Minor League Pro Baseball in Sugar Land?
(Fort Bend County • )
It’s looking more likely. This just in… Released by the City of Sugar Land late Friday after the print journalists went home:
Sugar Land, TX – Sugar Land City Council on Feb. 16 will consider a
Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Opening Day Partners, LLC (ODP)
to provide a professional minor league baseball team and develop a
stadium in Sugar Land’s Cultural/Entertainment District.The MOU designates ODP as the City’s exclusive negotiation partner
for 90-days while each party works toward more formal and binding
agreements.ODP has a strong background in minor league baseball with more than 27
years of experience in developing multi-use ballparks and successfully
owning and/or operating minor league teams of all classifications.ODP — a community-focused operator that emphasizes year-round
community events and activities at their stadiums — has designed,
constructed and operated 14 ballparks since 1982, more than any other
organization in professional baseball. ODP is led by Chairman Peter
Kirk, one of the best known owner/operators in minor league baseball;
President and Chief Operating Officer Jon Danos; and Hall of Famer
Brooks Robinson.Professional minor league baseball is planned to be part of a larger
destination activity center for Sugar Land, providing opportunities for
entertainment and recreation for Sugar Land residents, as well as
attracting non-residents from the surrounding area.“We established a vision for a cultural entertainment district within
our community over a decade ago,” said Mayor James Thompson, “and we
have worked tirelessly over the past several years to bring this plan
closer to reality.”A Visioning Task Force composed of a cross-section of citizens in 2007,
as well as planning activities and workshops, resulted in the creation
of a formal vision for a destination activity center called the
Cultural/Entertainment District on land surrounding the intersection of
U.S. Highway 59 and University Blvd.Three specific venues were identified for initial development – an
indoor concert venue, a minor league baseball stadium and a festival
site – and later supported by citizens in a November 2008 special
election.With community direction and public support, the City first pursued
professional minor league baseball. During the past year and a half,
Sugar Land:
→ identified a specific site;
→ performed a market assessment;
→ determined specific goals for a suitable venue; and
→ through a thorough public process involving formal Requests for
Solicitations of Interest, identified the best private sector partner to
assist the City.Sugar Land’s pursuit of a public-private partnership for the
development and operation of a ballpark is intended to result in a
first-class facility ready for the 2012 baseball season.The facility is anticipated to be a flexible multi-use design that will
provide the potential to support college and high school baseball
tournaments, concerts and other dynamic uses.“Communities all over the country have identified the benefits of
pursuing the development of entertainment districts to promote economic
development and quality of life,” said Thompson. “This is a project
that combines more than a decade of citizen surveys, parks master plans,
City Comprehensive Plans and Economic Development plans with the efforts
of a citizen task force. We are looking forward to the possibility of
working with Opening Day Partners to make our vision a reality.”
Personally, I’d rather take the kids to a nice minor league park where you can sit close enough to watch the teams, as opposed to suffering the traffic, parking hassles and financial trauma of paying for Astros tickets and then renting beer and soda at $8 to $16.
→ B.Dunn, Feb 12, 2010, 08 36 pm
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Define "Safe"
(Crime • Fort Bend County)
As the reader may have gathered by now, city fathers at nearby Sugar Land are exceedingly public-relations conscious. Today, for instance, I received five email press releases, one of which noted that the city now has a Twitter account.
My favorite, though, was the one declaring “Sugar Land has been named the 11th-safest city in America, a distinction based on an analysis of FBI crime statistics.” It turns out that something called CQ Press gathers publicly available FBI statistics each year and turns them into an opportunity for America’s cities to brag and, one supposes, purchase a few bound copies for city government coffee tables. Lots of promotional possibilities all around.
But you know what they say about statistics. You can throw ‘em into a big paper sack, whap ‘em against the wall and bend ‘em around to mean darn near anything. (That is what they say about statistics, isn’t it?).
Now, I don’t mean to infer Sugar Land doesn’t have fewer violent crimes per 100,000 population than many other cities its size. That we know of. Uh-uh.
All I’m saying is it has to be just a tad humiliating for a municipality to allege it’s one of America’s safest when, less than two weeks earlier, its very own mayor stepped out of his own car in his own driveway only to be greeted by a man who pushed a gun against His Honor’s head. Said gunman then, by the way, went on to not only rob the mayor, but also made him crawl underneath his vehicle, apparently just because he could. Many of the sordid details are here, although you’ll have to use your own imagination to gauge how much fun it’s been to work as a Sugar Land patrol officer these days.
Now that’s security we can believe in.
→ B.Dunn, Nov 30, 2009, 04 52 pm
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How Much Is That Doggy In The Window?
