The Palm Coast City Council is embarking on an ambitious plan to explore and perhaps develop and finance, in a private-public partnership, an enormous sports complex on the west side of the yet-undeveloped city. A consultant encouraging the project is projecting rosy figures that would not mortgage tax dollars yet yield ample profits while drawing up to 250,000 athletes and spectators a year.
The figures are speculative and do not easily stand up to scrutiny, but the council is excited about the prospect of such a complex, especially as it faces serious needs in field expansions.
Palm Coast has a deficit in playing fields so severe that its vaunted Sports Alliance, which manages the fields, had to stop accepting new members. Alliance coordinators “do not accept new groups into the alliance because we are out of field capacity,” Chief of Staff Jason De Lorenzo said at a community meeting Wednesday.
Palm Coast has 25 fields, 11 of them lit. Sixteen of the fields are at Indian Trails Sports Complex. The rest are scattered between four neighborhood parks.
Last December the Palm Coast City Council voted to spend $113,000 to study the feasibility and economic impact of a vast, $93 million sports complex in the currently undeveloped west side of the city. Synergy Sports Global, a sports consulting firm that’s developed more than two dozen sports complexes around the country, presented its analysis to the council earlier this month, obviously recommending the construction of more fields, but also indoor facilities.
The presentation on Feb. 13 was focused on cost, economic-benefit projections and funding options. The consultant found the $93 million estimate solid, along with a plan for 20 fields–16 turf, four grass–plus an outdoor stadium and an indoor facility of 112,000 square feet on 180 acres. “The indoor facility may be somewhat inadequate for hosting more of a regional sports offering. You may want to add leasable spaces, community spaces,” Jason Boudrie, Synergy’s owner, said.
“Palm Coast is a great place to put something like this,” he said. “It’s not a major market. When we talk to a lot of organizers, folks that organize tournaments and meets and things like that, one of the things that we hear a lot is–man we do not want to go to Atlanta again, we don’t want to go to Orlando again. We don’t want to go to Tampa. Yeah, those are all great markets for sports, but they’re crowded, it’s hard to get in and out. There’s just so much going on. And so Palm Coast has the foundational structures that’s necessary for this, access to thoroughfares, close proximity to airports.”
Boudrie’s analysis is based on what Palm Coast looks and drives like today. The unspoken logical flaw in that thinking is that Orlando before Disney was once smaller than Lakeland or Palm Coast are today, making it an ideal spot for what it became–snarls included. The more Palm Coast grows, as it is projected to (as its policy makers are wanting it to), the less Boudrie’s analysis holds true, especially when he describes Palm Coast as “a small community with a big reach.” That smallness is clearly waning. A $93 million mega sports complex would accelerate that trend rather than recall “a small community.”
“We feel like the economic impact of the region is low,
“We determined through our financial modeling that the revenues of the facility can support its operating expenses,” he said. “If through our programming recommendations and our modeling, we can show that cash flows can sustain operating expenses, then it’s really a win win for the community and for regional sports tourism.” He did not elaborate.
First, the complex would have to be financed and built. He proposed four funding options. One is to issue bonds, which the city would have to finance, the same way that government bonds pay for courthouses, government buildings and roads. The financing is tax-supported.
Another is to fund it through the capital improvement budget. It’s not clear if Boudrie had a look at Palm Coast’s capital budgets. This year’s capital projects add up to $129,000. But almost $120 million of that is not discretionary, while recreation’s capital budgets fluctuate from $3 to $7 million annually. A $93 million facility could not quite be funded through that mechanism alone.
The third option is to yield land to a developer and have the developer build the complex–and operate it. But that “inherently excludes the community,” Boudrie said, while developers are not good at running sports complexes, he said. “The community becomes excluded and it becomes an elitist kind of facility, charging the highest rates possible for access, and it typically will leave out community members that want to use it for quality of life.”
Boudrie, of course, had designed the presentation to lead to his favored option, “which of the 30 or so projects that we are consulting on now, almost all of them are following this pathway.” That would be a public-private partnership based on a “municipality lease.” The city would provide land, some money, some tax credits. The private side would develop the facility, providing the remainder of required capital. And that private entity ends up operating the facility, and cashing in on it. The city would be the lease holder.
“With the city as the master lease holder, it guarantees quality of life amenities for the community,” Boudrie said. “And then it provides the opportunity for the private side to program it to bring in the economic impact and the sports tourism benefits from it. And so it truly is the balance of both of those worlds. It’s externally operated, and most of these operators they work on on a fee plus incentive basis. With these type of facilities, we generally do not recommend that Parks and Rec or things like that manage these facilities.”
