The great benefits of Spirit Homes are five-fold: building size, price, ceiling heights, column spacing, and surrounding land.

Transcription

1 From: To: Cc: Subject: Date: Attachments: Mayor City Council Steve Ibbotson The Case for Spirit Homes Monday, April 20, :03:54 PM PARKS What if - Spirit Homes.docx City Council, I am putting into writing the case for Spirit Homes. The basic case will be presented in this . The case will be fleshed out over a series of s that I will send you this week. I will include spread sheets, graphs, and numbers in upcoming s for your consideration. I hope to make the case and will certainly reach out and be available by phone to answer questions. To get started, I want us to remember what is possible. I have included an attachment of photos from the Vision presentation at our council retreat in early Please remember that everything depicted in those photographs can be included in an ultimate build out of Spirit Homes at the same time! That is our opportunity! I also want you to know the full Chamber of Commerce Board did not take a position on Spirit Homes. The full board didn t even know the Executive Committee had sent a letter of concern. Even Chamber Chairman, Jay Myers, stated that the Executive Committee had not heard a presentation with the level of details I gave the full Chamber Board last Thursday evening. Even though the full board did not endorse or oppose or even express concern over the proposal to purchase Spirit Homes, there was considerable interest intermingled with questions. To help them, the public, and you, here are the answers to many of those questions The great benefits of Spirit Homes are five-fold: building size, price, ceiling heights, column spacing, and surrounding land. Spirit Homes is huge. At 220,000 square feet the building can almost accommodate everything the city could imagine in its interior. The building could hold six different 50 meters pools at the same time. We don t have to use all the space at once. We could build in phases. However, its size allows us to imagine and plan many facilities and activities that we would never build indoor new anywhere else in the next generation. Just for example, would we build indoor tennis complex? Indoor and new? No, probably not. We d build outdoor for sure but not indoor. At Spirit Homes what we wouldn t do otherwise becomes affordable. How affordable? Spirit Homes is priced at less than $16 per square foot. $16 per square foot and all the surrounding land would be FREE. $16 per square foot and 17 acres of free land. We couldn t build a building pad, a five inch ground slab, and a structural shell with roof and walls that size for anywhere close to $16 per square foot and getting all the surrounding land for free. Spirit Homes ceiling heights start at 20 feet on the outside walls ranging well over that through most the building up to a maximum of 40 feet. This allows the needed clearance and great flexibility for a huge range of activities.

2 Spirit Homes column spacing allows the clear spans to also make possible a great list of activities under roof AND clear of columns. Swimming, tennis, basketball, indoor turf fields, even ice skating and auditoriums without having to dodge columns. That is not to mention the unstructured activities such as indoor playgrounds, roller skating, skateboarding, walking paths, ropes courses, climbing walls, trampoline parks, etc., etc., etc. Spirit Homes also does have acres of surrounding land - land that at other places will probably cost considerably more. This land is critical for providing parking. Parking is the biggest single complaint at our new parks. For the regional draw that some of these structured and unstructured activities and facilities can provide, this parking will be critical. It s the regional scale parking associated with this regional scale facility that diminishes our chances of copying this opportunity elsewhere. But here; here at Spirit Homes, it can be done for cheap land prices. Now for the How To! I have described to you that we can do it with available funds, potentially not even using all our funds even though I don t prefer to limit ourselves to this way. I will show you this on a graph. I will show you other ways to fund it ways we can do it and preserve even more of our funds for other park initiatives. I will show you that much of the operating costs can be generated by daily use fees just like they currently are at existing facilities in Arkansas cities. Real fees, real customers, real cities, right here in Arkansas. The closer to break even and even making money we get, the more I can guarantee more park capital money for use in other areas. Some A&P monies are available to bridge the gap between daily fees and operating expenses. (I hope you understand that the $3.6 million dollar number I quoted is for full build out operations of a huge, high end facility that we would not build at first, for amenities we probably wouldn t include (computer labs?), staffed to a greater degree than we would staff and that alone represents a 26% increase over our ENTIRE 2015 Parks budget?) I will show you that the city could sell-off three one acre lots across the Dave Ward Drive frontage of the property of course, still keeping plenty of land for parking; of course, AFTER we build the attraction behind these lots sell-off three one acre lots for over $1.8 million dollars priced at 2009 prices. That would mean we would have bought the building for $7.55 a square foot and the land for free. I will show you we can buy Spirit Homes, make our first payment at the end of the first year of financing (in 2016) and in the next two years (2015 & 2016) still have over $3.4 million for OTHER parks projects. That is without any additional Parks Impact Fees paid in the next two years; without any Parks Voluntary Property Taxes paid in the next two years; without realizing any A&P growth this year (although we re already up $119,000 for the first two months this year.) I will also show you we can save more than $700,000 plus this year on our big parks bond if we

3 rededicate it this year realizing rates saving like Conway Corp did last week. Yes, rededicating the big bond this year is possible for interest rate savings of over $700,000 in the next two years AND we can rededicate it again as early as 2016 to realize new large amounts of capital money for a first phase of Spirit Homes. $700,000. In total, I will show you how in the next two years alone without additional impact fees or property taxes or growth in A&P for OTHER parks projects we can have close to $4.4 million dollars. And still buy and make our first payment on Spirit Homes. $4.4 million dollars for OTHER parks. $3.4 million for sure! I will send out more s this week backing up these statements. I hope you read them carefully and consider them. This is a great opportunity I don t want the city to miss. Ask any question at any time.

4

5

6