WHAT’S NEXT
These items are now high on the long to-do list of Braves executives working on the team’s planned move to Cobb County:
- Tour sports facilities around the country to collect stadium design ideas.
- Begin the formal process of selecting a developer to partner with on a mixed-use complex adjacent to the stadium.
- Have gas pipelines on the stadium site relocated.
- Hire a lead architect for the stadium.
- Negotiate contracts with Cobb County more detailed than the approved memorandum of understanding.
Atlanta Braves executives will return to work from their Thanksgiving travels Monday, still thankful for $300 million in public funding for a new stadium but aware that last week’s vote by the Cobb County Commission signaled the start of an unforgiving timetable to get the ballpark built by 2017.
“I know three years may sound like a long time to some people,” Braves Executive Vice President Derek Schiller said. “But with a 41,500-seat stadium and an adjacent million square feet of mixed-use development all going up in three years’ time, we will need every single day.”
This week, Braves officials plan to start a tour of sports facilities around the country in search of design ideas — first stop: the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium — and to start the formal process of selecting a development partner for the mixed-use retail-entertainment complex.
Those are just two of many items on the to-do list for Braves officials involved in the stadium project and their growing group of outside advisers.
Also high on the list: negotiating contracts with Cobb County that will be more detailed than the 20-page memorandum of understanding approved by the commissioners, and working through complicated details of relocating two gas pipelines buried about 5 feet deep on the stadium site near Cumberland Mall.
Braves officials insist they have no worries that any of the issues might derail the project. But they acknowledge there is much to navigate in order to begin construction by late next year and to open the stadium by April 2017.
The Braves admit the gas pipelines were a bigger concern at one point.
“The first time I saw the property, I thought they were potentially a big issue,” said Braves Executive Vice President Mike Plant, the franchise’s point person on the stadium.
The concern was allayed, he said, after engineers conducted “environmental, geological and hydrological” studies of the property and discussions were held with the two gas companies and the county about relocating the pipes. Plant said he expects them to be moved to outer edges of the 60-acre property the Braves are buying.
“Fortunately, moving pipelines isn’t something unusual,” Plant said. “We’re already way down the road on (plans for) relocating them.”
The Braves are at the starting line on other aspects of the project.
The team and its real-estate adviser plan to issue a formal “request for qualifications” this week to developers interested in partnering on a $400 million development of retail shops, restaurants, condominiums and hotels adjacent to the stadium.
The document, which Plant said is 60-plus pages and “ready to go,” will be sent to more than 50 developers in Atlanta and across the country as the Braves seek a partner with the experience and financial heft to help execute such a project.
“We don’t have to have expertise in everything,” Plant said. “We can go partner with people that do.”
The Braves also plan to move soon to hire a lead architect to design the stadium. The team is responsible for design and construction under terms of its deal with Cobb.
Dallas-based HKS, which designed the Cowboys’ and Indianapolis Colts’ stadiums in recent years, has been working with the Braves as a consultant and appears to have the inside track on landing the lead-architect job.
“I would say they are the leader in the clubhouse right now,” Plant said. “I also have a couple of other (architecture firms) I’m going to talk to … to look at some possibly different ideas.”
Braves officials plan to make trips to 10 or more baseball, basketball and football venues around the country over the next two months, starting with the trip to the Cowboys’ recently renamed AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, to compile their own database of features they want in the Cobb stadium.
Another time-consuming part of the work ahead will be negotiating definitive contracts that flesh out and expand on the key terms contained in the 20-page memorandum of understanding approved by the Cobb commission. Plant estimated it could take six to nine months to complete all of the contracts, which will run hundreds of pages and include a stadium operating agreement, a transportation and infrastructure agreement, bond financing documents and others.
The Braves say they won’t spend any time revisiting their decision to leave downtown Atlanta, their home since 1966, and Turner Field, their home since 1997. Minutes after the Cobb commissioners voted last Tuesday night to approve the stadium deal, the Fulton County Commission and Atlanta City Council issued a joint statement expressing a desire “to have a dialogue” with the Braves in hopes of keeping the team in Atlanta.
“We appreciate the partnership we’ve had with them, and we’ll appreciate it for the next three years,” Schiller said when informed of the Atlanta/Fulton County statement. “But we are now solidly looking to the future and our new location in Cobb County.”
For the Braves’ executives, Opening Day 2017 now looms large.
“While that was a very important and momentous decision last (week), it just paved the way for a lot of work to really begin in earnest now,” Schiller said. “The challenge for us is just beginning.”
On Monday, Plant said, he’ll gather the group working on the stadium project “to make sure we keep our eye on the ball and keep quarterbacking this thing down the road.”
