The McCracken County Fiscal Court and the Paducah City Commission have been gameplanning for the massive sports complex project since 2019, when officials gathered at the county courthouse to ceremonially kick soccer balls into a goal on the front lawn. That kickoff started the governments on what local leaders deemed a “new path” for sports tourism with a new goal: building an outdoor complex that will bring sports tourneys and tourism dollars to the area.
The plan for the complex has shifted over time as the local governments worked to accept the donation of land for the complex, hire design firms, gather community input and bid out contracts – doing much of it amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, with construction finally underway in Paducah after a July groundbreaking, some local residents are concerned about the project’s inflated cost while officials remain confident that the future sports park will be a homerun for the McCracken County community.
Cost estimates for the complex have risen over time for the 130-acre complex to be located at the site of the former Bluegrass Downs racetrack and part of the city-owned Stuart Nelson Park. Initial projections in 2021 put it around $43 million but the latest estimates have placed the cost around $65 million.
McCracken County Judge-Executive Craig Clymer pinned a lot of the blame for the price hike on the pandemic and its effects on the country’s economy.
“It's stylish, I guess, to pin everything on COVID,” Clymer said. “The federal government dumped trillions of dollars into the economy which, I guess, it helped some people get through COVID for their businesses … but it certainly created a wave of inflation. I think [higher project costs are] going to be with us for a long time.”
Clymer said the project, as originally envisioned, has had to be scaled back to accommodate increased labor and materials prices. The complex will still include the 10 synthetic turf playing surfaces – five diamond-shaped and five rectangular fields – that could support use across different sports and age divisions.
The judge-executive estimated that keeping everything in the “Cadillac version” of the plan, as it was described by local leaders, would have seen the project cost upwards of $80 million. Instead, the project planners have taken cost-cutting steps like removing basketball and pickleball courts, removing what had previously been considered key elements like the championship field and the renovation of the former racetrack’s grandstand and leasing an adjacent facility in lieu of constructing storage and maintenance buildings.
The more than 50% price increase for the complex wasn’t a big surprise for Paducah Mayor George Bray, who said “every project that [they] have right now is having cost overruns.”
“Quite frankly, it's just the environment that we're living in right now,” Bray said. “I think the costs that we're living with now are here to stay and we all have to figure out how to deal with that.”
For McCracken County Commissioner Bill Bartleman, the cost is “unbelievable” but worth it.
“The worst thing you want to do is do something that's not first class, where teams would come here, they'd have a bad experience and never come back. We wanted to have a wow factor, and this facility will have the wow factor.” Bill Bartleman, McCracken County CommissionerBill Bartleman, McCracken County Commissioner
“We wanted to do a first class facility,” said Bartleman. “The worst thing you want to do is do something that's not first class, where teams would come here, they'd have a bad experience and never come back. We wanted to have a wow factor, and this facility will have the wow factor.”
The former journalist turned public official said he first noted the need for a facility like this when his grandson was playing travel baseball around 20 years ago.
“It's an awful expensive project, but I think it's going to be good for the community,” he said. “Thousands of kids will be able to play at that facility.”
Brian Shemwell is a local business owner and a parent to two young daughters who play travel softball. He said, despite the high price tag, the facility is “much needed” in Paducah.
“I don't have any concern with the cost, to be honest with you,” Shemwell said. “It's going to bring a lot of people here, restaurants, hotels. I think … if you sit down and did some quick back-of-the-napkin math that you'd see how much of a shot in the arm this local economy would receive every single time we had a tournament.”
Travis Russell works as a revenue auditor for the Kentucky Department of Revenue. The 30-year-old was among a number of community members expressing frustration on social media over the high cost of the complex.
Russell grew up in McCracken County and feels that the complex will not create significant economic benefits for most people living and working in the community.
“I know it’s been the dream of a lot of people for nearly a decade to build it. A lot of communities have seen these sports complexes as like a magic bullet for quick revenue … [but] it doesn’t translate to a general economic improvement for most of the people in the city of Paducah,” Russell said. “It doesn’t create meaningful job growth. It doesn’t create, really, a condition in which people can find more middle class jobs. It really creates an economic benefit for a select group of people that are involved in traveling sports and businesses owners.”
Others still have complained about the construction shutting off access to portions of the disc golf course at Stuart Nelson Park, but officials say nearly all of the feedback they’ve received is positive.
“Every now and then I'll hear somebody raise an eyebrow and make a comment about [the cost] … but essentially, on the overall project, I have literally had zero pushback, which is quite amazing,” Bray said.
Though the pandemic may have caused the price increase, it is also providing the local governments with a potential solution: funds provided by the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).
