Officials in Sarasota County, Fla., expect an answer soon on whether the Braves will move their spring-training home there.
“(In) relatively short order, we should know something,” Sarasota County director of business and economic development Jeff Maultsby told a county tourism advisory council.
The Braves are seeking to line up a new spring home for 2018 and beyond.
“We are working towards trying to get a deal crafted to make that a reality,” Maultsby said during a meeting of the county’s Tourist Development Council.
A deal would need to be done “the sooner the better” for a facility to be built by 2018, he added.
Sarasota County commissioners voted unanimously on March 8 to pursue negotiations with the Braves.
Maultsby was asked during the tourism council meeting late last week – a video of the meeting is on the county website — about the possibility of a bidding war for the Braves, who also have talked with officials in the Florida counties of Palm Beach, Pinellas (St. Petersburg) and Collier (Naples) about spring-training facilities.
“(County Administrator Tom) Harmer indicated to the team that we were not interested in such a bidding war and wouldn’t necessarily get into that,” Maultsby said. “We will put our best foot forward, and if that was agreeable to them, then we would welcome them here. But if not, they were free to go on.”
The Braves are known to have strong interest in a possible return to Palm Beach County, where the team trained for 35 years before relocating to Disney’s Wide World of Sports near Orlando in 1998.
The Braves, whose Disney lease expires after 2017, are seeking a new spring-training home to get closer to other teams’ facilities and reduce travel time to exhibition games.
The concept under discussion with Sarasota County, on southwest Florida’s Gulf Coast, would have a roughly $100 million facility built in the Villages West master-planned community in North Port. Both the state of Florida and the county likely would participate in the funding.
“If and when we get to a point where there is some sort of deal, tourist development tax dollars would probably play a part in that,” Maultsby told the tourism council.
He said the county has signed a confidentiality agreement with the Braves that precluded him from disclosing some of the details under discussion.
