![]() ![]() “I absolutely love sitting in the stands for a baseball game, whether it’s high school, college, Triple-A, or Fenway Park,” he said. Mercer, who represents the area around McCoy, said he sees “a lot of positive possibilities” in Pawtucket’s future, but his emotions on Opening Day at Polar Park were not bittersweet - they’ll just be bitter. If McKee does go to Polar Park, he won’t see Pawtucket City Councilman Terrence E. “I think they tried as hard as they could to keep it in the state of Rhode Island.” “I don’t have hard feelings for the people who are in the management level up there,” he said. Between that and the new train station, “the future is going to look very bright in Pawtucket.” He vowed to do all he can to help Pawtucket, saying, “I think they have been forgotten for a little bit too long.”īut McKee, who graduated from Assumption College in Worcester, said he might pop into a WooSox game. The governor said he recently visited the soccer stadium site. Grebien looks up at the statue of former Pawtucket Red Sox owner Ben Mondor, who bought the team out of bankruptcy in 1977 and owned it until his death in 2010. McKee, a former mayor of nearby Cumberland.Īt a news conference this week, McKee said, “I’m a Blackstone Valley kid, so I was clearly advocating for the PawSox to remain in Rhode Island - and in Pawtucket, in particular.” Grebien is likely to have an ally in Rhode Island’s new governor, Daniel J. But whatever option the city pursues, he hopes the state will be a partner. Other possibilities include turning McCoy into a public safety complex, or a place to consolidate Pawtucket’s two public high schools, Grebien said. The city would need a “strong partner” to help renovate the stadium, Grebien said. Meanwhile, the outlook for McCoy remains unclear. ”They want to break ground this fall and to have the first soccer ball kicked in 2023 for the season,” he said. ![]() Grebien said testing is under way, and the developer hopes to secure the needed state and city permits over the next couple of months. City of Pawtucketīut first, environmental cleanup work must be completed at the Tidewater site, where gas manufacturing took place for decades. ![]() But Grebien said he still expects the project, which has received $46 million in state incentives, to bring about more downtown development than the PawSox proposal would have realized.Ī rendering of the proposed Tidewater Landing project, which would include an 11,000-seat soccer stadium in Pawtucket. Since then, the project has been scaled back to $284 million, and the city has not been able to acquire the Apex site to include in the plan. In December 2019, state and city officials joined Fortuitous Partners in announcing a $400 million project that would put a soccer stadium with up to 11,000 seats, 435 residential units, 60,000 square feet of office space, and 56,750 square feet of retail/restaurant space in downtown Pawtucket, across three sites separate from McCoy Stadium. Grebien said remaining in Pawtucket would have been better for both the city and the team.īut, in any case, Pawtucket is poised to jump into another game. Worcester assumed more than half of the $159 million in total design, construction, and land acquisition costs and helped cover cost overruns caused by a COVID-19 construction shutdown. “Worcester, I think, gave away everything to get them,” Grebien said. Grebien said that Mattiello’s plan might have worked, but it came too late in the game. Mattiello for scuttling that deal by hatching an alternative plan. But critics blame former House Speaker Nicholas A. Grebien gave the state Senate credit for backing a proposal to keep the PawSox in Rhode Island. Perhaps $37.5 million might have been a smarter ask, he said. And he acknowledged that it was unwise to have later called for $38 million in taxpayer support for a new stadium, a figure that raised the specter of 38 Studios, Curt Schilling’s ill-fated video game venture that received state backing. ![]()
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