Enjoying some crackerjacks, stretching during the seventh inning and throwing back a home run ball from the rival Idaho Falls Chukars baseball team could soon become a reality for Pocatello area baseball fans.

During a public hearing Tuesday, the Bannock County Commission discussed using federal stimulus money and partnering with Jeff L. Eiseman of the Georgia-based Azalea Sports Ventures and Agon Sports & Entertainment to construct a $20 million multi-use sports facility that could serve as the new home for an MLB-partnered minor league baseball team.

Eiseman, who purchased the Pioneer League’s Boise Hawks franchise in 2014 with business partner Chris Schoen, spoke to the Bannock County Commission for about 40 minutes Tuesday about the potential for the Pioneer League to expand with a team in Pocatello and the construction of a new stadium.

“There have been discussions back and forth for a while now between Commissioner (Terrel) Tovey and Mr. Eiseman about a baseball stadium here in Pocatello with a potential expansion team from the Pioneer League,” Bannock County Commissioner Jeff Hough said during the meeting. “But I think we are at a point now where we can have a serious discussion about potentially using some ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funds to explore something like this.”

THE MONEY

President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act into law in March 2021. It provided $350 billion in funding for state and local governments impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, with counties receiving $65 billion allocated based on each county’s population.

Bannock County received about $17 million in ARPA funds. To date, Hough says all of the money has been earmarked except for $3 million which the county intends to save and use in the event other ARPA-designated projects need additional capital.

Bannock County’s potential ARPA fund expenditures include investing about $3 million into the Bannock County Wellness Complex and Event Center for sewer improvements and for concert promotion and operations, Hough said.

“The county intends to take over the promotions and operations of concerts in the future,” Hough added.

Another $1 million will be invested into an ambulance bay at the McCammon fire station and approximately $2 million is being used as startup funds for a partnership with Idaho State University to build the East Idaho Forensic Pathology Center, which will provide badly needed forensic and autopsy services for 17 East Idaho counties.

Hough says the County Commission on Dec. 9 will vote to approve earmarking $8 million in ARPA funds for the construction of a $20 million multi-use sports facility in the Pocatello area. Eiseman and the three county commissioners — Hough, Tovey and Ernie Moser — made it clear during their Tuesday meeting that Bannock County’s investment, both in the long and short term, would remain fixed at $8 million.

“What we’ve talked about is about a $20 million build for the stadium and the county using up to $8 million of the ARPA funds to help fund that,” Hough said during the meeting. “A lot of the funding would come from the 20-year contract from the team.”

Eiseman added, “What I was looking to do was pledge $150,000 a year in base rent and another $150,000 per year for (stadium) naming rights, which are unsold at the moment.”

That $300,000 would be paid annually to the county over the course of what would be a 20-year lease, Eiseman told the commissioners.

“That’s $6 million toward this project, which also would be among the higher rents in baseball,” Eiseman said about how much the county would be paid during the lease.

Hough told the Journal following the Tuesday meeting the county is exploring investment opportunities for what would initially be a $12 million investment that would recoup $6 million over the 20-year stadium lease and naming rights contract. The county isn’t ready to disclose the potential investment partners, Hough added.

Additionally, Eiseman said his camp would handle the ongoing maintenance and operations of the stadium for the length of the lease, capitalizing on initial warranties for equipment and machinery and then extending them.

“We’re going to be at the building 365 (days of the year),” Eiseman said. “We’re taking care of the routine maintenance and we shouldn’t have many things that go awry in that building. We want to try to make this a non-expense item for the community. From a maintenance standpoint, I’m going to be employing people to operate that building 24/7.”

PIONEER LEAGUE HISTORY

Tovey said during Tuesday’s meeting he had his first conversations with Eiseman in July 2021 about an expansion of the Pioneer League — an independent baseball league that operates in the Rocky Mountain region of the United States and is home to 10 teams, including both the Boise Hawks and Idaho Falls Chukars.

