Local governments used to love the hackneyed baseball-movie mantra: “If you build it, they will come.” Economic development officials claimed having a sports arena or stadium would provide a boost to the local economy. While that idea has been pretty much universally debunked—it just moves local entertainment spending and jobs around, rather than creating new ones—cities today justify subsidizing sports venues as a way to revitalize distressed urban neighborhoods.

But will it turn around a struggling area?

“Some communities have managed to do that successfully, but it has to be planned very carefully, and it does not always work,” says David Swindell, director of the Center for Urban Innovation at Arizona State University.

Knoxville may need to figure this out within the next 10 years. A series of property purchases by Knoxville business magnate Randy Boyd, which culminated in early September, led to the revelation that he is considering moving his Tennessee Smokies baseball team back to Knoxville from Kodak when its current lease runs out in 2025. Boyd said on WBIR’s Inside Tennessee program that he had talked with Sevier County officials about replacing the Smokies with another team in Kodak, but since they weren’t interested, the Smokies will remain at least until 2025. He also told WATE that he’d be announcing some other types of development on his roughly 11 acres of property at the edge of the Old City in the next six months. Through a spokesperson, he declined to speak with the Mercury about the type of development he’d like to see in the area.

Boyd, who is also the state economic development commissioner, has repeatedly denied having a specific plan for the property. But emails among Boyd, Laurens Tullock of the Cornerstone Foundation, and top city officials indicate Boyd has been in preliminary talks with Knoxville leaders about the possibility of moving the Smokies to that specific area.

Boyd referred all questions to Smokies CEO Doug Kirchhofer. Kirchhofer provided only a copy of Boyd’s previously released public statement, which ended vaguely with: “Whether the Knox Rail Salvage site becomes a new commercial or residential development, a public park for Old City residents and pet lovers, or a new sports complex, I hope it will be a terrific new addition to Knoxville and the Old City.”

Emails obtained through an open-records request show the Cornerstone Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Tullock to help the city “achieve its full potential,” arranged an assessment of two possible sites for a baseball stadium at the edge of the Old City.

An August 2014 email from Tullock to Craig Meyer, a “senior principal” and urban designer for the design firm Populous, discussed a visit from a Populous team to study the specific sites and to meet with Boyd, Smokies players, Realtor Don Parnell, and Knoxville’s chief policy officer Bill Lyons. One of the study sites overlaps Boyd’s subsequent land purchases this spring and summer.

Populous, which has more than 15 offices worldwide, has designed many big-league baseball parks as well as AA parks in Montgomery, Tulsa, and Akron, and AAA parks in Memphis, Nashville, and Durham.

Tullock explained to Meyer that Populous would be expected to deliver a “full work up” on the two potential stadium sites “to complement the exact kind of work product that was developed in the original site study in 1996.”

Boyd, Kirchhofer, and Tullock declined to answer questions about the outcome of this study, or the geographic focus of the referenced 1996 study conducted before a previous team owner moved the Smokies to Kodak.

That move occurred when the team became dissatisfied with its historic home in Bill Meyer Stadium just east of downtown. It considered other sites in Knox County, but landed on a site just off the interstate exit for Dollywood. (The Smokies’ first game there was a victory over the Chattanooga Lookouts, who had just moved their new stadium into downtown.)

Other than Boyd’s long-term interest in boosting Knoxville’s Old City, why would he be looking to move the team? Fans turn out for the games in Kodak. During the Smokies’ first year there, attendance was 256,149, an increase from the 119,571 people who saw games in Knoxville the previous year, the News Sentinel reported. Attendance has remained strong, with the Smokies ranking 63rd in average attendance among the top 371 affiliated, independent, and summer-collegiate baseball teams in the United States, according to the annual tabulation by Ballpark Digest. This year, 293,694 fans have turned out for games, putting the Smokies only slightly behind the Memphis Redbirds (#56) and well ahead of the Chattanooga Lookouts (#104) and the Johnson City Cardinals (#180)—the latter of which is, incidentally, managed by Boyd.

The Smokies are also on par with teams in other metropolitan areas with about the same population, such as Greenville, S.C., whose team ranked 53rd, and the Tri-City area of New York, whose team ranked 67th.

However, attendance alone is not the only way to measure success. The Sports Business Journal releases its own annual ranking of minor league sports markets each year based on not only attendance but also local population, total personal income of that population, unemployment, and how long the team has existed at its current location—all factors that affect whether residents shell out for baseball tickets. By this standard, the Smokies lag far behind Chattanooga and even Johnson City (which was in the top 20).

The biggest factor in making a team successful is the size of the population, Swindell says. Teams need a majority of spectators to be locals because they depend on income from the club houses and high-end season rentals, buys that are only made by people or companies that plan to come to lots of games. This may be a hurdle in Sevier County. Although it’s a popular tourist destination during baseball season, it has a smaller local population than Knoxville.

Leverage

Is the trend toward moving teams to the ’burbs, or downtown? And who benefits?

Urban development and design experts say that moving downtown is slightly more common, often to “downtown edge” areas that need turning around.

“Sports has always been about leveraging,” says Mark Rosentraub, director of the Center for Sport and Policy at the University of Michigan and author of Major League Winners: Using Sports and Cultural Centers as Tools for Economic Development. “The Cincinnati Redwings were created to sell beer. Now we’re in a phase where we use sports to leverage real estate.”

But experts say certain factors make the effort more likely to succeed.

First, the city needs to see the project as more than a ballpark. Tim Chapin, professor of Urban and Regional Planning and Interim Dean of the College of Social Sciences and Public Policy at Florida State University, says a stadium project needs to be part of an “ongoing narrative or initiative” for a geographic area, with the city making concurrent investments, rebranding the district, and considering low-cost leases or other incentives.

