Big League Dreams: Going, Going, Gone?

City officials are recommending that Hercules abandon plans for building a “” ballpark and attempt to recoup a portion of the nearly $2 million that has already been spent on the project. 

A staff report likely to be discussed at the March 8 meeting of the City Council concludes that the plan for building a six-field stadium next to the Conoco-Phillips carbon plant off Highway 4 was “fundamentally flawed, and should have been recognized as such when it was conceived.” 

The oil company, which owns the 40 acres targeted for the ball fields, has been “adamantly opposed” to the project since its inception and said as much in meetings with former Hercules City Manager Mike Sakamoto almost two years ago, the report says.   

Sakamoto had officially retired from the city at that point, but he continued to steer key public projects, including the annexation proposals, through the auspices of NEO (Nelson E. Oliva) Consulting. When Oliva assumed Sakamoto’s seat at the helm of city government, he announced that he had sold the consulting firm to his two daughters. 

Accounting records show that taxpayers have spent almost $2 million on the project to date, but that’s a conservative figure that doesn’t account for what Sakamoto was presumably paid for his role as a “consultant” to the city manager’s office. 

“NEO has refused to provide records for how they disbursed the payments made to them by the City and Agency,” the staff report says. 

The staff report recommending the city cancel its agreements with Big League Dreams was prepared by Charlie Long, who as an interim city manager last year during the few months Oliva was off on medical leave. Long was in December, soon after that there was not enough money in the city’s general fund to continue paying for basic city services. 

But in the revolving door of the city’s administration, Long was a month later to manage the city’s faltering Bayfront development and later tasked with answering questions from Patch about expenditures on the Big League Dreams ball field project. 

The plan, approved by the council in 2008, was for Hercules to finance the construction of six lighted ball fields—three of them to be replicas of famous parks like Yankee Stadium—with a field house, two children’s playgrounds, an eight-station batting cage, food and booze concessions and more. Big League Dreams runs similar parks in Manteca, Redding and nine other cities, but its contracts vary. 

Oxnard, for example, recently opted to cancel its agreement with the franchise in an attempt to recoup the $400,000 licensing fee.  But unlike Hercules, Oxnard had not yet signed a consulting agreement with the operator. 

The city of Hercules, on the other hand, has paid Big League Dreams $720,000 in consulting fees for services ranging from “conceptualization” to advice on environmental roadblocks like traffic problems and even help in selecting furniture and other things for the park. 

But none of that ever happened, because the idea never got past the very first stage of acquiring a piece of land on which to build the ball field.  The land eyed for the ballpark is not even within the city limits, so it would have to be annexed from the county as a first step. 

The consulting contract was signed in 2008 before any formal annexation proposal had even been submitted to the county. It would have allowed the city to back out after paying Big League Dreams $90,000 over the first three months, but that never happened either.  

The most that taxpayers can hope to recoup at this point is $450,000, the license fee paid in 2008 to use the “Big League Dreams” name and logo. 

The staff report also suggests canceling the city’s contract with Tom Koch, a political consultant who has been paid $138,000 to help garner the necessary support for annexing the land needed for the ball field. Koch’s contract is for $6,000 a month, the same as the retainer City Attorney Mick Cabral is paid. 

“Koch has developed a strategy to include the Rodeo Gateway senior apartments in the annexation proposal, thus making the annexation area 'inhabited' and making it subject to a vote of the residents,” Long wrote in his report. “Whether this way of coercing the ConocoPhillips land into the City would have worked is quite doubtful given the other legal and political remedies that the company could pursue.” 

Koch, once an aide to former Contra Costa Supervisor Tom Powers, is also eligible to receive a $100,000 bonus if the annexation is approved, regardless of whether or not he is working for the city at the time. 

Even if the city could overcome the “very long odds” of annexing the 40 acres and buying it from ConocoPhillips, staff would still be faced with the of financing the project, the report says. 

Almost $1.5 million may have been “wasted” on what was an “ill-conceived” project, according to the report.  But it goes on to say that while ConocoPhillips might be opposed to baseball diamonds in its back yard, it is not opposed to any form of development in its supposed buffer. It says the oil company might be open to discussing compatible development on the rolling hills west of the plant that could create new jobs and, presumably, tax revenue.

Bob Porterfield contributed to this report.

Clarification: This story was updated after originally published. The headline and first paragraph were changed to reflect that the report on Big League Dreams recommends the project be abandoned, not simply put on hold.