"What happened?" Owner of The Rock stunned by stadium plan rejection
FRANKLIN (WITI) -- Mike Zimmerman, the owner of The Rock, expected his proposal to bring a minor league baseball stadium to Franklin to be a home run. Instead, he was stunned at the plate when the Franklin Common Council struck him out.
Zimmerman says he was stunned to learn the proposal was unanimously rejected by the Franklin Common Council on Tuesday night, April 22nd.
This is the second time the proposal has been rejected.
"The first proposal was rejected and he did elect to come back and worked with us very diligently to try to address the outstanding issues as best as we could," Franklin Director of Administration Mark Luberda said.
The proposal called for Zimmerman to raise about $10.5 million to build the stadium.
The city was looking at using a TIF district to pay Zimmerman back the investment over time -- but the Common Council unanimously turned it down on Tuesday -- leaving Zimmerman feeling like he was beaned at the plate.
In an early morning email to city leaders, he wrote: "What happened???"
He went on to write: "I literally put all other business affairs on hold for roughly two weeks and 100 plus hours of back and forth with the city to get us to a place where all parties felt like we had a good chance of success. You rejected my first proposal because existing tax dollars were not appropriate and it was you that suggested a TIF among a host of other risk mitigation clauses for the city."
Franklin Common Council's president says the issue of taxpayer dollars is pretty much what killed the proposal.
"The comments I was receiving were they didn't want taxpayer money used at all and I had floods of phone calls and emails regarding that and that really hurt the project," Kristen Wilhelm said.
Wilhelm says there were just too many questions about the proposal for the Common Council to feel comfortable moving forward -- particularly about the financial risk of whether or not the TIF district would be successful.
Tuesday night's vote doesn't preclude Zimmerman from addressing some of the Common Council's concerns and then bringing the plan back for future consideration.