Photo | Grant Welker
Polar Park under construction before its opening in May 2021
July 23, 2024
Worcester to again make Polar Park debt payments without dipping into general fund
Photo | Eric Casey
As the WooSox prepared to begin their 2024 season in late March, work continued on The Cove, a 173-unit, mixed-use development located at 85 Green Street. The project's website says that tenants will begin moving into the building later this summer.
As it has every year, the City of Worcester has successfully made its most recent debt payments for the $160-million Polar Park baseball stadium using revenues strictly from the special taxing district immediately surrounding the stadium.
Attendance at Worcester Red Sox games dipped slightly through the first 50 home games of 2024, but remains above league average. Meanwhile, development in the Canal District continues, particularly inside the special tax district.
Polar Park payments
After the City of Worcester announced plans to build the publicly owned Polar Park for the WooSox in August 2018, the city manager Edward Augustus said his north star for the project was for it to pay for itself using revenues from the team, its fans, and new developments immediately surrounding the ballpark. After Augustus left his role, City Manager Eric Batista has maintained this pay-for-itself value for the project.
Much like last year and every other year, the City has kept this promise by successfully covering its ballpark debt payments using only those funds, which did include a $3-million property sale to the developers of The Cove housing development.
Funding for debt payment service is derived from five sources: Team lease payments, parking revenues, receipts from the special district improvement financing (DIF) area surrounding the ballpark, ballpark-related activities, and the DIF reserve fund.
For fiscal 2024, the team continues to make rent payments without issue; the City collected $2.41 million in rent from the WooSox, according to data from the city covering fiscal 2024, with next year’s rent ballooning to $2.80 million, about a 15.8% increase.
Parking revenue came in at $879,150 as of June 30, approximately 19.1% lower than the fiscal 2024 budget projection of $1.04 million, but higher than the fiscal 2023 total of $539,202.
Funds from ballpark activities, which the City said is derived from its cut of advertising revenues, event revenues, and suite rental, equaled $165,482 in fiscal 2024, a 42% increase of the budget amount of $116,200 and slightly up from the $163,231 raised in 2023.
Revenue from the DIF brought in $2.34 million, the same amount budgeted for in the 2024 budget. The City receives and deposits funds into the DIF fund through the budget process, said Tom Matthews, City of Worcester media and public relations administrator, explaining why these two figures match.
The City has projected to pull $319,194 from the DIF reserve fund to cover the rest of the debt service bond payments for fiscal 2024, and had allocated $23,588 as of June 30 towards payments. If provided funding totals for fiscal 2024 prove accurate, it appears the City would have to pull an additional $118,653 from the DIF to cover the rest.
Still, the City says the DIF reserve fund had a positive balance of approximately $220,000 as of June 30. The City expects the budgeted revenues to exceed its debt service obligations in fiscal 2025, resulting in an anticipated increase in the DIF reserve of $135,000.
“The DIF Reserve is a stand-alone fund. It means that the DIF Reserve will increase or decrease based on revenues vs. expenses on an annual basis,” Matthews wrote in an email to WBJ. “In years that DIF revenues exceed expenses, the DIF reserve will grow. In years that DIF revenues do not exceed expenses, bond payments would be covered in part by draws on the Reserve. Only if the DIF reserve were fully depleted would the City look to transfer general fund revenues to cover any deficits as part of a year-end appropriation.”
The City balancing the Polar Park-related financial book doesn’t prove the merits of the idea of a publicly-funded stadium in the Canal District, said Victor Matheson, sports economist and professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester.
“Even if the books balance, there is still a gigantic subsidy for this ballpark. Basically, all of the property tax from the new apartments across the street plus a bunch of other things are all being directed towards a stadium instead of towards schools or public safety or roads/infrastructure,” Matheson said in an email to WBJ. “All this budget is telling us is whether Worcester can pay for the stadium debt using the mechanisms that it put in place to pay for the facility. It was always fairly likely that this was the case. But it doesn't really tell us anything about whether the ballpark has been a good investment for the city.”
The books on fiscal 2024 aren’t officially closed until the end of September, making the figures provided subject to potential change, said Matthews.
Attendance dip
Through the first 50 games of their season, the WooSox sold an average of 6,490 tickets per Polar Park home game, down 7.7% from an average of 7,012 fans through the first 50 games of the 2023 season, according to a WBJ examination of box score attendance figures available on the team’s website.
These attendance figures are only the number of tickets sold per game and not the actual number of people who show up to each game, which can be significantly less. Paid attendance vs. actual attendance is an ongoing issue throughout baseball as teams can only report on paid attendance.
Despite the dip in 2024 paid attendance, WooSox President Charles Steinberg is pleased with how the season is progressing from an attendance perspective, even if the weather has put a damper on some homesteads.
