Jesse Chambers
Members of the Birmingham City Council and city staffers during the council's regular meeting at City Hall on Tuesday, March 19, 2019.
The Birmingham City Council, at its regular meeting for Tuesday, March 19, voted 8-1 to approve an agreement between the city, the Birmingham Park and Recreation Board and the Major League Baseball Youth Foundation to build a $10 million MLB youth academy at George Ward Park in Glen Iris. However, the fate of the project is in doubt.
The agreement would allow MLB to invest about $10 million in a year-round baseball academy at the park. The facility would also feature various academic, tutoring, mentoring and life skills programs.
However, numerous Glen Iris residents and other stakeholders at George Ward Park have raised concerns over the last few weeks that the MLB facility would take away or reduce the availability of some popular facilities at the park, including the busy softball fields.
MLB — in an email to Council President Pro Tempore William Parker on March 5 — seemed to back away from the project.
Parker is a member of the city's park board and also serves as the chairman of the council’s Parks, Recreation and Cultural Arts Committee.
City Council President Valerie Abbott, who lives in and represents Glen Iris, cast the only no vote on today’s resolution.
The item was originally on the council’s agenda on Feb. 26 but was pushed back until March 5 and was then pushed back another two weeks.
The council did not meet on March 12 because five members were in Washington, D.C., and visited the MLB youth academy there.
“I am ready to vote and pass this,” councilor John Hilliard — a strong proponent of the academy and the George Ward Park site — said today.
“My plea to MLB is that we want this for our children,” Hilliard said.
“We are talking about the future of our children, we should not be debating about that at all,” said councilor Steven Hoyt, who also favors the George Ward Park site.
“I was impressed by what we saw in Washington,” Parker said. “I think it is a game changer for the youth of the city of Birmingham... It would be a travesty for us to lose this."
Abbott continued to argue, as she has in recent weeks, that current users of the busy park would be negatively impacted if the MLB facility is built at George Ward Park.
“The location is the only issue,” she said. “The city is 150 square miles big. There are other locations where it could go.”
After a lengthy discussion by council members, Parker withdrew an item from the agenda that would have approved the expenditure of $1.2 million for another ball field at George Ward Park as a possible compromise with current stakeholders.
Parker said that he received requests from Abbott and some other community members to look at that option and had wanted to do his “homework.”
However, the item received largely negative comments from the members who spoke to the issue today, including Hilliard and Wardine Alexander. Councilor Darrell O’Quinn wondered where the money would come from to fund the field’s construction.
