City to gain new sportsplex
A state of the art indoor/outdoor sports and entertainment complex will be coming to San Marcos following a decision by city council.
The San Marcos City Council voted unanimously to approve a purchase and sale agreement for approximately 30 acres of land in the vicinity of Centerpoint Road and South Interstate 35 to be improved with a multi-use sportsplex and to approve a lease of the property to SM Baseball Investments, LLC upon closing on the purchase of the property. The complex will be intended to host national tournaments and showcase events, but will also offer eight championship ballfields to be used by the local youth baseball associations free of charge.
After completion of the facilities, the city will retain ownership but will lease the property to SM Baseball Investments for operations.
“We get a free place for our local youth baseball citizens to play, we’ll get additional hotel/motel tourism that’ll help generate sales tax dollars and so forth within the community and so we’ve worked really hard on these agreements before you tonight,” Assistant City Manager Steve Parker said.
Parker said the agreement requires the developer to put in an approximately $3 million, 30,000 square foot training facility that will have education and study rooms and computers for tutoring after school.
“It has approximately 80 acres, it’ll be a development that will have eight championship baseball fields which the City of San Marcos will become the owner of,” Parker said. “There’s a future plan for a hotel and a conference center that will be geared towards sports tourism as well in the future. And so we’ve been really working with (the developer), possibly a Top Golf-like facility, all of those things are components of the master plan related to that, but the first thing that needs to happen is these sports fields.”
The estimated purchase price of the project is $19,875,383.51, which will be funded by bonded indebtedness through hotel/motel taxes, according to Parker.
“(Tyler Sibley, the developer) will work with the city on the design over the next several months, we will start construction, we will issue bonds to do that,” Parker said. “But the best thing about this project is typically a project like this is funded through property tax receipts. The great thing about this — because it will generate so many hotel room nights — that this is eligible to be paid for by hotel/motel revenues. So we have some excess revenues related to our Embassy Suites Conference Center that we can allocate towards this project, it’s about a million dollars a year, which will basically cover the debt service on the project without really having any additional room nights monies needed to come in.”
Parker said the best part of the deal is that all the maintenance, upkeep, utilities, turf replacement and lighting will be paid for by the developer, who is going to manage the facility.
Mayor Jane Hughson noted that the city will have to pay for utilities at certain times, according to the contract. The contract states that the city, or the landlord, “shall be responsible for its share of utilities for the Outdoor Premises during any City Sponsored Uses (including SMYBSA events), to the extent such utility usage is in excess of reasonable and customary usage.”
“I just want to make sure we’re being totally transparent to the public when we say ‘oh, he’s paying for all of that’ because that’s not totally correct,” Hughson said.
After discussion on the agreement, Mayor Pro Tem Lisa Prewitt motioned to go into executive session for legal advice and questions on the economic incentive pertaining to the agenda item.
Following the executive session, council voted on several amendments to the contract, and then voted unanimously to approve the lease agreement and the purchase and sale agreement.