“Not only have the sales been good, but fans have been packing the park. This last nine-game homestand was inspiring,” Steinberg said. “We’re up to four rain-outs, although one was a snow-out. All the clubs in this region joust with the atmospherics of April and May weather, but when it comes to our attendance, we're in a rarefied atmosphere.”
Overall, the team has sold 435,000 tickets for the 2024, putting the WooSox on pace to cross the 500,000 mark by the end of the season, according to a July 14 article on the team’s website. The team is the only MiLB team to reach the 500,000 ticket plateau in each of the past two years.
Photo | Ashley Green courtesy of Worcester Red Sox
Polar Park, the home of the Worcester Red Sox, commonly known as the WooSox
Of the 120 MiLB baseball clubs across the country, the team sat at 8th in overall attendance as of July 18, according to stats provided by the team.
Polar Park, which holds 9,508 patrons, has seen a singular sellout so far in 2024: An April 19 evening matchup against the Durham Bulls, an affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays.
In 2023, the team sold out two of their first 50 games, which were contests against the Cleveland Guardian-affiliated Columbus Clippers on April 14 and 15.
In June, baseball news publication Baseball America reported that attendance was down across Minor League Baseball in 2024. As of July 18, the average attendance for International League teams, the division of AAA baseball that includes the WooSox, had an average listed attendance of 5,472, according to stat website BaseballReference.com; the 2023 season saw International League games draw an average of 6,421 through the full season.
There are 24 remaining home games in the 2024 WooSox season, with the next one being a July 30 contest against the Toronto Blue Jays-affiliated Buffalo Bisons at 6:45 p.m.
Canal District developments
Some of the Canal District real estate development projects pitched after the announcement of the ballpark are at or nearing completion.
Residents have begun arriving at the 228-unit, mixed-use development at 1 Green Island Blvd. dubbed The Revington, where apartments rents range from $1,894 for a studio apartment to $3,441 for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom unit, according to listing site Apartments.com. A UniBank branch was announced as the first commercial tenant at the site earlier in July.
Photo | Eric Casey
Officials held a ceremony on Tuesday to mark the opening of District 120, a new 83-unit affordable housing building in the Canal District.
City officials held a ribbon-cutting for District 120, an 83-unit affordable housing development at 153 Green St., on Tuesday, as residents have already begun occupying the space.
Work continues on The Cove, a 173-unit, mixed-use development located at 85 Green Street, although the project’s website is now offering reservations for leases, advertising a late summer move-in.
Many housing-related projects have been scaled back or faced delays as the result of the economic climate of high construction and labor costs and high interest rates, which make fundraising difficult. Other plans, including a hotel planned for a lot across the street from the ballpark at a 1.93-acre lot designated as 115 Madison St., have yet to break ground. A planned bioscience facility behind the ballpark’s left-centerfield wall remains in limbo, as the team continues to use the space as a fan-experience area.
Redevelopment in the Canal District started long before the Polar Park announcement, but Steinberg said the ballpark deserves credit for the area’s most prominent recent construction.
“You look out your window from Polar Park, and you see this apartment building that is only here because of Polar Park, if you keep looking you'll see another apartment building that's only here because of Polar Park,” he said. “And then you see The Cove [mixed-use development] that's going up. So yeah, the redevelopment is happening, as I think everyone hoped.”
Some WooSox players are living in the Canal District, including at The Revington, located directly across from the park’s main entrance. The players have been enjoying the area’s restaurants and businesses, said Steinberg.
The team’s 35-year lease for the facility runs through 2056.
“We're still in the early innings of this change in the environment,” Steinberg said.
Eric Casey is a staff writer at Worcester Business Journal, who primarily covers the manufacturing and real estate industries.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article stated that the Columbus Clippers are a minor affiliate of the New York Yankees. While the Clippers are a former Yankee affiliate, they changed affiliations to Cleveland's MLB franchise in 2009.
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Stephen Quist
July 24, 2024
Again Holy Cross professor Victor Matheson is again shown to be out of his league regarding the PolarPark.com project. Matheson's higher ed reputation is in shatters and his reputation shredded as a purported "stadium expert" across the country.
And yet again, much to the chagrin of the WBJ.com and the very few vocal critics, Polar Park is meeting and exceeding expectations year in and year out.
The PolarPark.com project is the most successful transformative economic development in the Worcester's history and it just keeps on growing.
Go cry a Blackstone River WBJ and Vic....you both owe the residents, taxpayers and the city of Worcester a public apology.
Richard J Patient
July 23, 2024
If the Park was not built, there probably would not be any new developments in the canal district to speak of. The talk of the merits of the DIF and funds being allocated elsewhere, other than the Park debt, would be a mute issue. There would not be any additional funds available for Schools, Roads, Infrastructure or Public Safety.
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