Voters handed bad news to developer of Boise’s proposed stadium. Now he’s doing this
Faced with bad news from Boise voters, the developer of the proposed $50 million Boise baseball and soccer stadium has changed his mind and decided not to buy the West End property he sought. That ends any chance that a stadium will be built there.
Atlanta developer Chris Schoen, of Greenstone Properties, isn’t saying what he will do next. But he may try to persuade Ada County to let him build it on the Expo Idaho site in Garden City, where the Boise Hawks, which Schoen co-owns, already play at the aging Memorial Stadium.
Meanwhile, the owner of the West End site, Los Angeles developer Casey Lynch, is reviving plans he had set in motion in 2017 to build apartments and retail shops there. Lynch put those plans on hold to cooperate with Mayor David Bieter as Bieter backed Schoen’s plan for the stadium.
Neither Schoen nor Lynch returned telephone calls seeking comment this week. An email to Lynch generated a reply saying he was out for the holiday week. A Boise spokesman for Schoen said Greenstone had no comment.
But Ada County Commission Chairwoman Kendra Kenyon said two associates of Schoen met with her in mid-November to ask about the county’s plans for the 240-acre Expo Idaho site, where the Hawks have a 50-year, $1-per-year lease on Memorial Stadium. The county is setting up a citizens advisory committee to explore options for the site.
“They did reach out to me,” Kenyon said by phone. “I told them we’re going to take this out for community engagement with the citizen advisory committee ... That’s all I told them, that we’re going through this process.”
Kenyon said one of the associates — Jeff Eiseman, a partner of Schoen’s in Agon Sports and Entertainment, the Hawks’ company — sent her his resume to consider for a seat on the advisory committee. While Kenyon said she advised Eiseman that he could do that, she said the commissioners probably will not appoint him because of his business interest in developing a stadium. He could make presentations to the committee, though.
Schoen (pronounced shane) and Eiseman bought the minor-league Hawks baseball team in 2015 through Agon. They want to give players a better place to play and fans a better experience, and they want to use the stadium as a springboard to private development nearby. In 2017, they began to seek a site and public financing for a new stadium.
Their first site, a former Kmart store and parking lot at Americana Boulevard and Shoreline Drive, drew vocal opposition. In July 2018, Greenstone abandoned plans to buy it. Four months later, Schoen bought from Lynch an option — the right to buy, before a specified date — a 6-acre cluster of vacant parcels bordered by Main Street on the north, Fairview Avenue on the south, Whitewater Park Boulevard on the west and 27th Street on the east.
That land is ripe for development. Lynch, in fact, had signed a development agreement with Bieter two years earlier to build apartments there. The agreement requires at least 50 residential units, including at least 10 for people earning less than 80% of the area’s median income. Lynch told the Statesman in November that he would build 200 to 300 apartments.
Schoen’s plan was to build the stadium there instead and put up multifamily and commercial buildings around it. Soccer was part of the plan: Last January, Agon acquired a professional soccer franchise whose team members could play at the stadium. Concerts and other events could be held there, too.
But Schoen’s plans faced one obstacle after another.
The Legislature restricted the use of urban-renewal funds Schoen hoped to tap. Boise State University, which is bringing back baseball, said it would not be a tenant. City voters in November overwhelmingly enacted an ordinance to put any such stadium up for a citywide election, and in December they defeated Bieter, who championed it, and elected Lauren McLean, who said she had higher priorities.
Schoen’s option expires at the end of this year. A Lynch representative told the city Planning and Development Services Department on Dec. 5 that Schoen no longer planned to buy the site, according to a departmental email obtained by the Idaho Statesman in a public records request. The email was first reported by the Idaho Press.
Lynch told the Statesman in November that if Schoen didn’t buy his site, “we have every intention to immediately restart our mixed-use development plan, a phased project with housing, retail and potentially other uses.”
Lynch has begun to do that, according to the email, by requesting a change in his 4-year-old development agreement to relocate a road that the agreement requires be built by next summer.
Meanwhile, the Expo Idaho site awaits — and it comes with no requirement that a stadium receives voter approval. And Schoen must build a stadium somewhere or risk losing the soccer franchise.
Other developers besides Schoen may be interested in the Expo Idaho site, though. The land has been eyed for possible urban development for more than a decade.
Kenyon said the county commissioners seek a vision for the future of the entire 240-acre parcel, which includes the Western Idaho Fair and the out-of-business Les Bois horse-racing track.
“This is an important piece of property, and there’s one shot at doing it right,” she said.
This story was originally published December 28, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
