N.Va. Ballpark Backers Don't Own Most of Site

Business leaders hoping to bring baseball to Loudoun County have been adamant in their proposal to major league officials: Baseball in Northern Virginia is so much more than a new home for the ailing Montreal Expos.

It's a 450-acre lakefront "new town" with office buildings, hotels and thousands of residences that they said will forge a new prototype in ballpark development and baseball economics and will be a boon to team owners and the region. They've dubbed their mix of commerce, scenery and box seats near Dulles International Airport "Virginia's Ballpark at Diamond Lake."

The problem is, the baseball backers don't own most of the land. Tax records and interviews with owners who control the majority of the property indicate that the developers have agreements to buy, at most, only about a third of it.

As baseball executives enter the final stages of their search for a new home for the Expos, it is unclear how the unsettled nature of the Diamond Lake project is affecting the closely held negotiations with Major League Baseball officials. The questions come at an especially sensitive moment in the years-long quest to return big-league baseball to the Washington area.

Major League Baseball is concentrating its search on four sites to move the Expos to for the 2005 season: the District, Northern Virginia, Las Vegas and Norfolk, according to senior league sources. The league has issued detailed legal and financial questionnaires to those bidders to evaluate the locations and get the clearest financial picture possible, the sources said. Those questionnaires are being completed and evaluated.

One source familiar with the negotiations between Virginia and baseball officials, as well as with talks over the past several years, said the effort has never reached this level of detailed legal negotiation. That source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations, thought that the list had been narrowed further. "It's safe to assume that D.C. and [Northern] Virginia are the two finalists," the source said.

Representatives of the Virginia Baseball Stadium Authority, the state agency responsible for building a stadium if baseball executives decide to locate a team in the commonwealth, declined to comment on efforts to secure land. But Gabe Paul Jr., the authority's executive director, argued that the stadium could be built even without some planned amenities.

"Can you do Diamond Lake without the lake?" Paul said. "Yeah, sure you can."

Such an eventuality would mark a stunning rollback from the vision Paul and his fellow baseball boosters offered Major League Baseball executives in May. But the developers crafting the Diamond Lake project said they're veteran builders intimately familiar with the undulations and pitfalls associated with such a massive undertaking. They said they're not worried.

"It's what we do for a living," said Laurence E. Bensignor, chairman of Diamond Lake Associates LLC, a consortium of some of the nation's top home builders. "We have been working with the stadium authority and the county and landowners, and we have complete confidence in our ability to do not just a viable, but a successful, project."

Bensignor noted that Diamond Lake controls a site appropriate for the stadium. Builders need about 12 acres for the ballpark, he said.

"We have a site we believe will be the ultimate site, and we have it under contract. I'm not sure D.C. can say that, other than RFK" Stadium, Bensignor said.

The District, too, faces challenges in putting together the real estate for a stadium. Although the city controls Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium and a second site is owned by the National Park Service, the remaining two sites are privately owned.

If nabbing a 12-acre stadium site in Loudoun County was tough, securing city blocks in the District for possible construction would be significantly harder, Virginia backers said.