McCracken County Commissioner Eddie Jones broke the funding sources of the project down into chunks: around $12.5 million will come from ARPA funds received by the county during the pandemic; $12.5 million will come from the City of Paducah’s bond that was originally set to go towards a project to build an aquatic center; an estimated $14 million that he said could be borrowed and debt serviced with transient room tax revenues; and $26 million in cost that the city and county will ultimately split.
Bartleman said that it’s heartening that the local government can use funds created by the pandemic to bring what he feels will be a positive change in the community.
“I wish [the pandemic] never happened, but the federal government passed out a lot of money. Without that cash, [the project’s cost] would be prohibitive,” Bartleman said of the ARPA funding at the county’s disposal. “So it's going to be paid for with a combination of cash from the city and the county of $25 million. A little less than half of it will be paid in cash that's already available.”
Jones devised a plan in 2019 to expand the transient room tax – which sees local governments take a cut of rental fees paid by people staying at local hotels, motels and other short-term accommodations like Airbnbs – to fund the project. The general idea for the project is to create a self-sustaining sports complex that brings families to the area for tournaments and “puts heads in beds” at local hotels to capture tourism and tax dollars.
Since then, the transient room tax that the City of Paducah and McCracken County share has been altered to fund not only the Paducah Convention & Visitors Bureau and the McCracken County Convention & Expo Center, but also the McCracken County Sports Tourism Commission (STC), the group steering the sports complex planning.
Deputy Judge-Executive Steve Doolittle estimates that the tax should continue to yield around $1.4 million a year, as it did in 2022 and 2023.
Doolittle said it has taken “extraordinary cooperation” between the city and county to make this project, among the biggest collaborations between the two, happen and noted that it’s survived more than one administration on each government’s part. The project – along with the new E911 communications system – reflects the beginning of what officials have deemed a new era of cooperation between the two governments.
Over the past five years, over $5.6 million has been funneled into the coffers of the STC by the tax. The volunteer-led group has put some of that money towards the design and building of the sports complex and the creation of other sports tourism revenue streams, like the movable hard court at the convention center that’s been used for volleyball, basketball and pickleball events.
Jim Dudley chairs the STC. He volunteered to join the group out of a desire to help bring a facility like this to Paducah after coaching his daughters’ travel softball teams for years and seeing what a sports complex can do for a community.
“We've been doing this for a long time, and you just see a need,” he said. “We want the ultimate experience. We want to be able to bring teams in from all over the place and be a premier travel destination.”
Sports complexes can have major economic impacts in the areas where they’re built. Elizabethtown Sports Park in central Kentucky, built in 2012, is estimated to have had more than a direct economic impact of $150 million in its first decade of operations.
“It's a pretty significant investment, use of tax dollars … and but I do think if it's well ran that the proof’s in the pudding in other communities: Elizabethtown, Owensboro, Evansville, Cape Girardeau,” Shemwell said. “I think that if it's obviously done right – and that's the easiest thing in the world to say – it will be successful.”
Dudley said this facility could outpace those numbers, with the City of Paducah estimating it could eclipse $155 million in direct economic impact the first five years it’s open. Much of that will be created by tournaments programmed by management, which will be handled by a third-party contractor in Sports Facility Companies. SFC also operates the Elizabethtown complex, in addition to dozens of others across the U.S.
Part of the facility’s strength in Dudley’s eyes will be its flexibility to support a variety of sports.
“The way we designed this complex is it's obviously for multiple sports,” he said. “We're not tied down to just diamonds with softball and baseball. We're not tied down to just soccer. We can do rugby and lacrosse, which are two of the fastest growing travel sports in the industry, as well as you can do softball, baseball, soccer and flag football.”
Officials have been vocal during this project’s development about giving local youth soccer players an alternative to the McCracken County Youth Soccer Complex, which was built on top of a closed landfill off of Coleman Road.
“We're taking 100 acres that has kind of been left behind in the city and urban growth, and we're planning this in the middle. So, to a certain degree, we're saving ourselves from maybe urban blight,” Jones said. “Best case scenario is that every other weekend there are kids out playing soccer and baseball, and they're not from here … and, at the same time, our kids have got a lot of time where they're not playing on a landfill.”
While some things about the facility are still up in the air, officials and some community members are still excited about what the facility will do for the community by giving local athletes a new facility to play at when tournaments aren’t going on.
“This park is not going to be just for the weekend travel teams that come in on Friday afternoon and stay through Sunday. Monday through Thursday this local park for local kids,” Doolittle said. “Figuring out how to make that happen … is still a little bit of a challenge. We have work to do while this thing is being built to make sure that every local kid has an opportunity to play on what is going to be a first class facility.”
Though some elements of the design could change – Clymer is hoping to raise private funding to pursue the renovation of the grandstand and Bray feels that the addition of the championship field back into the plan would be worthwhile – construction equipment is on the ground and moving at the former racetrack.
The facility is expected to be tournament-ready in the fall of 2025.
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