Pasco BCC Votes 4-1 To Bring In Veteran Management Company; Parking At The Wiregrass Ranch Sports Campus To Be Addressed
Clearwater-based Sports Facilities Companies (SFC), which manages 90 sports facilities around the country, will take over the management of the Wiregrass Ranch Sports Campus (WRSC) on August 1. That’s the good news.
The better news is that SFC has six months to figure out the long-standing problem of not having enough parking at the facility. The not-as-good news, according to the only Pasco County commissioner who voted against entering into the agreement at the June 17 Pasco County Board of County Commissioners (BCC) meeting, is that improving the parking situation isn’t in black-&-white on that agreement.
When the BCC voted 4-1 to approve SFC as the new management company to operate the Sports Campus, District 5 Commissioner Jack Mariano cast the only dissenting vote — not because he doesn’t think SFC will do a good job of managing the facility, but because there is no official commitment regarding parking in place in the agreement, other than SFC has agreed to conduct a feasibility study, to determine the best way to add more parking at WRSC.
Mariano also said that it was obvious that the county’s tourism department, which goes by the moniker “Florida’s Sports Coast,” did not do a thorough or correct enough job of looking for a new operator when it put out its Request for Proposals (RFP) for companies to take over the management of the Sports Campus.
“You say you did it right,” Comm. Mariano said to deputy director of tourism Consuelo Sanchez before the agreement was voted on by the BCC. “But, we had only one bidder. If this company coming in says you need to do a feasibility study and you haven’t already done that, you can tell me you think you did a good job, but there’s a flaw there and they (SFC) exposed it.”
Sanchez said that the RFP went out to 7,800 sports facilities operators around the country, with only four responses and only one company, SFC, that submitted a bid.
Since June of 2023, the $56-million WRSC has been managed by Pasco’s Parks & Recreation Dept., after the BCC first voted to default (in Oct. 2022) and then bought out the contract of WRSC’s previous operator (RADDSports). According to RADDSports partner Anthony Homer, however, his company was on track to bring in 40,000 room nights when the agreement was bought out in 2023.
In 2024, the first full year the county managed the facility, Sanchez told the commissioners that the events at WRSC only brought in 21,000 room nights and the facility was on pace for about the same number of nights this year. SFC has committed to bringing in 30,000 room nights annually. The county, which is still paying off the four-year, $3-million buyout of RADDSports’ agreement, also has incurred costs of about $20,000 per month for the Parks Dept. to run the WRSC.
Under the newly approved agreement with SFC, the county will pay SFC $750,000 — an initial financial commitment of $500,000, which Sanchez called “bridge funding to offset potential revenue shortfalls,” plus a “management fee of $18,000 per month paid out of the Operating Account (an account to be managed by SFC which serves as the central fund to collect facility revenue and disburse expenses).” The 10-year agreement also calls for, “up to $250,000 for Facility Floor Resurfacing Reimbursement, since Sanchez said, “the gym floors [at WRSC] haven’t been resurfaced since the facility opened in 2020.”
She added, “This necessary upgrade must be completed regardless of facility management to ensure athlete safety, event eligibility and competitive standards.”
When Comm. Mariano raised the question of whether or not SFC was planning to provide additional parking for the Sports Campus, which already has a huge lack of proper available parking, Sanchez called Sullivan up to the microphone to confirm that his company is planning to conduct the study.
Sullivan noted, “We are really excited about this opportunity. We’ve been working diligently with Consuelo, with Keith (Pasco Parks, Recreation & Natural Resources director Keith Wiley) and their teams to find out what’s been working at the facility and what needs to be improved upon — and parking has been one of the challenges. It does us no good to not have convenient and adequate parking and we have full intention of solving the parking solution. We have proposals from three parking garage developers — two from here in the Tampa Bay region — and we know [parking] is going to be the number one thing we need to address.”
Wiley said that it appears that the only available space for more parking at the facility is an 18-acre lot located north of the 98,000-sq.- ft. AdventHealth Sports Arena, which already is north of the five outdoor fields.
“It is a bit of a walk from that location to those fields,” Wiley admitted. Dist. 3 Commissioner & Board chair Kathryn Starkey asked if golf carts could possibly shuttle people back and forth from the parking area to and from the fields.
The resolution passed 4-1, with Mariano’s the only “Nay” because of the parking concerns.
Wiregrass Ranch developer JD Porter, who attended the June 17 meeting, but was not asked to speak, told the Neighborhood News after the meeting, “We are very pleased with the approval by the Board of the outside operator. From our conversations and research, they [SFC] seem more than capable of running the facility, as the donation agreement outlines, as an upper echelon sports tourism facility. We look forward to [SFC] raising the bar of the tournaments and tax dollars brought into Pasco County.”
Following the vote, the Neighborhood News emailed Sullivan a number of questions about SFC’s plans for the Sports Campus, including:
1) Will SFC have management on-site at the facility?
2) How many weekend events are already on the books at WRSC for the rest of 2025?
3) Are there any weekends available this year for SFC to book events? If not, when will SFC (or its LLC created to run the Sports Campus, WRSC SFM, LLC) be able to start adding new weekend events?
4) Will you be retaining all of the existing employees at the Sports Campus or will you be deciding on a case-by-case basis which of those employees you will retain?
5) Will you be continuing the local programming that’s currently in place or will SFC be replacing that programming with programs of its own?
6) When will the parking feasibility study actually begin?
7) Have you spoken with JD Porter and/ or Scott Sheridan of Locust Branch, LLC, since being awarded the contract?
8) Have you been in contact with the Peachtree Group about the Residence Inn that shares the Sports Campus site to address any concerns the hotel company may have?
Sullivan’s response to our email was: “We do not take over operations until Aug 1. I would like to kindly decline any media interviews/discussions until we are formally engaged. I appreciate your understanding.”
