Officials in Palm Beach County are trying to lure the Atlanta Braves to South Florida. Actually, it would be a return of the Braves to the county. Currently the Braves have talked about a $100 million dollar complex with a 10,000-capacity stadium.
Palm Beach County Commissioner Shelley Vana believes the stadium and the team would be a great economic boost for the community.
Right now we are in preliminary talks with the Braves and I believe it has great possibilities for economic development in the area and actually for upgrading parts of the park and making them nicer for the kids and for the people to enjoy.
What kind of details can you give us about what those preliminary talks are like and will there be any cost to the taxpayers?
We have not discussed how we would finance it yet, but there will probably be similar methods of financing like we did with the two-team stadium already in West Palm Beach. Only this would be a one-team stadium. We would be looking at many different methods of financing. The state has money to contribute. Also some of the municipalities have indicated that they would at least be looking at ways to help contribute as well as the county, we have different methods of raising money for that, a tax being one, we have some other methods that might be created.
You do have a group of people who live in that community and some of them have spoken up and said they don't like the idea. Their issue has to deal with light pollution, possibly noise pollution, and they believe that the roads aren't good enough for that traffic. What do you have to say to to the group who's opposing it?
Every time we even talk about having any kind of team at that location we have opposition. We're moving forward with the talk but of course the communities will be involved. The questions of traffic and light pollution or noise pollution I think can very easily be addressed. The location is next to a Tri Rail station. It is right next to I-95 and quite frankly economic development in that area is desperately needed.
The Braves have played in Palm Beach County before and we've seen teams pick up and go when they find a better deal. What kind of concerns do you have not just to entice the team to come to the area but to want to stay here long term?
Well I think the fact that we have so many teams here now makes a big difference also. We have a lot of teams here now and having a team like the Atlanta Braves, I think, adds to it. We become more of a kind of stable place to have baseball.
What do you envision all of these teams are going to do for the county, again considering they're only here for one month of the year?
When the teams leave we have other programs that go through there. We have a Sports Commission that really actively recruits other level teams to come in, amateur teams and youth teams that have big competitions. So we hope that we'll have that kind of situation down here in what we call the heart of Palm Beach County, which is the older part of Palm Beach County.
Not everyone is for the stadium, specifically a group of residents from Lake Osborne Heights. Katie McGivern is leading the charge to protect the park.
It wasn't that we didn't want the Atlanta Braves to come to Palm Beach County. It's that we're concerned about putting any kind of private enterprise inside a public park.
Do you have any confidence that the stadium won't be built at this particular park or have you accepted the fact that maybe it's just going to happen?
I would hope that this would never happen in a public park. This would be shameful quite frankly. And let me tell you John Prince Park is a beautiful park. It's used by working class people. It's used by the immigrant community and in my opinion if this were a park used by Palm Beach or a polo players or North Palm Beach this would never be done, this would never be tried. The people in John Prince park are just the little people. And the Palm Beach County Commission, to their shame, has never adequately funded John Prince park in quite a while. And this is just their way of maybe getting rid of some of their responsibility that they should be doing.