Boudrie does not appear to have been familiar with Palm Coast’s experience with just the type of arrangement he was describing. That arrangement was in place for both the Palm Harbor Golf Club and the city’s tennis center. It was not a good experience. The city lost millions of dollars–until Parks and Recreations took over. It isn’t clear why Parks and Recreation could not replicate at the west side sports complex what it does at the Indian Trails Sports Complex, or now at the Southern Recreation Center.
“The private side again, is very well versed at going out and securing tournaments, bringing in events working with TDC [the Tourist Development Center] working with other events holders and naming rights donors to really run it as a business where the community focus,” he said. But the city’s Sports Alliance, in conjunction with the TDC, has been doing exactly that, rather seamlessly, transparently, and without having the overlay of a private company looking both to recover its capital costs and to make a profit on the back of tournaments and community users. The municipal lease calls for revenue from the facility to be returned to the city–but only after the private side recovers its operating expenses and “lease service.”
“Of the four options this is by and large, the best option in these large capital projects,” Boudrie said. “We’re not going to put ourselves our partners out there. You know, put our necks on the line to bring all this capital in if it’s not going to be supported by its own revenues.” He illustrated his point with what he described as a $90 million, 100-acre project in Odessa, Texas, with 10 soccer fields, 10 ballfields and an indoor facility, plus splash park and amphitheater. (The Texas Tribune last September described it as costing “roughly $70 million,” while “the sports center’s most recent design includes 30 pickleball courts, 20 volleyball courts, 10 hardwood courts, a portable 200-meter banked competition track, fitness centers, conference rooms, offices, a concession area, a cafe and a retailer. An exterior area of the center includes 12 fields for soccer, football and lacrosse, and up to eight softball and baseball fields.”
Odessa fronted $2 million in taxpayer money and raised $5 million from investors, including $1 million from Houston-based Occidental Petroleum.
“Synergy Sports agreed to inject the capital required to see the construction through,” The Tribune reported. “It plans to lease the space to a nonprofit foundation established by the city council, which also appointed the foundation’s board of directors. The foundation will accept donations while co-managing the sports complex alongside RADDSports, a development company that helps cities run large-scale sporting facilities. RADDSports has helped fund the project.”
Jason Boudrie said the same can be replicated in Palm Coast. But his presentation then went into the speculative.
Cost and funding options are tangible numbers that can be calculated at today’s prices in today’s environment. Economic-benefit projections are not. They fall in a different category of speculation and dubious methods equivalent to projecting rainfall 10 or 15 years hence. Politicians and chambers of commerce love them, because it gives them cover to greenlight expensive projects. Economists and more evidence-based analysts don’t, and warn of economic-impact projections’ flaws. (See examples from copious research about the risks and problems with economic-impact “studies” here, here, here, here and here.)
Journalists especially are warned to approach such analyses with great caution and skepticism, since it is through media that generally flawed or unreliable analyses are uncritically disseminated, making the reporting no different than misinformation. While council members accepted Synergy’s projections uncritically, they are presented here only as part of Synergy’s report, but with the above caveats, and the understanding that the projections have not–and cannot–be verified, so cannot be taken as fact so much as guesses–and tendentious guesses at that: Synergy is in the business of developing sports complexes. It is not likely to submit less than rosy projections to a client.
The economic impact analysis for the Palm Coast complex projects an economic impact in year one of $30 million. That economic impact analysis was not Synergy’s. Synergy did not dispute it, however. It called it “low.” It also called “low” a projection of 75,000 hotel room nights booked the first year of the complex’s operation.
“We put together a more detailed financial operating model for the complex that is based on actual performance of actual performing facilities. And so we put real life numbers to these rather than just make assumptions or based on on assessments or or hypotheticals,” Boudrie said.
But there seems to be nothing “real life” about the 75,000 room nights projected, or the “46 possible tournaments in the southeast that could relocate to Palm Coast if given the opportunity,” in Boudrie’s words.
In his analysis, 46 tournaments would generate total spending of $32.7 million and 82,308 hotel room nights booked. But simple math shows the numbers to be spurious at best: 82,308 hotel bookings for 42 tournaments would mean that each tournament would generate 1,789 hotel bookings, and that every night in Palm Coast, on average, 225 rooms would be booked for those tournaments, 365 nights a year. Those tournaments would then generate $535,000 just in tourist tax revenue. (Last year all of Flagler’s tourist tax totaled $4.6 million.)
Even at the lowest estimate–if just 12 tournaments were drawn to the city–the room-night booking is estimated at 20,577, with the same average number of hotel nights per tournament.
The economic-impact analysis is based on drawing 250,000 athletes and spectators in year one, or an average of 684 per day, with each person–adult and child–spending $195 per day. Assuming a family of four were to spend three nights in Palm Coast, in two hotel rooms, at the average daily rate of $150 (as of January 2024), or $900 in hotel costs for the three days, that would assume that the family would be spending $1,440 in Palm Coast for its three-day stay in food, entertainment and shopping, assuming it has enough time to do it all during the tournament.
