Columbus bond sale seals $50 million Golden Park upgrade for Double-A Braves in 2025

With a year to go and $50 million in work to do, Columbus pitched its bonds to investors Tuesday to pay for bringing Golden Park up to current Minor League Baseball standards.

Columbus City Council on Tuesday approved the $50 million bond sale in order to start upgrades on Golden Park, further clearing the way for the city to welcome an Atlanta Braves minor league affiliate. The 1920s ballpark upgrade by construction company Brasfield & Gorrie is to be done by April 2025, in time for the opening pitch in the Double-A Braves’ first season in Columbus.

The team will be moving here from Pearl, Mississippi, outside the state capital of Jackson.

Selling bonds means the city borrows the $50 million and pays interest, akin to a home mortgage. Typically investment firms buy the bonds, as they do stock.

Braves’ owner Diamond Baseball Holdings agreed to lease Golden Park for 20 years, the same span the team spent in Pearl.

The $50 million in bonds to fund the ballpark renovation also will last 20 years. The financing costs will be $4.1 million a year.

By the time the Braves decide whether to stay, at the end of the lease term, the entire cost to the taxpayers will be $82 million.

In February, council voted to start paying for the park renovation with about $2 million in sales tax money, from an ongoing tax voters in 2008 approved partly for infrastructure, but mostly for public safety, which gets 70% annually. The sales tax funds will pay interest on the bonds for the first year, as no payment on the principal is required.

Left to be decided is how the city will pay the $4.1 million a year yet to come. Raising property taxes was an option.

Citywide Councilor Judy Thomas asked about that, before council voted on the bond sale Tuesday night.

“There are some of us who will not vote for that,” she said of raising the millage rate.

Deputy City Manager Pam Hodge said the city for fiscal year 2025 will spend more than $1.8 million in sales tax money to kick off the construction, and it plans to continue using that same sales tax funding for the financing costs.

But the mayor and council cannot bind future city leaders to that pledge. First elected in 2018, Mayor Skip Henderson’s last four-year term ends in 2026. Council seats come up for election every four years.

Addressing council on the bond sale was Jon Pannell, a partner in the Savannah law firm Gray, Pannell and Woodward, and Doug Gebhardt of investment adviser Davenport & Company.

They said the best deal out of six bidders on the bonds came from Robert Baird & Co., commonly called Baird, which will underwrite the bonds at an interest rate of 5.01% per year.

The bond sale will close April 9, they said.

With Columbus’ credit given an AA rating, the bonds are considered a safe investment certain to pay off for financial institutions, money-market funds or retail brokers, they said.

Because the municipal bonds are tied to the Braves’ private use of the stadium, they will not be exempt from state or federal taxes, they said. Bonds that fund public, capital projects such as schools or other government buildings typically come with tax breaks.

The work

Golden Park was born from a sudden spurt of construction: Work crews built the first stadium in two weeks in 1926 for the opening game of the Columbus Foxes, named from their manager, Jim Fox.

The park was named for Theodore Golden, of Golden’s Foundry, who chaired the city’s recreation board. At that time the whole South Commons, more than 100 acres of public land along the Chattahoochee River south of downtown, was called Golden Park.

As part of their baseball venture, city leaders have opened that land to private investment, with proponents claiming up to $350 million could go into residential, retail and office space development, though critics dispute those projections.

Golden Park has been through many renovations over the years, but the $50 million it’s getting now is to fund a major-league face-lift.

Council earlier voted to spend $750,000 from the city’s general fund reserve to get the planning and permitting underway. Survey marks are spray-painted along the stadium borders to denote its boundaries.

A general overview of the renovation plan shows a new clubhouse, new entryway, new batting cages, fan zones and “new patron amenities” overlooking home plate.

Brasfield & Gorrie will be working with Hecht Burdeshaw Architects and Moon Meeks and Associates Inc. on the project.

Henderson has said the park must be brought up to current building standards, with handicap-accessible dugouts, larger and more modern showers, and locker rooms for women.

“And then of course they’re going to do some aesthetics to help them continue to make this a total fan experience,” he said in an interview Feb. 13. “There will probably be some open-air boxes, and they wanted I think a walk-through in the outfield.”

Brasfield & Gorrie also handled Atlanta Braves’ Truist Park, which was 1.1 million square feet at a cost of $494 million. They also handled the University of Florida’s McKeithan Field in Gainesville, which was 141,470 square feet at $54.7 million.

Diamond Baseball Holdings executive Shea Guinn, who has been speaking for the company at council meetings, told the Ledger-Enquirer Golden Park’s history was a major draw for the Braves.

The park over time has been the background for a constellation of baseball’s brightest stars. It has “great bones,” Guinn said.

“It’s what baseball originally was,” he said. “You look at that list of players that have played there. You’ve had Babe Ruth. You’ve had some of the all-time greats of baseball play there. That history is also in that stadium, and I think that’s really going to be a real important part of the design and the experience of the stadium.”