C.C. Elebash, retired UWF professor and the economic guru for the group formerly known as Save Our City, hasn’t given up his fight to stop a baseball park being built at the Community Maritime Park. During the months leading up to the Sept 2006 referendum vote, the Independent News and this blog debunked many of his “facts” about baseball.
It was Elebash who tried to use a Brookings Institute study to prove that sports stadiums don’t help economies in the communities where they are built. We found and read the study. It concerned major league baseball and football stadiums built primarily in 1970s and 1980s. It was written in the mid-90s. There was nothing in the study about minor league parks built in downtown areas that seat between 3000 to 6500 people.
I challenged Elebash, City Councilman Marty Donovan or anyone to name five minor league parks that had been built in downtown areas in the past five years. I would pick five, and we would together analyze how well each was doing. I was willing to let the facts lie as they may.
Elebash never responded, even though I directly emailed him the request to name five parks.
Instead Elebash wants to keep bashing the park, without an current data upon which to base his negative opinion.
In today’s News Journal (Baseball stadium at planned park not needed) , Elebash bashes the park 16 months after the citizens approved it. He asserts “The ballpark has been “over sold” as a multi-use stadium. Baseball stadiums are not easily modified for other sports, and the park amphitheater will be more suitable for outdoor non-athletic events. Promoters will put the entire venture at risk if they insist on the baseball stadium.”
Obviously Elebash hasn’t really studied the design criteria approved by the Community Maritime Park Associates Board. The design team has taken extra care – and it will cost us more – to design a stadium that will handle football, soccer and outdoor concerts.
Once again Elebash refuses to look at facts and makes outlandish, unsubstantiated statements to undermine the park. I interviewed all the master developer candidates and asked them directly would they be interested in the CMP project without the ballpark. They said that they would probably still bid on it, but they each saw the stadium as the key component of the project that would attract other businesses to the commercial and retail areas.
I do not know if Elebash has talked to any of the master developer candidates or even the design criteria team about his theory that stadiums can’t be adapted for multiple uses.
Maybe back in 1940, it was difficult to have multi-use parks, but not today.