SPRINGDALE : Parking problem plagues Naturals
Posted on Saturday, April 12, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/222509/
SPRINGDALE — The Northwest Arkansas Naturals on Friday changed the parking plan for Arvest Ballpark, taking a different approach to how the team goes about collecting parking fees from arriving fans.
General Manager Eric Edelstein said he made a half-dozen changes based on the parking and traffic difficulties experienced by fans when they arrived Thursday at the ballpark for the Naturals’ inaugural game.
“There was no way to practice 7, 800 fans coming to your venue,” Edelstein said as he sat in his office before Friday’s game started. “The parking was the most critical shortfall.”
The biggest change is for the parking attendants. More of them will be collecting the parking fees, and fewer will be guiding fans into the 1, 700 parking spaces.
The team also planned to station an employee on a roof over the stadium’s suite level before Friday night’s game to oversee the parking attendants and to help them direct motorists.
Thursday’s traffic and parking trouble caused many fans to leave before the final out. That, coupled with the lopsided score, led to a gradual departure of fans over the final three innings and helped smooth the exit for many of the 7, 820 fans who attended.
Getting to the stadium and getting parked were the diffi- culties.
Bentonville residents Michelle and Adam Turley, who celebrated their third wedding anniversary by going to the game Thursday, left in the seventh inning. They feared a long post-game wait if they waited until they end.
Before the game, it took more than an hour for them to make the 1. 3-mile trip from Interstate 540 to their seat in Section 115.
“We were not about to get stuck in the traffic again,” Michelle Turley said. “It wasn’t wellorchestrated at all.”
The city on Friday blamed the pre-game traffic issues on the Naturals’ parking system, pointing to the time it took inexperienced parking attendants to collect the $ 3 parking fee from drivers. It caused traffic to snake onto 56 th Street and Watkins Avenue.
“It was real clear that the bottleneck was where you paid the parking attendant,” said Wyman Morgan, the city’s finance and administration director. “The ball team is going to have to be better about moving people into the parking lot. It’s real simple.”
The team took steps to get fans to the game on time Thursday, going so far as to print the 6 p. m. starting time on tickets when there never was any intention to start before 6: 30 p. m. That’s standard practice among minorleague teams scheduling season openers, said Frank Novak, the Naturals’ marketing and public relations manager.
“I’d imagine you’ll never see it quite that bad as it was on the first day,” Novak said.
There remains a concern among city officials about concert parking. A 24-by-48-foot stage sits behind the left-field fence that can be used for performances. No acts have been signed, but the team intends to hold concerts with seating for up to 12, 000 this summer.
“They’ll have to add a transfer bus or something like that, because they can’t all park there,” Morgan said.
Most everyone eventually found a parking place for the baseball game, but fans didn’t particularly like where they ended up.
“I talked to one guy who told me to park wherever you want without tearing up too much,” said Allan Lindy, a Fayetteville resident who parked his pickup in a soggy field west of the stadium.
Jennifer Lovelace-Chandler of Prairie Grove had intended to pull into a parking space for the handicapped because her husband, Martin, is in a wheelchair. Instead, she dropped him off near the front of the stadium and parked her van farther away from the stadium.
“I think they should look at it and say, ‘What if we have the max ?’” she said. “There may be people that get mad and don’t come back because of the trouble, but we’ll come back.”
The Naturals, which lost 7-1, trailed 4-0 when the first large group of fans headed for the exit in the seventh inning.
In the end, waiting worked out for the Turleys’ anniversary. They waited in traffic to get in, and Michelle Turley waited 40 minutes in a concession stand line before giving up and returning to her seat. She was famished, so their anniversary dinner shifted from the ballpark to Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Rogers.
“It was better than a hot dog from the ballpark anyway,” she said.