Cedar Rapids baseball stadium starting to show its age, needs repair

Little can shake off the winter blues quite like seeing the grass start to green at Veterans Memorial Stadium.

Even so, with opening day at the city's minor league baseball field just six days away, city leaders and the management of Cedar Rapids Kernels' baseball team are taking stock of a surprising truth - the city's “new” ballpark, which cost $16.5 million to build and has debt payments still to be made, is 8 years old.

The park off Rockford Road SW is showing its age.

“This is a beautiful stadium when you have everything fixed up,” council member Justin Shields said. “We need to make sure it stays that way.”

Shields has called on the City Council to pay attention to the capital-improvement needs of the stadium, and last month he proposed that the council participate in a repair program that might cost $150,000 a year for a decade.

Shields said he has been troubled to learn that the stadium has some significant leaks when it rains and that the stadium has no dedicated fund for higher-priced repairs.

“That really bothers me,” he said.

Jack Roeder, Kernels general manager who is retiring at the end of the season after 20 years with the ball team, helped lead Shields, Mayor Ron Corbett and council member Chuck Wieneke on a recent tour of the stadium.

At the top of the list of needed fixes, said Roeder, is a major leak at an expansion joint on the first-base side of the stadium. The leak sends water from the roof, onto the concourse and down into the area below the concourse that is used for indoor batting practice. The stadium has water drainage issues that also need to be addressed, he said.

Also on Roeder's priority list: new field turf (after this season), replacement of field lights, parking lot maintenance, a new scoreboard and audiovisual equipment, and new heating and air-conditioning. (See related chart on 1A.) The list of capital needs could come to $1.6 million over 10 years.

Major League Baseball demands certain standards be met when it comes to items like playing surface and field lighting, Roeder notes.

Just who pays what at Veterans Memorial Stadium has long made for an interesting discussion, because the facility is owned by the city, managed by the city's Veterans Memorial Commission and used by the Kernels.

Roeder notes that the commission gives the club $70,000 a year from property-tax revenue for routine facility maintenance, and he said the Kernels team - owned by Cedar Rapids Baseball Inc., a group of community baseball lovers - also contributes some each year to maintain the stadium.

What is needed now, Roeder said, are capital improvements over and above routine maintenance.

Mayor Corbett said the owner of a facility typically has the burden to make major capital improvements.

“I'm personally committed to helping Justin (Shields) figure out a way to put together a plan,” Corbett said. “If you don't address the issues now, you'll be addressing them at a much higher cost 10 years from now.”

Corbett said council member Monica Vernon has wondered if the city could impose a maintenance surcharge on the price of Kernels' tickets, an idea Roeder isn't fond of.

“Out ticket price is where it needs to be,” Roeder said.

He wonders if the city could make some hotel-motel tax revenue available for the ballclub and stadium, though Corbett has said he might need a chunk of that to help fund a convention center.

The issue, Roeder said, is long-range planning, something that had fallen by the wayside in the old Veterans Memorial Stadium.

“There wasn't that rainy-day fund to keep up with the deterioration of an aging facility,” Roeder said. “What I think everyone is trying to do is make sure that doesn't happen in the new Vets Memorial Stadium.”