The numbers seem somewhere between excessive and fictitious, as those athletes’ families would theoretically be frequent sports travelers who do not necessarily have the means to turn each trip to each tournament into a splurge. While Synergy provided charts of line-itemed numbers with sums for direct and indirect spending on various categories, it did not show its method or sources.
Synergy also projected that the facility would make a profit of over $800,000 in year one (before debt payments), and $2.6 million by year 10.
Nevertheless, the council gave its go-ahead to explore the private-public partnership Synergy was proposing. “I mean, if you look at the first year, it’s hard to tear it up,” Mayor David Alfin said.
Robjr says
WTF!
The streets I drive have pot holes on top of pot holes!
And this town council is looking to spend for leisure and the infrastructure is falling apart.
Dennis C Rathsam says
As a retiement community, we have no need to spend tax payer money on this foolish indever! Palm Coast streets are crumbling, traffic is a mess, peoples homes are flooding, because of mismanagement & thievies that are suppose to represent us! What a laugh!!!! Now let talk about the price we pay for garbage, shitty tasting water, & swales that dont work. And you want to spend money on WHAT!!!!!!
Denali says
Palm Coast ended its career as a ‘retirement community’ years ago when the first schools were built. The need for schools indicates only one thing, KIDS. Kids usually reside with working age adults, not retired folks. The roads would have lasted a whole lot longer if they were being used by a bunch of old farts off to a doctor or a Mahjong Game. But no, we have 50,000 soccer moms/dads running kids all over the place and trying to make a living. A whole lot more traffic on the roads than they were originally intended to carry.
Vin says
Retirement community haha hasn’t been that in 10 years. That ship has long sailed
John says
Well written. This place is going down the tubes. And we can thank the thiefs that are running it.
Morgan monaco says
Golf courts, pools, tennis loosing $$ & no streets lights & what ever you want because of no brainers. This city is runed by Republicans idiots like everything else a failure. Palm Coast need own Police dpt. I was at the tennis yesterday & not 1 cat……complete waste of $$$$$$
TR says
Political affiliation has no bearing. IMO. There are just as many if not more Democrat idiots. Besides do you even know the exact break down of how many Reps and how many Dems are on the city council or even work in any department of the city of PC? No you do not. I wish people would stop always making it a political issue. The damage to the roads and the lack of lighting has been a big issue for awhile and not just with this council. If every council from the start of when PC was incorporated (1999) stayed on top of the infrastructure to keep up with the growth no matter what the speed of the growth was at the time. We definitely wouldn’t have all the problems we have with the roads and lighting. But council after council has turned a blind eye to the infrastructure and kept sweeping it under the rug so to speak. Jump ahead to today and we have this enormous problem (s). If in live every small problem was dealt with right from the start. No problem would grow to a massive situation. Keep putting a band aid on a infection will not cure the entire infection. The other thing the entire past list of councils have not done is know how to manage the city’s money. They have been wasting it for years and over the years has gotten worse. The more the councils get away with not doing their job they swore to do. The more they will ignore the problems and it allows then to push their personal agenda. Case in point look at what has been going on for the past three years with all the construction and no infrastructure to keep up. Mayor Realtor and council member realtor as well as realtors in the planning and zoning. If you ask me, it’s a conflict of interest and shouldn’t be allowed.
NO NO says
AGAIN
WHO NEEDS STUPID ROADS
The Sour Kraut says
If this sports complex is so wonderful, let Boudrie back up the facility with his own money. We need more fields. Something that can be accomplished with a MUCH smaller budget. Palm Coast cannot afford to build such a grand (vanity?) project, not to mention actually maintain it. Anyone in our government that actually endorses this plan will get voted out as soon as their term is up.
Ric Flair says
Who came up with this one? The Ecology major or the camp counselor?
sean brown says
worry about getting company’s two come two palm coast two make jobs two help pay for the available housing in are expanding town they call a city
Chris Conklin says
if you build they will come.
JimboXYZ says
$ 93 million would pave every residential road in Flagler county several times. Take care of necessary infrastructure 1st. Same message I’ve always preached for years, somebody has to step up & say “No” to stupidity. This smells like a fraudulent Revenue Cost analysis for projection(s) really. If there are no organized sports leagues guaranteeing event contracts for decade(s), $ 93 million & any revenue projections is a build it 1st & hope for the best Ponzi Scheme. Any council member approving that kind of deal needs to be removed, whether they are voted out or resign.
This month, the Tennis Center facility expansion was announced, what are the revenue numbers from that grand opening ? I doubt that is enough for the grand opening of a brand new facility to have approved that project for the millions it has cost taxpayers over the past years ?
Greg says
You got to be kidding me with this project. I wonder how many recommended projects by this company are actually successful? Most of these type companies, will always tell you it’s good for the community while losing its butt. Let’s just fix the roads.
