The Bellevue City Council approved issuing $4.45 million in taxable and tax-exempt 20-year bonds to finance construction of Cat Osterman Champions Village.
That cost includes 87 acres of farmland. Twenty-five of those acres form the site of six softball fields that are under construction this winter.
An investment group called World Baseball Village LLC must pay back the bonds, with interest. If the project fails, though, city taxpayers will be responsible for bond payments. The World Baseball Village group will manage the facility.
The Utah-based investment group, led by Chad Jennings, recruited Cat Osterman, a former Texas All-American and one of the world’s top softball players, to be the face of the project. She will help market the facility to teams across the country.
Plans call for four weeks of girls softball tournaments in July 2010. Baseball tournaments for boys teams will take place on those same fields in June, coinciding with that year’s College World Series at Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha.
Jennings modeled his project after the Little League baseball complex in Cooperstown, N.Y., which draws dozens of teams each week from June through August. Jennings still plans to construct a youth baseball complex in Bellevue as part of a second phase of construction on the group’s remaining 180-acre tract. That construction won’t begin until 2011, at the earliest.
— John Ferak
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