Resident of Palm Beach County speaks out Against the Braves going into John Prince Park

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Yesterday, several people spoke to the Palm Beach County Commission regarding its desire to allow the Braves taking acreage on public land at John Prince Park. Following are comments from one resident followed by the facts:

Thank you commissioners for giving me the opportunity to briefly speak to you about our concerns over the possible takeover of our public park by corporate baseball.  Actually, I’m here to speak in support of the Braves Corporation.  I’m in support of this billion dollar, heavily tax-subsidized company setting up their training camp anywhere outside of our park that we have lived with for over fifty years. (Provided that they use their own money and NO taxpayer dollars regardless of the source.)

I just want to address one particular concern about some misleading information that has been published in the news media about the amount of public land the company wants to take from our park.  The local minions of the Braves Corporation seem to want to minimize the impact of this takeover by making repeated statements to the media that this is a 726 acres site and they only want to take TINY 100-110 acres of it for their private use.

We have attempted to examine the actual impact on the usable lands using published park administration figures (where they are available) and through measurements of actual park areas using satellite imaging methods. We have prepared a handout of these figures that we have provided for your use and for the use of the news media who we hope will move to correct these statements.

As you can see, 338 acres of the park area happens to be water.  Perhaps we could add a new dimension to baseball by providing the players with water wings, but I seriously doubt if that would happen.  In all probability only the bats would float.

This leaves us with 338 acres of total land, much of which is occupied by the Golf Center, the campground, the Maintenance Area (which turned out to be an additional and crucial public asset in recovering from a number of recent hurricanes) and the Administration Complex.

This leaves the maximum land area available for free (or almost free) public use of 238 acres.  In reality, the Corporation wants to take away almost ½ of that.

You can visualize this on the attached map if you mentally superimpose the 100 acre scale drawing over the land area actually available for public use.

CHARLES E. MARTIN

Click here... to see the figures and the map