V28|NO42 “This isn’t a stadium in the middle of a cornfield someplace that’s like, ‘OK, we need $30 million and the state is going to put in this, and the city is going to put in this and the team is going to put in this, and let’s go build it.’ This was much bigger.” — GreenJackets president Jeff Eiseman side of the river,” Eiseman said, referring to Augusta. “However, your downtown is rocking and rolling right now, and that’s good for everybody. And as we’ve always said, a healthy downtown Augusta is great for the entire region. We are Augusta-centric. We are remaining the Augusta GreenJackets. It’s important.” However, the baseball team also recognizes the enormous potential North Augusta has to offer the entire region, Eiseman said. “There is something very special happening over in North Augusta,” he said. “Not only with this project, but elsewhere and throughout North Augusta as well as Aiken County. But we are seeing it throughout the entire region and our job as a baseball team is not here to be partial and say, ‘It’s North Augusta.’ 16 METROSPIRIT AUGUSTA’S INDEPENDENT VOICE SINCE 1989 19OCTOBER2017
It’s to bring the community together and bring both sides of the river together and make this one region. What is good for Augusta and what is good for North Augusta is good for everybody.” Augusta Commissioner Bill Fennoy, who represents Augusta’s downtown district, said he couldn’t agree more. He believes when the SRP Park opens next spring, members of all of the local governments including North Augusta, Aiken, Augusta, Aiken County and Columbia County should be invited to the press conference. “North Augusta didn’t take the GreenJackets from Augusta,” Fennoy said. “North Augusta did something that is going to have an economic impact on the entire region, and we support what they are doing over there.” The grand opening of the stadium will happen before you know it, Eiseman said. “We are on pace. We expect we will have a certificate of occupancy here sometime around the end of March,” he said. “This facility is going to be amazing.” The first baseball game that will be held at SRP Park won’t actually be a GreenJackets game. Two major college programs, Clemson and Georgia, will be the first teams to take the field at the new ballpark on April 10. The GreenJackets are scheduled to play their first home opener in the stadium two days later, on April 12. Season tickets and seats for the inaugural season in the new North Augusta stadium are going fast, Eiseman said. He believes local fans understand that this move to North Augusta is a celebration. “But we know our village itself doesn’t sustain itself by itself.” — GreenJackets president Jeff Eiseman “So, for all of you who have spent time at Lake Olmstead and are wondering like, ‘It’s a baseball stadium. How great could this really be?’” Eiseman said, laughing. “No. No. No. This is way more than a baseball stadium. This will be nothing like Lake Olmstead, which is what we were trying to tell the community for 10 years.” The SRP Park will offer fans and visitors a complete experience, not just a ball game, he said. “Lake Olmstead was built in a different time and a different place, not just for the baseball industry, but for sports and entertainment in general,” Eiseman said. “It was put in the wrong location, with poor ingress and egress, with a tight footprint and it didn’t allow any opportunities to really expand and enhance that ballpark.” “But a lot of people are like, ‘Well, but you couldn’t even fill up Lake Olmstead, so what makes you think you are going to be more successful here?’ It’s not a chicken or the egg,” he added. “Lake Olmstead was keeping us from being able to fulfill what we wanted to do, not that the community wasn’t supporting us.” Riverside Village with the SRP Park will be like nothing the Augusta area has ever seen or experienced before, Eiseman said. “This is over a $200 million public-private partnership. It is almost $200 million in private sector alone for this development over here,” he said. “There is a perception out there like, ‘Oh, the taxpayers are paying for bonds for a baseball stadium. This is insane!’” That’s simply not true, he said. “It wasn’t dissimilar to what we were trying to propose here (in Augusta),” Eiseman explained. In the case of the North Augusta development, the city had to get Aiken County and the school board to agree to the Tax Increment Financing for the project. Basically, that the city voted to amend the TIF district, which was created back in 1996, to repay the bonds it issued for Project Jackson. “Yes, we used a TIF district, but the way that generally works is, we are providing the infrastructure — whether it is the hotel, the shops, the retail 19OCTOBER2017 — that mix creates taxes and those taxes are going against the debt service on the bonds,” Eiseman explained. “So it doesn’t become a tax burden on the community.” In addition, the GreenJackets have signed a 20-year lease at the ballpark and expects to pay approximately $500,000 a year in rent, he said. “So this was never meant to be a burden, but this is a big, big, mixed-use project and that’s partially what has taken so long to get it done because it’s complicated,” Eiseman said. “This isn’t a stadium in the middle of a cornfield someplace that’s like, ‘OK, we need $30 million and the state is going to put in this, and the city is going to put in this and the team is going to put in this, and let’s go build it.’ This was much bigger.” There were a lot of moving parts that needed to come together to make the project happen, he said. “You have a hotel that won’t commit until they know the project is going forward,” he said. “You have retail that’s saying, ‘Are you going to build this? Because we are going to open up a location here, here and here, but if this isn’t going forward, we are not going to sign on this.’ And so the challenge is when we try to pull all of this together, making sure that you have the commitments that satisfy the city to keep moving forward to release the bonds.” Fortunately, it finally all fell into place, and the reality is an incredible new development coming to North Augusta’s riverfront that will benefit the entire region. “We anticipate full completion, total buildout by April of 2019,” Eiseman said. AUGUSTA’S INDEPENDENT VOICE SINCE 1989 METROSPIRIT 17
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