By Srianthi Perera | The Arizona Republic
Big League Dreams Gilbert, an elaborate amateur-baseball complex pitched a decade ago as a financial and recreational boon for the town, cost taxpayers millions more than officials expected to spend on building it and appears to have generated little of the economic impact they predicted.
Now, five years after it opened, the eight-diamond complex, modeled after historic major-league ballparks, is posing a new headache as the town squabbles with the company that built it over who will pay to fix crumbling pieces of its infrastructure.
Big League Dreams Gilbert is the product of the kind of public-private partnership that municipalities often use to jump-start expensive economic-development projects.
After learning in 2003 about the California-based Big League Dreams USA’s concept, town officials embraced it as an answer to two problems confronting Gilbert.
On the one hand, they had $16million to build new parks and recreational facilities for the rapidly growing town, which at the time was 247 acres short of the National Recreation and Park Association standards, but said they had no money to maintain them once they were built.
Town officials wanted a big-draw recreation complex that would lure visitors to Gilbert and generate new businesses. But the town estimated such a complex would need at least $500,000 annually for maintenance, records examined by The Arizona Republic show.
