Spokane preparing to sell Joe Albi Stadium, grounds

Spokane city officials are moving ahead this month with a plan to sell Joe Albi Stadium and 89 acres of surrounding property for as many as 700 potential new home sites.

The sale could net the city as little as $389,000 once the property’s debts and obligations are paid.

The move ends years of talk about turning the Albi grounds into an amateur sports complex, an idea that won 81 percent approval from voters in 1999. A sale would also close a 55-year history of a landmark that hosted high school, college and professional football, rock concerts, kids’ runs, band competitions and religious crusades.

Mayor Jim West wants to get out from under a yearly operating loss of $300,000 to $400,000 and put the acreage back on tax rolls, in part to free up money for police, fire and library services.

Councilman Brad Stark said he plans to submit a resolution to the full City Council this week giving the West administration authority to seek a sale. A City Council vote could come in two weeks.

The proposed sale also leaves Spokane Public Schools without a location starting in 2006 for high school football. District officials are scrambling to come up with alternative venues, but teams may be forced to play afternoon home games on existing unlit practice fields starting in 2006.

West has agreed to pay the owner of the Spokane Shadow soccer team $450,000 in two cash payments to buy out a license agreement granted to the team in 1996, the same year that the city borrowed money for $1.9 million in improvements to the field and stands.

The buyout was negotiated between the mayor’s staff and Bobby Brett, owner of the Shadow, who invested $193,000 in stadium improvements in 1996 and championed the idea of developing a large multi-use sports complex on the unimproved grounds.

“The bureaucrats basically decided, ‘We’re not doing it. We don’t care what the voters said,’ ” Brett said Tuesday about the now-abandoned idea to build a sports complex at Albi.

Brett blamed Parks Director Mike Stone for not moving ahead with the complex more than six years after voters approved it, and said his business relationship with the city has been frustrating compared with successful lease arrangements involving his minor league baseball and hockey teams at other publicly owned facilities.

In February 2004, the city Park Board voted unanimously to develop the first phase of a sports complex on 30 acres south of the stadium. It had paid a consultant $130,000 for a master plan for partial development of five large softball fields capable of attracting national competitions.

Stone has said the sports complex could have been forced to pay for traffic improvements on Wellesley Avenue and Assembly Street at a cost of $500,000 or more. He said in a memo last October that the project would cost nearly $5 million to complete.

The city had about $3.5 million derived from a voter-approved sale of 30 acres of park property near Northpointe shopping center to Wal-Mart in 1999. That money was set aside for a sports complex, which under the ballot measure, was to be built at Albi.

It is not clear if the parks department needs voter approval to spend that money elsewhere. Albi and its surrounding acreage are not owned by the park system, so the sale is not subject to voter approval like the Northpointe property was in 1999.

West said one idea is to improve a separate chunk of park land northeast of the stadium along Assembly Street on park property not proposed for sale.

“It kind of depends on what the neighborhood wants,” West said.

Dick Carson, a leader in the Northwest Neighborhood Association, said, “I wish they wouldn’t” sell Albi. Residents near the stadium did not favor a sports complex but would support walking trails and other community facilities there.

West first proposed the sale of Albi in May 2004 and said the city could build a smaller-scale stadium and sports complex at the site of the former Playfair Race Course, which the city purchased in 2004.

Proceeds from the sale of Albi would go to pay off nearly $1.4 million in bonds sold for the field and other city improvements in 1996. After Brett is compensated for his license agreement and the bonds are retired, the city would be left with a net gain of $389,000 based on an appraised $2.3 million value of the property.

In addition, the stadium needs new artificial turf at a cost of about $750,000 as well as other maintenance work.

Councilwoman Cherie Rodgers said she believes the city should wait to sell Albi until 2011 when Brett’s license agreement to operate the Shadow soccer team expires.

She said she agrees with Brett that parks officials did not want to spend money at Albi. “I always thought they wanted to spend the money somewhere else, not at Albi,” she said.

Rodgers said Brett had intriguing ideas for developing and marketing a variety of sports events at the Albi grounds.

Mark Anderson, associate superintendent for Spokane schools, said district officials believed the city would continue to operate Albi for several more years, but was told a few months ago that high school teams would no longer play there beginning in 2006.

The district has not set aside money for developing a football stadium elsewhere. Practice fields do not have lighting for evening games.

Anderson said district officials are studying options and expected to have a report for the school board by this fall. He said a stadium at the old Playfair site is one idea.

The Albi Stadium arrangement between the school district and the city was part of a long-standing joint use agreement in which parks and schools have shared facilities as a way to benefit taxpayers. That agreement may need to be re-evaluated, Anderson said.

Albi Stadium opened in 1950 as Memorial Stadium and was renamed in 1962 following the death of local attorney Joe Albi, longtime president of the Athletic Round Table, which raised money for the stadium.

In 1962, the stadium was expanded to hold big time Pacific Coast League college football. It hosted a handful of professional football exhibition games.

During World War II, the property was turned over to the federal government for construction of Baxter General, a U.S. Army hospital that treated 14,000 patients from 1943 through 1945. The existing Veterans Affairs Medical Center was built in 1948. Much of the Baxter land was returned to the city the same year.