Remember how the otherwise-green-conscious Red Sox moved to a new spring training facility called JetBlue Park in Fort Myers, FL that virtually forces you to drive there? Turns out there’s plenty of green motivation behind the lack of transit and bike parking – the cash kind:
Fort Myers’ coffers retained parking fees collected from Red Sox games under the terms of the city’s 1991 contract.
Today, the teams keep all the money generated from game day parking, tickets sales, concessions and advertising, while the county pays for expansions that increased the teams’ ability to sell those items.
As the article details, Lee County is on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in ballpark costs while the Red Sox and nearby Twins owe only a small fraction of that in lease payments – and that doesn’t cover the cost for road expansion & maintenance to bring all those cars to JetBlue Park.
But even with the driving mandate and JetBlue Park’s total lack of solar energy despite the park’s Sunshine State location, the Red Sox still got a baseline LEED green building certification, because the U.S. Green Building Council apparently is now giving them away to anyone who recycles.
Cross-posted from TheGreenMiles.com
