Metro Spirit - 10.19.17

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