{"id":10553,"date":"2015-08-14T03:28:49","date_gmt":"2015-08-14T03:28:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=10553"},"modified":"2015-08-14T03:28:49","modified_gmt":"2015-08-14T03:28:49","slug":"ballpark-or-no-ballpark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=10553","title":{"rendered":"Ballpark … or no ballpark?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I’m still trying to wrap my head around the debate over whether to put a ballpark near the heart of downtown Amarillo.<\/p>\n

It’s called the multipurpose event venue. MPEV, for short.<\/p>\n

It’ll be up for a key decision on Nov. 3. The city will ask voters if they want the MPEV to include the ballpark. If they say “no,” the ballpark won’t be built; a “yes” vote, of course, means what it says.<\/p>\n

I believe the ballpark is a good deal. It can be a potentially great deal if we use our imagination, employ some creativity and relearn how we can enjoy the downtown district.<\/p>\n

I keep hearing numbers about the cost of the MPEV. It’ll be around $32 million. The city plans to issue bonds to pay for it. It\u00a0plans to\u00a0retire those bonds with hotel-motel tax revenue and lease payments from the tenant who agrees to run the place. Bill Gilliland and Laura Street, a pair of big-hitter fundraisers, told the City Council they have received pledges totaling around $2 million from private contributors; there might be more in the wings.<\/p>\n

Amarillo’s political\/business\/civic brain trust isn’t reinventing the wheel with this downtown ballpark concept. Cities all across the country — big cities and mid-sized cities, just like Amarillo — have enjoyed varying degrees of success with downtown ballparks.<\/p>\n

There’s nothing particularly original or groundbreaking in the city’s effort to revive its downtown district.<\/p>\n

Now, for the record, I’m not going to suggest that Amarillo can copy cities such as Oklahoma City in developing a downtown ballpark. The OKC project was paid for with a public tax levied specifically to raise money for the construction of that city’s ballpark in its Bricktown district. And I am acutely aware that OKC is a much larger city.<\/p>\n

If we step back, though, we need to understand that no one with a lick of sense is suggesting that Amarillo’s downtown project can function on the same level as the one in OKC. It can, though, function nicely at its own level.<\/p>\n

The MPEV as it’s been presented does represent a step forward for the city and presents a fascinating opportunity for the city to progress to some next, and perhaps largely still undefined, level.<\/p>\n

Indeed, this project requires a leap of faith. I am prepared to take that leap.<\/p>\n\n

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I’m still trying to wrap my head around the debate over whether to put a ballpark near the heart of downtown Amarillo. It’s called the multipurpose event venue. MPEV, for short. It’ll be up for a key decision on Nov. 3. The city will ask voters if they want the MPEV to include the ballpark. … Continue reading Ballpark … or no ballpark?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10535,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[288,5341,1436,3153,3402],"class_list":["post-10553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","tag-amarillo-city-council","tag-bricktown","tag-downtown-amarillo","tag-mpev","tag-oklahoma-city"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10553"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10554,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10553\/revisions\/10554"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}