monday night, I went to a community meeting about the Ballpark neighborhood, and what’s going to happen when the Bees leave after the 2024 season. We’ll get to that in just a minute.
First, a little bit of housekeeping.
I went 11/23 on my Oscar predictions, which is why I don’t gamble. While I watched the show (from my DVR after I watched the season finale of THE LAST OF US, of course), I realized that there were a lot of half-measures in my voting process. Some categories I picked what I wanted to win instead of what I thought would actually win, and some categories I second-guessed myself out of the correct winner.
Overall, the show was fine. No one got slapped, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE got a rare full sweep (of categories it was nominated in), and Jimmy Kimmel did a thankless job very well.
Now, on to actual important matters.
Publik Coffee on West Temple held a community meeting for Ballpark residents this past Monday night, and it was a lot less contentious than I anticipated. There were a few city council people there, and Mayor Erin Mendenhall was on hand to answer questions, and listen to concerns that residents of the area have about the Bees leaving.
If you haven’t heard, the Bees are leaving downtown Salt Lake after the 2024 season. The Larry H. Miller Group, who owns the team, is moving them from their longtime home at 1300 South and Main St. to Daybreak. The Miller family acquired most of the Daybreak planned community from Varde Partners in April of 2021, in a deal that also included 1300 undeveloped acres (it apparently doesn’t include homes that already exist). They’ll be privately funding a new stadium built somewhere between Mountain View Corridor and the existing TRAX line, and that will be the new home of the Anaheim Angels Triple A affiliate.
This is the first part of the story that needs to be addressed. The Miller family did not take nearly enough shit for this move. Most of the outrage that I read online, and heard from people in real life was directed at politicians in Salt Lake City, and the mayor herself. Normally that’s fine, because politicians are usually the ones to blame, but in this specific case? It was all the fault of the Miller family. They decided to move a team that they own to a community that they recently purchased so that development would become more valuable. If anyone should be getting yelled at for leaving the Ballpark neighborhood in a lurch, it’s the Miller family.
If there’s one thing that we know, it’s that Greg Miller does not give one single fuck about the community in the way his dad did. Larry H. Miller, for all his other faults, did a massive amount of work to not only keep the Jazz in Salt Lake, but to keep them downtown. The Delta Center was privately funded by Miller and some other investors, and became an anchor of downtown activity. When Larry died, and Greg was given the reins to the Jazz, it was very apparent that he couldn’t care less. His passion was cars, and literally every aspect of owning a professional basketball team was treated with disdain. It was like a kid being told by his mom to do a chore that he hated (which it basically was). I had kind of forgotten that they owned the Bees until the announcement. The Miller family has been slowly getting out of Salt Lake for years now, and this really seems like the last step. Daybreak will eventually be big enough to be its own city, but it will be fully owned by two corporations.
That’s probably not great.
But I don’t live in Daybreak, so that’s not really my problem to deal with. I do, however, live in downtown Salt Lake, and love it with all my heart. I want it to be a place that people like going to. I don’t care that Charles and Shaq said it was boring. Sometimes it is!
It’s spread out, new development is prioritized over existing local businesses, and the city takes every single opportunity to take away parking spaces while also refusing to expand public transportation. “You want to go to this one restaurant? Cool. The closest parking is three blocks away, and it’ll cost you $10/hour. Then you have to cross two extremely busy roads while keeping a close eye on every car because we’ve spent 40 years teaching terrible Utah drivers that pedestrians are an inconvenience at best.”
Greg Miller probably loves that, by the way.
Back to the meeting about the Ballpark Neighborhood. Essentially, it’s WAY too early to tell what’s going to happen there. The Bees are staying until the end of the 2024 season, and maybe longer if construction on the new park gets hit with delays. Stadium builds are tricky, and they may not be able to move until halfway through the 2025 season. A whole lot can happen between March of 2023 and summer 2025.
The biggest thing? We don’t know who will be in charge at that point. Erin Mendenhall can say whatever she wants, but there’s a very strong chance that she’s not the mayor eight months from now, let alone in 2025. I think the ranked choice voting thing is going to make the election this fall wildly unpredictable, which is why everything is still on the table for whatever happens in the neighborhood.
Baseball has been played at that site for almost 100 years, going back to when Derks Field opened in 1928, and there’s a chance that it could continue. Talking to people at the meeting the other night, I picked up that the owner of the Ogden Raptors might have some interest in keeping baseball downtown. He wouldn’t necessarily move the Raptors, but he might see an opportunity for another team to move in and take over the park. There’s a chance that he may even buy another one and move it to Salt Lake. I think the rules are pretty loose when it comes to who can own minor league teams, because there are a lot that need investments.
The Ballpark Next project was a thing that invited community members to suggest plans and ideas for what might happen if the stadium is torn down. It’s almost a full city block, and the entire parking lot across the street to the north. That’s A LOT of land to develop, and my biggest fear is that it becomes another Zephyr Club. Remember the Zephyr? It was on the corner of 3rd south and West Temple, and closed in 2003. Investors bought it for the land, and waited for the value to go up. It sat vacant for 17 years until it was demolished in 2020. It’s now a parking lot. I really, really hope that’s not the fate of the Ballpark site.
Mayor Mendenhall kept saying that she was determined to see it turned into something that had a 365-day use, which it definitely doesn’t have right now. Another bit that I overheard, is that there’s currently some kind of clause in the contract that the stadium can only be used for baseball (or something like that), which is why there’s never anything else going on there. Think of how cool summer concerts would be in that place if it was allowed. There were several pieces of poster board hanging on the walls of Publik, and people wrote notes of what they wanted to see take its place, and a lot of the notes were asking for green spaces like a park, a live music venue, and a library. The most common comments were for affordable housing and owner-occupied housing. Salt Lake has a housing crisis right now, and investors buying multiple condos and turning them into AirBnB’s isn’t helping at all. The other thing Salt Lake doesn’t need more of are boring “luxury” apartment buildings that sit 25% empty all the time and only help the people who own the buildings, not regular people trying to make a home in these neighborhoods.
The only submission I’ve seen is for a place called The Swarm, and it’s a small arena with housing, retail, daycare, and outdoor space. It reminds me of something that you’d see in Seattle, and I really liked it. Not sure if it’s a great fit for that particular site, but the concept is cool. Having a slick video and giant renderings sure helps. If you want to check it out, head to Friends of Ballpark and poke around. Submissions for Ballpark Next officially close this week, and they’ll announce the winners sometime this summer. Again, the winning submissions WILL NOT be what ends up there, but it’s a jumping off point that the city may use pieces of. The city may also ignore it altogether and go in a completely different direction. No one has any idea right now.
All that said, I’m still sad that the Bees are leaving, and I hope something cool happens in that neighborhood when they actually go. I made good on my promise of setting up a Bees night for my friends this summer, and I’m excited to get back down there. Hopefully we’ll do it a couple more times before the team leaves, the park is torn down, and a three story Buffalo Wild Wings or something stupid takes its place.