Grizzlies take city rent issue to public

Posted at 10:53 PM on Saturday, Oct. 17, 2009

A looming balloon payment is the driving force behind secretive stadium lease renegotiations that promise to dramatically change the troubled relationship between the Fresno Grizzlies and City Hall.

The financial pressure on the tottering Fresno Baseball Club LLC -- the Grizzlies' owner -- is so intense that team officials are asking the public to support their bid for an immense rent break at the city-owned Chukchansi Park.

Chris Cummings, a Fresno Baseball Club partner, said the team recently mailed about 10,000 fliers to registered voters in the city at an estimated cost of $3,000 to $4,000. The headline in big, bright letters: "City Officials Deserve Our Praise for Trying to Keep the Lights on at Chukchansi Park."

Grizzlies officials have said they want their $1.5 million annual stadium rent cut by $1 million.

The flier is not a threat to shut down or move the team if the Grizzlies don't get what they want, Cummings said.

"The whole purpose is to try to make sure we get as much public support as we can," Cummings said.

Council Member Lee Brand, who represents the council on a four-person City Hall negotiating team, said he won't be intimidated by the Grizzlies' appeal to voters.

"It means absolutely nothing to me," Brand said. "I'll listen to whatever people have to say. But in the end, my decision will be based on the facts."

Cash-strapped though they say they are, the Grizzlies also have hired a Southern California-based public relations firm to help with their campaign to influence City Hall. Andy Andersen, a Fresno-based partner in Passantino Andersen Communications, said he designed the flier.

The phrase "Keep the Lights On" is not meant to suggest the Grizzlies might leave town if they don't get the $1 million rent break, Andersen said. The phrase was simply an eye-catching incentive to get people to read the remainder of the flier, he said.

But the mailing is a clear signal that the stadium lease negotiations are entering a delicate phase.

The Grizzlies say they've lost more than $5 million from 2006 through 2008, and the just-completed season also was awash in red ink due to declines in attendance and corporate sponsorships.

The Grizzlies blame much of their financial woes on the stadium rent, the highest in Triple-A baseball. Team officials say they've discussed rent relief with City Hall since they bought the franchise in late 2005, but it has been only in the past year that the efforts turned serious.

Those efforts produced an amended lease in November 2008, and that's what is driving the sense of urgency in the current talks.

Lease hard to interpret

About a week before Thanksgiving 2008, the two sides signed a revised lease that tried to do the seemingly impossible: Give the Grizzlies a break without changing the $1.5 million annual rent.

The rent has been something of a sacred cow in Fresno since October 2000, when a bitterly divided City Council concluded nearly a decade of public debate by approving construction of the downtown stadium.

The decision was made politically possible only by the promise of the Fresno Diamond Group, the Grizzlies' original owner, to pay $1.5 million of the estimated $3.4 million annual bill on the construction bonds.

Stadium critics were convinced the Diamond Group's projections of the stadium's capacity to generate money were wildly inflated, and taxpayers would soon be stuck with footing most or all of the cost of providing a home for a profiting-making company.

This is why the Grizzlies and City Hall in November settled on a complex lease revision that, to this day, appears to be a source of confusion on both sides.