(Richmond • Fort Bend County)
Nice.
Today the New York Times gives Richmond, Texas, its 15 minutes of fame. And it looks like our little town now will be known far and wide as the home of the fabricated bloodhound scent lineup:
In several of the cases that were based on Deputy Pikett’s dogs, however, the scent lineups appear to have provided the primary evidence, even when contradictory evidence was readily available. Mr. Bickham spent eight months in jail after being identified in a scent lineup by Deputy Pikett’s dogs, until another man confessed to the killings. In an interview, Mr. Bickham scoffed at the accusation that he had taken part in three murders, noting that he has been hobbled by bone spurs and diabetes and is partially blind.Ronald Curtis, another Houston man jailed on the basis of Deputy Pikett’s dogs, was released from jail nine months after being accused of a string of burglaries. Store videos showed that the burglar did not resemble him. “Nobody was listening,” Mr. Curtis said.
Both he and Mr. Bickham are filing civil lawsuits over their treatment in federal court on Wednesday.
It won’t be the first time.
Over the past two years, I’ve reported on lawsuits filed in Victoria against dog handler Keith Pikett and Fort Bend County – here, and here, and here and here.
In one of those cases, law enforcement records allegedly show Pikett’s dogs followed the scent of a murder suspect (a former police captain later proved innocent when someone else confessed to the crime) “while supposedly riding in a car over 5.5 miles of roadway from the murder scene to his home.”
Pickett isn’t talking to the Times or anyone else about these cases now, but last year the bloodhound handler told me trained dogs such as his “do that all the time.”
In fact, Pikett said at the time that his dogs were working a capital murder case in Harris County “where we trailed a car for 38 miles – and we’ve already got two convictions.”
In the other Victoria case, police arrested a 42-year-old man and threw him in jail on charges of robbery and sexual assault, based on a scent lineup using Pikett’s dogs. DNA evidence later proved they had the wrong guy.
A spokesperson for The Innocence Project thinks there are other “wrong guys” out there still behind bars. This morning he told the Times, “Our estimate right now is we’ve got 15 to 20 people who are in prison right now based on virtually nothing but Pikett’s testimony. That’s a big problem.”
I am not a dog expert and continue to withhold judgment of Pikett’s performance or that of his dogs – although it has to be said that at this point, with this many innocent people surfacing after having been picked out in scent lineups, it doesn’t look good.
But I am curious right now about how much, in County Attorney’s Office man-hours and related legal costs, Fort Bend County is paying to defend Pikett in these cases, and how long they’re going to continue that defense.
→ B.Dunn, Nov 04, 2009, 05 10 am
Tips For Desperate Reporters
(Fort Bend County • Media)
As a public service to local reporters so desperate for news that they even drop by here, I have decided to occasionally provide low-hanging fruit that just falls into my lap. (Readers from elsewhere: Sorry, this probably will just bore you nearly to tears.)
Today’s harvest:
The Texas Department of Transportation’s kind-of-recently (Aug. 27) updated list of “Mobility Stimulus Projects” apparently lined up for funding thanks to the fact other higher-priority projects didn’t wind up costing as much as once estimated.
These are road projects coming to Fort Bend County via congressionally approved federal stimulus money, for which I thank Congress (except for my own representative, Pete Olson, and his next-door neighbor, Ron Paul, both of whom, you can just bet, voted no, nothing for our districts, please):
→ A $24.3 million project to build an overpass/underpass at U.S. 59 and FM 360 south of Rosenberg and just south of the megalopolis of Beasely;
→ A $14.5 million project that will turn FM 2218, which is a major artery on Rosenberg’s southwest side, from two lanes to a four-lane divided highway running from U.S. 59 to the intersection with FM 1640.
→ A $5.5 million project running from where the above one just ended (at FM 1640’s intersection with FM 2218) to Richmond’s Thompsons Highway, turning the half-mile stretch into a six-lane road instead of the current four lanes.
Reporters: I don’t even want byline credit, but you’re going to have to come up with the TxDOT document to which I refer all on your own.
Note to non-residents who somehow managed to read this far down: Wow, you must not have much to do today, huh? But here’s a nugget of knowledge, as a reward for your thorough readership: Just in case you were wondering, in much of Texas the existing network of roads were built in the first place to serve farmers who needed to haul their crops to grain elevators next to the railroad tracks, or vegetable markets nearer to towns and cities. So to this day, those roads are known as “farm-to-market” roads. Only everyone shortens them to “FM.” Thus FM 2218 is really Farm-To-Market-Road 2218.
Don’t thank me, I just live here.
→ B.Dunn, Sep 02, 2009, 10 20 am
