Aurora Announces Northern Lights Expansion Project

[Borealis]

Aurora Announces Northern Lights Expansion Project
NLN Exclusive
By Francis Ferry, NLN beat writer

December 15, 2013: Aurora, Colorado – At the start of the annual Planetary Extreme Baseball Alliance Winter Meetings today, the Aurora Borealis announced plans to begin an expansion project at Northern Lights Park that will raise the park’s capacity from 45,000 to 50,000. Such an increase will produce over $10,000,000 in estimated additional revenue, plus additional merchandising revenues.

“We are excited about the additions that will be made to the park,” began owner Michael Topham, “Last season, we could not sell enough tickets to Borealis games. With these expansion plans, we will shut out fewer fans. We plan to the take added income and pass it directly on to the team’s payroll. We have an extremely talented young group of players here and we plan on keeping the core together for many seasons.”

Plans for the park’s renovations touch many of the seating areas. One major spot will be the left field bleachers, where the iconic Coke bottle rises three stories above the top of the section. The bleachers will be extended upward to be level with the fan platform surrounding the Coke bottle. This will create seven new rows of bleacher-style seating, totaling 2,000 new seats in the park’s cheapest location. Below the seats, where the Coke bottle slide terminates, a new array of concessions will be established to serve the additional fans.

Another extension of outfield seating will occur in right field to the Arcade seating area. Risers will extend outside the wall, above the port walk overlooking Cherry Creek Lake, supporting another set of bleacher-style seating for an additional 1,500 fans. The existing walkway will exist below these new seats. Below them, outside the park, will be a new Aurora Borealis Museum featuring exhibits about team and league history, player facts and memorabilia, and much more. The museum and its infrastructure will eventually replace the riser system to form a permanent support for this part of the stands.

The most interesting addition to the new seating plan will occur in the right and right centerfield archways, where the traditional “open” seating will be converted into a gourmet bar-b-cue area that will seat up to 100 people. These special tickets will afford fans an opportunity to be out at field level with a unique view while feeding on a unique array of natural and organic foods ranging from Colorado-raised Kobe beef and Cherry Creek Farms ducks to Nebraskan corn and Idaho potatoes. The press release announcing this addition stressed that all foods will be local, Plains State grown. Tickets will be all-inclusive, all-you-can-eat. Although no ticket price has been announced, do not expect them to be cheap. Nor should you expect them to be easy to get – especially for weekend games and those big “rivalry” games with Bakersfield, Crystal Lake and Tempe. And to answer your question, no, alcohol is not included in the ticket price.

The additional seats will be added primarily to the park’s “Club” level in the form of a single row above the existing seats. These additional 900 seats will of course have access to the numerous amenities that the Club level already has. Additional “kiosk”-style concessions will be added to this level of the park to both accommodate for the increased number of fans as well as increase the culinary options.

Five hundred additional seats will be spread throughout the park to fill in areas that could be better used, many of which will be earmarked as handicap-accessible and easily removed to accommodate wheelchairs.

“A number of teams have been expanding their coffers through the addition of new, creative seating in their parks, most notably Florida and Manchester,” stated Topham. “If we are to remain competitive in the long term, we need to look at mechanisms for generating a greater revenue stream that does not gouge the fan base. We believe the addition of seating in our outfield bleacher area makes the game more accessible to hard-working fans throughout the Front Range.

“This is a challenging project for us. We have what we feel to be one of the most beautiful settings in all of the PEBA, sitting on the shores of Cherry Creek Lake with the Rocky Mountains in the distance. Our park is quant and intimate and we don’t want to lose that feel, yet we need to expand our seating capacity to increase revenue. We are also constrained by our agreement with the Park Service not to increase our footprint here, so it becomes a tricky proposition.”

The Borealis have a number of contracts coming due for extension in the next two years, particularly 2013 Royal Raker John Knight, Steve McDonald, Wilson Berry and Kojima. They also are looking at many key players entering arbitration, including Cory Pierce and Bill Bradley. Increasing the revenue stream sounds like a sound plan.