$500,000 awarded for baseball facility

HOT SPRINGS — The Oaklawn Foundation on Friday awarded a $500,000 grant to the Hot Springs Advertising and Promotion Commission for the first phase of the Majestic Park Baseball Complex, which will be constructed at the former site of the Boys and Girls Club of Hot Springs.

Visit Hot Springs, the city’s tourism agency, said site preparation will begin shortly after the beginning of the new year, but plans are still being formulated on how to construct a “first-class baseball facility.”

The ad commission voted April 30 to accept the donation of the Boys and Girls Club property at 109 W. Belding, which was worth an estimated $222,550 to $581,598. The donation included multiple baseball fields of various sizes, restroom facilities, a concessions building, green spaces and off-street parking.

The former club building was donated to Champion Christian College.

“We are officially awarding a half-million dollar grant to the A&P Commission to be used for the construction of the Majestic Park baseball field complex,” said Dennis Smith, Oaklawn Foundation chairman. “One of the things we do is we award grants to selected nonprofit organizations, mainly for infrastructure purposes. This one fit our mission and we felt like the importance this project has to the community that we needed to participate.”

Smith said that when the project came to the foundation’s attention, the members thought it was a perfect fit for the mission of the Oaklawn Foundation because of the impact the project will have on the community.

“For our grant programs we look at the potential impact any project we get involved with will have on the community as a whole,” he said, which is why the Foundation has supported projects with Mid-America Science Museum, the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts, Garvan Woodland Gardens and National Park College.

Visit Hot Springs CEO Steve Arrison said the advertising commission knew this amount was needed to get the site ready, and plans to start demolition next week.

“We’re going to start demolition next week, remove everything from the site, have engineers come in to figure out the proper drainage — there’s always been drainage issues over there — and get the site totally ready for construction,” he said. “We’re still looking and trying to decide how we’re going to fund to do a firstclass baseball facility for the youth of our community, and for visitors.”

The commission was notified several weeks ago that the foundation would provide the grant, and once site preparation takes place, a timeline will be established for the project’s completion.

“They’ll take everything off, get the engineers coming in and get it all ready to build,” he said. “By that time we’ll have a plan if we can find the money to do it all at once, or do it one field at a time. At this point, we’re just one step at a time, right now.

“We’re just grateful for the participation of the Oaklawn Foundation.”

Arrison said the commission wants “to put back baseball fields since there’s no youth baseball fields in the city of Hot Springs.”

“Hopefully, the project will be a good project to help locals as well as bring in some tourists on the weekends,” he said. “There’s a baseball, sports tourism component to it so it’s sort of a twofold project and that’s why we’re involved in it.”

Incoming commission Chairman Elizabeth Farris said commissioners have been excited about the project all along.