Gwinnett's new baseball stadium eventually will be surrounded by a 250-room hotel, 1,600 new residences, 280,000 square feet of retail space and 910,000 square feet of office space, according to documents filed Tuesday with state planners. Gwinnett County is preparing to build the 10,000-seat stadium for the Atlanta Braves, who will relocate their top minor-league team from Richmond, Va. to play there. Developer Brand Morgan sold the county the land where the $45 million stadium will be built. He grew up on property near the Mall of Georgia and now hopes to develop his family's longtime land holdings surrounding the stadium for a variety of uses.
Morgan has been planning a major mixed-use project on the land since before county officials let him in on the secret that they were negotiating to bring minor league baseball to the county. Initially, he wanted to build an amphitheater-anchored development, but he wound up selling 12 acres of his family's property on Buford Drive, east of I-85, to the county for $5 million.
That agreement does not obligate the county to build Morgan's project or help pay for its development. But the county-owned stadium will be the centerpiece of the development, said Morgan, who still owns 105 acres surrounding the sports complex. "That stadium is the center cut of the filet," he said.
Although a small portion of the retail space planned for the complex would be built on county-owned land, the mixed-use component is not part of the stadium deal between the county, the Braves and the developer. About half of the initial retail development will make up a retail facade of the stadium, according to Morgan's early design concepts. The rest will be on the other side of a new drive that will be built to give access to the stadium and retail project. Because of its size, the project requires review by state planners for impact on traffic and the environment under the Development of Regional Impact program.
It's unclear whether the retail facade envisioned for the stadium or additional retail space planned for the area will be built at the same time as the stadium, which will be owned by the county and managed by the Gwinnett Convention and Visitors Bureau. Morgan said he did not want his mixed-use project, which eventually will surround the stadium on three sides, to interfere with the county's time-sensitive construction work.
County officials are obligated under their contract with the Braves to complete the stadium by March 2009. The bulk of the mixed-use project is expected to take until 2020 to complete, although specific timing details will be driven by demand for space at the complex, Morgan said. Morgan said he's already been contacted by hotel developers and potential retail tenants interested in locating there.
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution