Lights dimming for Cashman Field

By Joe Schoenmann

Sunday, Nov. 23, 2008 | 2 a.m.

The first major steps in a what is likely to be a long trek toward demolition of the Cashman Field baseball stadium and Cashman Center took place last week.

The city wants to see something new built on the Cashman complex’s 51 acres, and the proposals expected to come in over the next few months have the potential to be either the best or the worst news in decades for the valley’s fans of minor league baseball.

Redevelopment of the site comes with a condition: Developers must include plans to build a minor league stadium on the site or somewhere else in the valley.

“We want them to have a new home,” said Scott Adams, director of the city’s Redevelopment Agency.

But major league teams may not stick with Las Vegas long enough for that to happen. Lots of teams have switched cities in recent years, going where they could find the best deals and the nicest stadiums.

The Los Angeles Dodgers this year ended an eight-year affiliation with the Las Vegas team, moving their Triple-A club to Albuquerque. In September, Toronto switched its Triple-A affiliation from Syracuse to the Las Vegas team, the 51s, but only signed up for two years. And the 51s’ lease at Cashman Field, a 25-year-old building that everyone seems to agree is way past its prime, expires in 2010.

If there is no team in Las Vegas in a couple of years, it would make no sense to build a stadium. And, Adams said, city hall thinks “if (the 51s) ever left, they’d be gone for good.”

Don Logan, president and general manager of the 51s, said the team wants to stay in Las Vegas and hopes to “hang on” until a new stadium is built.

He figures Las Vegas “knows how good minor league parks have been for other cities and what it could do for this one.”

Mayor Oscar Goodman, however, has often said that he is much more interested in major league teams than minor ones.

And how a stadium jibes with the would-be developers who toured the site Monday is anyone’s guess. Adams said that among the 31 people who attended the city’s informational event were investors from oil-rich Dubai. Most of the others, he said, were intermediaries and did not reveal who they represented.

Still, he added, he didn’t get the sense that a requirement to find a home for the baseball team turned off anyone.

“A lot of Triple-A teams have been urban catalysts for cities,” Adams said. “I could envision a developer looking at (a stadium) as a magnet.”

Logan said he had heard about the Dubai interest, but also heard a major retailer was looking at Cashman, as were developers of office buildings and medical complexes.

Adams said the city sees the site “as being large enough to become a large-scale mixed-use development like Union Park, but probably with lower density given its location and lower perceived land values.”

Union Park is the name given to the 61 acres located roughly west of the Union Plaza casino and east of Interstate 15. Its build-out is to include the Smith Center for the Performing Arts, a brain research facility and housing.

After acquiring most of that land in 2000, however, the city spent years trying to get its redevelopment under way. Adams doesn’t think it will take as long to develop the Cashman site. The formal process began in early August, when the city ratified a memorandum of understanding with the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

But talk of redeveloping Cashman isn’t new. “I’ve been on board 4 1/2 years and right after I came here, there were discussions about it,” Adams said.

He added that there has even been talk — “the kind you might have when you’re sketching out ideas on an envelope” — about using the money earned from sale of the 51 acres to fund a new minor-league stadium.

“That land is worth about $1 million an acre. It’s about $40 (million) to $60 million to build a new Triple-A minor league stadium,” Adams added.

The visitors authority is motivated to do something, he added, because it is losing “substantial” amounts of money on Cashman Center, which, like the stadium, opened in 1983.

The age and outdated design of the stadium make it practically obsolete, Logan and others have said. Among fans’ complaints: It is too hot to watch games there in Las Vegas’ scorching summers.

“We looked at retrofitting it, but the cost was more than building a new stadium,” Logan said. He talked of the possibility of a newer stadium using efficient misters to cool spectators and tubing within concrete that would use water to keep the concrete from radiating so much heat.

Logan said he was “hopeful” about Adams’ desire to keep the team here — but he was also realistic.

“Ideally, we’d play out the string at Cashman, then move into a new facility,” he said. “Then again, given the state of the worldwide economy, at this point, who knows? You have to step back and understand there are a lot more needs out there. The timing really isn’t the best.”

Time is also ticking away for potential developers of the Cashman site. A letter of intent is due to the city by Dec. 12 and proposals are due Jan. 9.