By Wayne Horne
The Joliet Slammers have a new long-term lease with the City of Joliet that extends their occupancy of the city-owned baseball stadium known as Duly Health Care Field. The current lease was due to expire next September 30,2023. The new lease extends the Slammers tenancy until September 30,2028. Rent will increase for seasons 2022-2025 to $90,000 and $105,000 in seasons 2026-2028. The naming rights agreement clause makes no mention of any revenue sharing received under the clause. The City also agrees to pay for 50 percent of all utility costs incurred by the tenants. The City must also provide for the cost of security around the stadium during home games.
This year’s Joliet city budget also provides for more than $250,000 of routine cost-related expenditures for the ballpark stadium. That does not include any capital expenditures that might be required during the term of the lease. Those include heating and air conditioning replacements, plumbing, roofing, etc. The Slammers organization also receives all income received from events held inside the ballpark in addition to Slammers baseball games.
The Slammers also have the exclusive right to negotiate any changes in the naming rights. When it comes to naming rights, Joliet has a history of granting entities that want to use Joliet’s geography but not the city’s name. The now closed Chicagoland Speedway apparently wanted to attract a broad-based demographic to pay the admission price to see NASCAR events at the track. Evidently, Jolietland Speedway didn’t resonate with the NASCAR crowd and thus a more familiar moniker included Chicago in the title.
The new Slammers lease sounds like a sweetheart deal for the baseball team’s owners but it’s not much of an advantage to the tax-paying owners of Duly Health Care Field. The baseball team has consistently drawn fewer than 3000 fans per game in years past. Taxpayers built Joliet’s version of a professional ball park with little possibility of ever getting a return on the investment. In fact, Joliet taxpayers continue to pay for the maintenance and repair costs every year. The original cost of the stadium exceeded $30 million when it was built in 2002 and has a capacity for just over 6,000 people for baseball games. Ongoing expenses have added millions of dollars to the original cost of the baseball park. In the last three and a half years alone, the City of Joliet has had expenditures for maintenance and repairs in excess of $1,000,000 and only received revenues of just under $236,000 from the Slammers organization.
The subject of selling the baseball field has come up at various times in the past but it has always been reported that there are no interested buyers. Maybe the city’s approach has been wrong in pursuing a sale of the asset. The Illinois Sports Facility Authority (ISFA) owns Guaranteed Rate Field where the White Sox play baseball. They also financed a saucer shaped addition to Soldiers Field where the Chicago Bears currently play. The ISFA is a government entity created by the Illinois General Assembly in 1987 for the purpose of constructing and renovating sports stadiums for professional sports teams in the State of Illinois. Maybe they might show an interest in buying Joliet’s asset that is expensive to own and difficult to dispose of. Probably not, but it’s worth a phone call.
Stay tuned…
Wayne Horne is a Times Weekly columnist your comments welcome at wayneswords@thetimesweekly.com