While Pocatello is currently home to the Gate City Grays — a semi-pro baseball team that’s part of the independent Northern Utah League — as well as Idaho State University’s athletic programs, Eiseman said the city lacks what he described as a professional sports environment.

“From a geographical perspective, I found (Pocatello) to be one of the better spots that’s very central to lots of the different clubs around the (Pioneer League) and would create a lot of central rivalries,” Eiseman said. “Although Idaho State University has a varied athletic department with teams that are participating in lots of different sports, there isn’t a (local) professional sports environment in the marketplace that brings the community together.”

The Pocatello Cardinals, an affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals, were actually one of the original six teams to join the Pioneer League when it was first launched in 1939. The late Jack Halliwell, the namesake for the Pocatello baseball stadium on Alameda Road that’s home to the Grays, was instrumental in launching the Pioneer League. Other iterations of Pocatello’s Pioneer League team, which ultimately left the area in 1993, included the A’s, Bannocks, Chiefs, Gems, Giants and Pioneers, with various Major League Baseball team affiliations.

Eiseman has a successful track record as a baseball executive. He and Schoen established Agon Sports and Entertainment in 2012 as a holding company and management entity to oversee minor league sports opportunities, according to an article published by Minor League Baseball. Agon purchased the Augusta Greenjackets, the Class-A South Atlantic League affiliate of the San Francisco Giants located in Georgia, in November of 2012, Eiseman said during Tuesday’s meeting with the commissioners.

Eiseman spent 20 years in various management capacities for Mandalay Sports Entertainment and Ripken Baseball, according to the Minor League Baseball article. Under his previous leadership, the Aberdeen IronBirds — a minor league baseball team based in Aberdeen, Maryland — sold out every game over a 10-year period.

“Aberdeen, Maryland, is where Cal Ripken Jr., baseball Hall of Famer, is from,” Eiseman said. “It’s a city of 14,000 people…. When you start really breaking it down, you start finding out that really I got about 100,000 people in a radius that I got to get to this ballpark, and it’s 6,400 seats. I think I was hired because I made promises that I had to keep. I had a game plan for selling out of a 6,400-seat stadium, but I also had four and a half months to do it.... Not only did we sell out every single game that we played, we had a waitlist for season tickets of over 1,200 people. We sold out every single game for 10 straight years (in) a market that shouldn’t have even had professional baseball.”

THE POSSIBILITIES

While the proposed stadium could serve as the home for a Pocatello team in the Pioneer League, it’s envisioned as much more than a ballpark. Hough says the county has described it as a multi-use facility because the county anticipates being able to host numerous sporting events on the field, including soccer, lacrosse and football.

“I don’t want to call it a baseball stadium because that’s just one aspect of what this building can do,” Eiseman said. “The baseball team will be a tenant, a host inside this building, but this is an outdoor event center. I see things like additional types of concerts or festivals that would go on there and all kinds of sports. The facility will be designed so that it can host soccer, rugby and lacrosse. It can host all kinds of rectangular sports, including football.”

Eiseman added, “It might not be one of the larger venues for high school football in the state. But nonetheless, it could have some appeal for the lower classifications to host some games and things along those lines. This is a community asset but it also should be a place where people can congregate.”

Bannock County must have all of its $17 million in ARPA funds obligated toward projects by Dec. 31, 2024, and the money must be spent no later than Dec. 31, 2026.

If the County Commission this month approves earmarking the money for the new multi-use sports facility, at least $8 million would be spent well ahead of that deadline.

“My goal here, and again some of this is how quickly everything comes about, but the league would like to start (in Pocatello on) opening day in May of 2024,” Eiseman said.

Tovey, who lost his re-election bid earlier this year, said he is hopeful the County Commission approves the stadium funding before his term in office expires in January.

“I have six weeks left before I’m gone… and so I would say we need to do everything in our power to make this happen,” Tovey said. “Because if not, we just need to be complacent and understand the jobs will not come to Pocatello. They will go to Idaho Falls and we all better just get ready to have good commuter cars and go shopping up there.”