Study group: Sioux Falls Arena, baseball stadium should be demolished

Now is the time to tear down the Sioux Falls Arena.

That's a primary takeaway from a citizen panel tasked with studying future needs at the city-owned events campus in the heart of Sioux that houses not just the arena, but also the Sioux Falls Convention Center, the Denny Sanford Premier Center and the Canaries baseball stadium.

The group Wednesday morning finalized its recommendations, to be delivered to Mayor Paul TenHaken in the coming days, that also call for at least 60,000 more square feet of convention center space, an attached hotel on the campus, and the eventual demolition of Sioux Falls Stadium, which has housed the city's minor-league baseball team for decades.

"The high level things that we talked about that brought us to this recommendation were the age of the facility, its use, the programming being down, and just some of the operating costs that we have here," said the task force's co-chairman Ryan Pidde, about the recommendation to tear down the arena.

Previously:What's the future hold for the Sioux Falls Arena?

The group considered the possibility of renovating the arena into more convention center space, but determined that the costs associated with that were too high when considering the age of the facility, built in 1961.

Annually, the arena runs a deficit of more than $600,000. Andrea Miller, a panel member and project manager at Journey Construction, said no longer operating the arena would cover the cost of demolition within three years.

No longer having the arena there would also provide necessary space on the events campus to add onto the existing convention center, which the Sioux Falls Convention and Visitors Bureau said is necessary to better compete both regionally and nationally to draw more trade shows and conventions to Sioux Falls.

The task force agrees, and is formally recommending the city use the available space that tearing down the arena would provide to add an additional 60,000-square-feet of flat floor space.

And while the recommendation calls for doing that in the next five years, task force members said Wednesday the city shouldn't waste time in making that happen as the CVB is already finding it hard to compete with peer communities that offer more convention space.

"These things all take time especially when there’s several dominoes, as we’ve said, in this process to expand space here … so there needs to be a little bit of urgency on it," Piddle said.

In contrast, the city should take its time when it comes to tearing down the baseball stadium, according to the group's recommendations. 

Previously:Report: Downtown setting better fit for Sioux Falls Stadium

The task force, challenged to study the future of the existing campus, is not proposing to relocate the stadium downtown or elsewhere, as a 2016 study did. Rather, its recommendation simply states that maintaining the baseball stadium, which loses more than $200,000 a year and will soon need around $3 million in repairs and maintenance, and keeping it at the current location is not what's best for baseball in Sioux Falls or taxpayers.

"Our recommendation is baseball is not right for this campus," said Erik Nyberg, an attorney with Cutler Law Firm, adding that it will be up to the city to determine where a new stadium goes and who pays for it.

An earlier draft of the group's recommendations called for an additional 300 hotel rooms to complement the existing 240 rooms on-site now at the Sheraton Hotel. But the group Wednesday opted not to specify a number, and instead included language in the final report to analyze market demands that an additional 60,000-square-feet of convention center space would require.

That's due to the challenges the city will face in luring a private developer into building a full-service hotel on the site immediately, especially considering the 65 percent occupancy rate reported by the hotel that's already there, said Danny Amundson, a task force member and an executive at KWB Hotel Partners.

CVB executive director Teri Schmidt said whether the recommendations spell out how many hotel rooms are needed or not, to make the convention center success, more are needed as soon as additional convention center space becomes operational.

"It won't be easy but if this area is going to grow and we're going to make this happen out here; it's got to happen somehow," she said.

Figuring out how to put into action the task force's recommendations will be up to the mayor, who said in January he plans to follow through with their final report.

T.J. Nelson, TenHaken's deputy chief of staff, said once the final report is received by City Hall, a master plan will be created to map out how to tackle the recommendations, noting that there will be available dollars in the 2020 budget to hire engineers and consultants to get the process started.

"The recommendations are broad in nature but we see the need to invest out here," he told the Argus Leader following Wednesday's meeting. "We'll digest the full report when we get it."