Pogo says
@I see it now…
…a six-year-old boy in dad’s suit and shoes — with his daddy’s fedora set at a rakish angle.
Deborah Coffey says
This is the worst leadership we’ve seen in our 24 years living in Palm Coast…growth, growth, and more growth without matching infrastructure. eg. A bridge to nowhere.
Mark says
This sounds very similar to a same proposal up by Woodstock, Illinois about a dozen years ago. I remember all the great things the developers said were going to happen, after securing a state grant that should have gone to a new fairgrounds, the proposal died and the money disappeared.
https://issuu.com/woodstockindependent/docs/woodstockindependent_1-28-15
Steve says
These Sports Complexes are real money makers for Seminole County thru Motel Tax Revenues and Built with Municipal Bonds but IMO PC doesn’t have the Leadership to run it by and for the County
Wow says
Palm Coast’s track record with managing such facilities is not good. Anyone remember the great tennis center that is now an empty lot across from European Village? BTSRC? Golf course?
John says
Here they go again spending taxpayers money foolishly which is all the seem to know how to do. You can’t see the lines in the roads anymore, holes n the streets, empty store fronts. The City of PC used to keep up with everything now it has gone way down, traffic is horrible. There are over 1000 homes for sale in PC, people are getting out of here. It’s going down the tubes and we can thank the new mayor and the town council that is clueless.
Ed P says
Palm Coast grew 10.3 percent between 2020 and 2022 to 98,411. It has been reported that we have surpassed the 107,737 in 2024 and is still growing at a rate of 4.52%. We have growing pains but people are not leaving or indicating that we are going down the tubes.
There is nothing wrong with a wish list or entertaining a huge future visionary project. If every idea is dismissed or not fleshed out, and some type of real opportunity was missed that too would be criticized.
The roads and infrastructure issues are of immediate importance and must be addressed. Planning is also important.
A Church, a library, a park, a playground, beaches, or a sports complex can all be asserts for our community. Just because some will never use a facility that doesn’t mean we should not explore or even build them. Everyone’s real estate values and quality of life hinges on a vibrant community.
Doesn’t anyone ever see the glass half full? Why is it always half empty? Half full optimists tend to be happier, healthier, and wealthier.
harry m says
Here we go again another wasted money scam for there pockets, I think the people should rise up to this board ,no street lights in neighborhoods ,road breaking apart , still pep system in city neighborhoods, ,but new big community are tap in to city sewers, this board is crazy ! They should work on the people problems first ,, then they can talk about dumb parks ,bridges to no where , we still paying taxes on court house ,city hall , I think the people should vote on every big project in town because ther using are tax money anyway , p.S when I moved here in 2005 the board at that time they had the same idea to build big parks in 1a ,paid a company 100k for the plan , then they sold all the land to big builders for those house being build on 1a now they want come back if the same b.S . They should had build a big plaza back there ,like a new walmart ,etc
Lost in Tolstoy says
I read the whole article and all I got was the organization running things says they are sold out! Isn’t that all we ever expected to do?
Please don’t spend the money on another study, we don’t have the money to give you politicians anymore!
Jack Howell says
The City Council has clearly lost its way. The builders and contractors will exploit every opportunity to overbuild the city. However, on the flip side, you don’t see much dialogue regarding infrastructure to support this ongoing building. The tax burden rests on the shoulders of the homeowners. The concept of economic development and the pursuit of major corporations to build in our county and city has no push from the local governments. When it is discussed as a significant project, it ends up either being an auto part or a General Dollar store, neither of which brings any significant tax relief to the homeowner’s burden.
By the way, we are located within the Space Corridor. Yet, with all the build-up of space exploration by NASA, SpaceX, Boeing, and Blue Origin, to name a few, nothing is done to attract their attention. When I was serving as a member of the City Council, I was pursuing these companies. However, the City Manager and Mayor saw fit to terminate the Economic Development staff member, so my efforts were in vain. Sometimes, we are our own worst enemies!
blondee says
Oh this city will be paying for repairs for the next pothole that finds my car!!! FIX THE DAMN ROADS
Bartholomew says
I would love to men’s major fastpitch softball here. It’s rare in Florida.
Billy says
Ormond Beach, Daytona Beach, Port Orange all have these sports facilities. All are money losers. All sit idle nobody ever there. What of tax dollars. This is a huge money loser why even consider this. Just try putting some green conservation area in and leave the ones we have alone.
jeffery cortland seib says
Although I see the need for new playing fields for the many sports teams for the kids and adults in our city, this project is somewhere out in space or actually right in a location like Orlando, not Palm Coast. This would make for a huge pay for everything package that eh private developers would operate and charge hefty fees. I can’t see it in our city, not for a long time, if ever. We do need more city owned and operated places for the kids to blow off steam like in sports.