The sports complex would be located in the annexed property north of Highway 4 and east of the Foxboro neighborhood…

Hercules has Big League Dreams for sports park
By Tom Lochner

Big League Dreams, the company that runs sports complexes with scaled-down replicas of Yankee Stadium, Wrigley Field, Fenway Park and other Major League Baseball venues, soon could come to Hercules.

The Hercules City Council last week, approved a license agreement with Big League Dreams USA and authorized the city manager and city attorney to negotiate a maintenance-and-operations agreement with one of the company’s entities. The approvals, which passed unanimously on the consent calendar, piggyback on a planning-and-design agreement with Big League Dreams Consulting LLC that the council approved July 22.

Big League Dreams Sports parks typically house numerous baseball-and-softball fields as well as facilities for soccer, basketball, volleyball and other sports. They are used for youth and adult sports league play and tournaments as well as sports clinics and camps and special events.

The proposed Hercules sports complex would be run as a private business and pay fees to the city — essentially a privatization of traditionally municipal sports and recreation functions.

“We make money, and we share the profits with the city,” said Pat Kight, a Big League Dreams consultant and former city councilman in Redding. Around 2000, when he was on the council, officials estimated a 30-acre sports park would cost Redding $350,000 to $400,000 a year to maintain, he said.

“The city manager said we can’t afford it,” Kight said.

Today, Redding has one of nine Big League Dreams sports parks, including six in California.

“If you privatize it, you’re going to spend more money up front,” Kight said, “but once it’s done, you’re off the hook for 30 years.”

Hercules would pay to build the park, and Big League Dreams would have financial responsibility for operating and maintaining it.

The Hercules City Council appropriated $750,000 for the design agreement July 22 and $450,000 for the license agreement last week.

A draft maintenance-and-operations agreement calls for the company to pay a fee, in quarterly installments, equal to 6 percent of gross revenue, with a guaranteed minimum of $100,000 a year; 1 percent of the gross revenue, or one-sixth of the fee, would be deposited in a structural replacement reserve account.

The site for the sports complex would have to be about 35 to 40 acres, Kight said. Hercules officials did not say where it would be located, and several did not respond to e-mails. Kight said city officials told him “they have several sites that they’re toying with.”

Big League Dreams CEO Scott LeTellier, however, told the council July 22 that Councilman Ed Balico and City Manager Nelson Oliva “were kind enough to show us not only the location for the proposed park but also the intermodal transport facility, which strikes us as a most interesting adjunct to this.”

Kight, explaining LeTellier’s reference to a proposed intermodal transit center, said Big League Dreams parks host many corporate events and family days, to which people could travel on a future ferry from San Francisco, transfer to other transportation, and “make a day of it.”

The licensing agreement, which has a term of 30 years, provides for an exclusivity radius within which no other Big League Dreams park could locate.

A draft of the agreement does not spell out the radius, but Oliva told his council last week that it would be 35 miles, which would encompass all of San Francisco and stretch north to south from about Fremont to Vacaville and east to about Antioch.

The nearest Big League Dream Sports Park, with six baseball-softball fields, an eight-station batting cage, an indoor soccer field and playgrounds, is in Manteca, which has a 50-mile exclusivity radius.

Manteca earned about $225,000 in the first three quarters of 2008 and about $60,000 in the fourth quarter of 2007 from its Big League Dreams Sports Park, for a total of about $285,000 for the latest 12-month period for which there are figures, said Parks and Recreation Director Steve Houx.

The complex opened in late 2006 and early 2007.