Chris Lamberth, HOK, introduced David Peacock, chairman, St. Louis Sports Commission, who spoke on negotiation at the Arena Management Conference. (VT Pulse)
REPORTING FROM ST. LOUIS — Key players in this year’s newsmaking events in St. Louis shared lessons learned with arena managers at IAVM’s Arena Management Conference here Sept. 20-22.
David Peacock, entrepreneur and civic advocate and current chairman of the St. Louis Sports Commission, spoke on the art of negotiation and dealmaking by reviewing the effort to build a stadium for the St. Louis Rams of the National Football League. The goal is to keep them in St. Louis versus a potential move to Los Angeles. Some things are out of your direct control, he said, but he is optimistic they will stay and the new stadium will open in 2019.
“Do your homework,” Peacock advised those planning major capital projects. “Anticipate what may happen.”
“Be resilient,” he said. “We’re 80 percent complete now. I never guessed we’d be this far along.”
And look at media as “your constituents,” he said. “Don’t ignore them and don’t fight them. Give them information and be open. Build relationships.”
The media’s role also concerned Jeff Fowler, VP of marketing and communications at St. Louis University (SLU), who talked about last year’s “occupation” of the campus by students and others protesting the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.
“Social media owns every crisis,” Fowler warned. He’ll never forget that day a year ago, Oct. 13, 2014, when the university received word that 1,000 protestors were marching toward SLU. On social media it was #occupySLU.
“We’re a Catholic Jesuit university. Our mission is to help others. We’re highly rated for service in our community,” Fowler said. Every action had to be weighed against that values-based approach.
Lessons learned include that you cannot communicate enough during a crisis. SLU used social media to update parents, students and the community and even installed a live webcam on the clock tower where protestors camped out to help show what was actually going on. It remained peaceful throughout, but parents were watching news reports from Ferguson and worried about their children at SLU.
In the end, students called it a life-changing week at SLU, Fowler said. Issues that had been buried before were openly discussed.
“We were worried about what it would do to enrollment,” Fowler said of the entire incident, but it turns out they had the second largest enrollment of freshmen ever. “It was a defining moment for SLU,” Fowler said.
Both civil protests and civic projects are contentious, Peacock agreed. It’s important to hammer home the important role sports and entertainment has in the fabric of the community, just as it was important to position SLU in its role in the community. The media plays an important role in that endeavor.
On the other hand, Peacock refuses to do the media’s job for them. He asks them to be balanced and fair and not speed over accuracy, but it’s important to trust them to do their job.
The stadium project “is 100 percent negotiation,” he said of the quest. And it’s political because they are seeking $400 million in public funding. The group has acquired 57 parcels of land and plans to build the new stadium on the riverfront, next to the $380-million St. Louis Arch project.
The two projects will restore 89 acres of blighted land, including 51 structures that are currently vacant. “There’s never been a better brown-fill site than this one,” Peacock said.
Included will be the ability to park cars on 20 acres of land that, when not used for parking will be used as parkland, for hiking, biking and leisure activities. That lends itself to his mantra that it is more than a stadium, it is a redevelopment.
“We’re building a stadium for our market, our values,” Peacock said, but it will also track well in the 148 metrics the NFL uses to rank stadiums. It will be in the top eight stadiums in the NFL, he said.
It’s also being built for Major League Soccer with hopes of getting a team and for international soccer events.
It will have a signature brew pub, a nod to local giant Anheuser-Busch; a riverside club, three times the club space that the current Edward Jones Dome has, and future opportunities for a Power and Light Building and a Sports Hall of Fame.
It answers the governor’s call for protection of taxpayers and the state, he said. The state’s participation will be net positive over time with tax credits of $180 million over the life of the project. “If you don’t play, coach or go to the games, you are not really paying for it,” Peacock said. He also noted that many of these projects are 70 percent public money, but St. Louis is closer to 40 percent.
Jobs are guaranteed for people who are unemployed, sometimes unemployable, but the goal is not just work. “We don’t want to create jobs,” Peacock said. “We want to create careers.” He’s talking about taking a person who is earning $25,000 a year and helping them build a career that will pay $60,000. “That’s part of the legacy you create,” he said.
The governor also wants the project to show commitment, allow for repurposing the Edward Jones Dome, share ownership in a public/private deal and spur redevelopment. The plan is to make the Edward Jones Dome more meeting friendly with a $50-million-plus redo.
Peacock said as of this week, “we’re making progress with the board of aldermen to get them to vote for it.” We’re in the 11th hour of the 11th hour.” He’s pretty impressed with that considering that “we’re six weeks away from approval to build a stadium.”
It helps that the venue managers in the St. Louis area are very engaged, Peacock said. It is a group effort and tours of existing venues help the cause.
“In a market like St. Louis, it’s more about stability than a windfall,” Peacock said of the public/private partnership. “Nobody is hitting a home run, but nobody is striking out either. It’s shared risk. You have to keep it in balance. We got it out of balance before.”
Contacts: Jeff Fowler, (314) 977-2540; David Peacock, (314) 345-5100