Miners to remain at fairgrounds

PALMER — Though some are worried the Mat-Su Miners baseball team might need to find a new home, the baseball team and Alaska State Fair are dismissing rumors that plans are in the works for anything but baseball at Hermon Brothers Field.

“The fair has no plans to change any programming over there,” fair director Ray Ritari said.

“They’re telling us that they have no plans to move us,” said Denise Christopher, a Miners board member and wife of the club’s general manager, Pete Christopher.

The Miners lease the field, located on the Alaska State Fairgrounds, for $1 a year and have over time added improvements to it like fencing and concessions stands. High school ball clubs play there as well, fitting their games and practices in around the Miners’ schedule.

As for where the rumors began, Christopher and fair spokesman Dean Phipps both recounted a story about an idea to stage a Bob Dylan concert at the fair. Dylan at the time was doing a tour of minor league baseball parks. The fair looked at the possibility of hosting him at Hermon Brothers. They asked a sound guy if that was even possible.

“I think based on that, suddenly the rumor was flying that we were planning on putting on concerts over there,” Phipps said.

“The wrong people heard it. We were getting phone calls nonstop,” Christopher said.

More recently, Christopher said, when the Miners decided to build a new concessions stand at the field the fair told them to make sure it was portable. And again the rumors began. She said a pair of hardcore fans went to sit down with the mayors of the borough, Wasilla and Palmer. She suspects a resolution that passed the borough assembly unanimously Tuesday comes from that.

The resolution reads like a brief history and list of accolades of the field and the ball club, and ends with two declarative statements urging the fair to extend a lease to the miners, “allowing the team to become a permanent fixture in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough at its current location.” It passed without debate or objection.

But while the rumors of an imminent move are false, both groups acknowledged the fair and Miners have a relationship that could use a bit of work.

Phipps said that during the fair, Hermon Brothers is the only piece of the fairgrounds that isn’t bustling.

“Are there some compatible uses that could go on during the fair that wouldn’t bring damage to the field?” Phipps asked.

He tossed out possibilities like soccer, football or baseball games at fair time. He said that the fair doesn’t have the desire or funding to do anything drastic like build something there. Also, the fair has enough parking lots. It doesn’t need the ball field for that. He said that he hears some concerns coming from the Miners.

“It’s a beautiful baseball field. They don’t want it to be damaged,” he said. “I don’t think that we do either.”

Christopher said that she would be open to having events there at fair time but concurred with Phipps that the uses can’t damage the turf.

“If the field were damaged it would be our cost to fix it and we don’t have it,” she said. “We have enough to do what we do and give what we give to the community.”

And then there’s the question of the lease agreement. That lease has to be renewed every five years. Phipps said the fair board has put a policy in place that it will not grant leases longer than 10 years. The thinking is a lease longer than 10 years ties the fair down to one particular arrangement longer than the board feels comfortable. A lot can change in 10 years.

The Miners have requested a 20-year extension. Christopher said a five-year lease hamstrings the baseball team. The Miners run as a nonprofit. Grant-giving institutions they apply to want more certainty that their investments will buy something that will impact the community long-term — or at least a longer term than five years. Most recently, she said, it’s been hard to find grants to put in a watering system.

“A three- to five-year lease is great, but to some people giving you grants that’s just not good enough,” she said.

She said that with that request for a longer lease the board also asked the fair, if it decides to move the baseball team, to provide it with a comparable facility elsewhere. Again, that seemed reasonable to Christopher, considering how much the Miners have done to improve that property.

Both sides said the fair should sit down with the Miners and talk about these issues, find ways they can help each other. The Miners pay essentially no rent, but in exchange fair workers lodge at the fields during fair time and the fair uses Miners’ vans to get around.

However long it takes to have that conversation, the two organizations have time on their side, Phipps said.

“The first five years doesn’t even run out until 2013 and there’s nothing on the agenda that I see that would stand in the way of extending it to 2018,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.