SAN ANTONIO – There may not be any designs yet, but the San Antonio Missions’ dream of a downtown, minor league baseball stadium is rounding the baseball diamond toward reality.
But while the plans are moving forward, they aren’t yet safe at home.
The San Diego Padres’ Double-A affiliate, though, is displaying confidence. A week after a key city council vote, the Missions announced they had hired international design and architectural firm Populous to design the new stadium. The club hopes to have design renderings to share by mid-summer.
Speaking with a partner and board member of the Missions ownership group, Designated Bidders, it wasn’t clear if the club’s hiring of the design firm came before or after the council vote.
“I can’t remember the exact date of the hiring, but until we were really sure we had what we needed to go forward, that’s when we made our decision‚" Cohen told KSAT in a Friday interview at the team’s current home on the far West Side, Nelson Wolff Municipal Stadium.
In a Thursday news release, the team also called a tentative deal with the San Antonio Independent School District to acquire the final piece of property for the stadium a “key milestone” that prompted them to move ahead with programming and design.
While it’s true that district trustees agreed to the broad strokes of a deal in December, the deal still isn’t done four months later.
“We cannot provide an update as we are still in contract negotiations,” SAISD spokeswoman Laura Short told KSAT in an email Thursday.
Cohen, though, says he’s not worried.
“There’s no drama there, we’re just getting paperwork drafted, and it takes a while to get the papering done on a process like that,” he said.
The $160 million, 4,500-seat stadium will be largely funded by bonds through the newly created San Pedro Creek Development Authority and a $34 million equity contribution from Designated Bidders.
The bonds will be repaid through a combination of $1 million annual lease payments, $2 ticket fees and property tax revenue funneled through the Houston Street Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone (TIRZ).
The TIRZ money is expected to be largely generated by new projects built by the team’s developer partner, Weston Urban, whose co-founders, Randy Smith and Graham Weston, are also part of the Mission’s ownership group.
Some of the development plans include demolishing the 381-unit Soap Factory apartments. The loss of a rare low-cost housing option in downtown has been one of the most controversial elements of the plan.
“One of the things that’s important about these new ballparks that you see around the country in downtown areas is that there’s a lot of development around it,” Cohen said. “There’ll be a lot of activity with businesses, hotels, bars, restaurants, shops coming up, and that’s what’s going to make that part of that quadrant of downtown really sizzle."
Part of the downtown move is due to the aging Wolff Stadium. Built in 1994, it doesn’t meet current Major League Baseball facility standards.
Designated Bidders, which acquired the team in November 2022, wants to build new rather than renovate.
“So it was always our intent to have a downtown ballpark and do something that was very transformational,” Cohen said.
The Missions’ current home has limitations because of its age, he told KSAT.
“Most of what would be needed to update the stadium would be square footage-related, and when you start talking about that you’re talking about millions and millions of dollars,” Cohen said. “And the feeling was we could we could do things with a brand new ballpark state-of-the-art that would appeal to fans as well.”
The Missions have trumpeted the proposed stadium as “a ballpark poised to become a cherished community asset for generations to come.”
But they have to win the game to build it first.