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Montgomery County looks to land a minor league team
By ZACHARY LEVINE
Copyright 2010 Houston Chronicle
March 10, 2010, 7:10AM
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Just weeks after Sugar Land entered an exclusive negotiating window with a developer to bring minor league baseball to Fort Bend County, another effort is afoot to give Greater Houston an additional baseball option.
The East Montgomery County Improvement District signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ventura Sports Group and Sugar Land-based Wallace Bajjali Development Partners to build a stadium in Montgomery County with the intention of hosting independent minor league baseball in 2012.
The site would be in Porter just off the U.S. 59 feeder road near the proposed intersection with the Grand Parkway extension.
According to the parties involved, the ballpark — located on 42 acres of land purchased by Wallace Bajjali — would be part of a larger development, which could feature a hotel, dining and retail.
"We bought this land knowing it was a growth corridor," said David Wallace, CEO of Wallace Bajjali and former mayor of Sugar Land.
With the land in place and the county interested, the search eventually commenced for a developer for the ballpark. The company selected was Ventura Sports Group, the owner and operator of independent teams in El Paso and Grand Prairie and their ballparks.
"Those are the type of venues that we like and would be a good fit for this area," EMCID president Frank McCrady said.
Ventura was a runner-up in the selection process for the Sugar Land site.
"The Houston market, being the largest market without minor league baseball, has been on our radar for a long time," Ventura managing partner Mark Schuster said.
The project is a mix of private funds with public money, which McCrady said could come from a parking tax, a venue tax and/or a sales tax.
Like in the Sugar Land plan, the first pitch will not be thrown by any major league club’s prospect. Only independent leagues will be considered.
The Astros declined to waive their right to block an affiliated team from moving into their metropolitan area in the Sugar Land case.
"We had heard time and time again that the Astros were not interested, so we didn’t approach them," Schuster said.
All signs seem to point to the American Association as the league in question.
It has teams within manageable bus distances from Greater Houston, and its 96-game schedule is attractive to Wallace Bajjali, which wants the ballpark to be available for high school and college use as well as other sporting events and concerts.
Of the leagues with a Texas presence, "the American Association is the strongest and is the logical choice," said Joseph Esch, the Wallace Bajjali director of economic development and public policy.
American Association commissioner Miles Wolff would "absolutely" be interested in expanding his league, which includes the Ventura-owned Texas teams as well as ones in Fort Worth and Shreveport, La., to Montgomery County.
"It’s all preliminary right now," Wolff said. "They have not made any formal application to the league."
Groundbreaking on the site is set for this year and all parties in the memorandum of understanding are optimistic about a 2012 start.
"If we break ground by the end of the year, we can have it done and giving ballpark tours with four or five months to spare," Schuster said.
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