Another approach working for downtown baseball stadium projects in Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus, Ohio is folding them into a larger entertainment district or mixed-use redevelopment plan that includes commercial, office, residential, and even light manufacturing. The mix should encourage activity day and night, instead of creating a ghost town that comes alive only for games, Rosentraub says. (Similarly, the Chattanooga Lookouts moved downtown to an existing waterfront entertainment district that included the Tennessee Aquarium and the Creative Discovery Museum.)

Chapin says one of the top struggles for downtown stadiums is parking. Cities that do it best spread it out, even allowing the community to provide some of it by charging for parking in empty business lots and yards.

“It’s not a success if you build a big deck next door with a sky bridge to the stadium, because then people come and leave,” he says. “Try as best you can to let the community help you with parking solutions.” But he added, “Teams hate it, in part because they like the parking revenue.”

Spreading out the parking encourages walking, which brings visitors to other restaurants and businesses. But this works only when the transition between the ball field and the surrounding area is smooth. In places like Chicago, both visitors and residents can see exactly where the ball park investment stops, Chapin says. Once you cross that line, lighting, sidewalks and other infrastructure obviously worsen, which neither encourages visitors to wander nor makes the community feel that it is sharing in the benefits.

On the upside, baseball projects are often more successful at this than other sports venues, Chapin says. That’s because baseball is a more leisurely, family-oriented sport than football or basketball, so fans are more likely to explore the neighborhood. Baseball stadiums also tend to offer more of a sense of place than other sports venues, building fan loyalty.

Show Me the Money

Knoxville officials have said only that they are eager to bring the Smokies back, but specific talks about incentives and funding have not taken place.

“Teams are still good about playing communities off each other,” says Tim Chapin, professor of Urban and Regional Planning and Interim Dean of the College of Social Sciences and Public Policy at Florida State University. “It only takes one sucker to give the team an absolutely great deal. There’s prestige wrapped up in this, all sorts of issues of self-image, so cities often get in an arms race to invest in something that frankly isn’t a very good investment economically.”

Stadium projects are more likely to be winners if they incorporate private investment, Chapin says. In San Diego, that came from the team owner, who developed a variety of commercial and residential elements around the baseball stadium, he says. In most cities, more complicated multi-partner deals are needed, and the public sector needs to lead the way.

Buzz Goss, who has himself received a payment in lieu of taxes incentive from Knoxville and Knox County for developing the Marble Alley apartments and mixed-use complex downtown, says he thinks the city should offer incentives to bring the Smokies there, too.

“I think the benefit to the city by making that happen is dramatic increases in property values in that area,” he says. “That benefits everybody because you also get higher tax revenues.”

Chapin and Swindell, who both have research expertise on how sports venues can affect redevelopment, say cities need to weigh such public investments cautiously. Swindell calls it a philosophical question: “Would you build a building for Walmart to come to town? Is it appropriate for your taxpayer dollars to be spent on a private entertainment endeavor?” He cautions, “Once they spend those dollars on a baseball stadium, they will not be spending it on new cops or new teachers.” He recommends creating a tax district around a stadium, capturing a portion of its revenue to cover the city’s investment.

Unlike some team owners elsewhere, Boyd is personally invested in the future of Knoxville’s downtown. In addition to his recent land purchases, he owns the Jig and Reel pub in the Old City and has provided land for gardens and parks there. This might mean the city doesn’t need to offer as many enticements to “attract” his stadium.

But another question is whether development already extending from the Old City, such as apartments at the renovated White Lily building and renovation of the Regas complex, is already so active that a ballpark wouldn’t help—and might even hurt by reducing the land available for privately financed projects.

“If the private market is already doing the job of redevelopment for you, why would you invest your limited public dollars in an area that’s already healing, so to speak?” Swindell says. “Wouldn’t you want to put that in an area that isn’t getting the attention from private investment?”

Although Goss says he thinks the Old City and Downtown North are progressing fine without public help, a stadium could be a perfect bridge to East Knoxville, where redevelopment has been slow to spread.

“As you try to go east out Magnolia and connect to the Morningside area, we don’t have anything that could act as a good catalyst for that,” Goss says. Retail, restaurants, and bars that could cater to baseball stadium visitors would also expand opportunities to people living on the East Side, which lacks diverse businesses in these categories.

Developer Jeffrey Nash, whose company has done three downtown condo developments as well as the Crown & Goose building on Gay Street, agreed a baseball stadium would complement rather than compete with other private projects. “I think it would be probably one of the best things that could ever happen, not just for the Old City but for Knoxville generally” because of the downtown foot traffic and potential boost to property values and tax income from surrounding properties, he says.

Nash, whose upcoming projects include the Hubris Building on Gay Street’s 100 Block, added that the property Boyd purchased is in an area that’s “in great need of some tender loving care and some new things to happen to widen the whole aspect of downtown Knoxville.”

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Featured Photo: Bill Meyer Stadium, seen here in a postcard image, was demolished in 2003, four years after the Knoxville Smokies moved to Sevierville. Image courtesy David B. Stinson, from his website deadballbaseball.com.

S. Heather Duncan

S. Heather Duncan has won numerous awards for her feature writing and coverage of the environment, government, education, business and local history during her 15-year reporting career. Originally from Western North Carolina, Heather has worked for Radio Free Europe, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in London, and several daily newspapers. Heather spent almost a dozen years at The Telegraph in Macon, Ga., where she spent most of her time covering the environment or writing project-investigations that provoked changes such as new laws related to day care and the protection of environmentally-sensitive lands. You can reach Heather at heather@knoxmercury.com