Fairfax County’s leadership appears willing to move cautiously forward in considering the creation of a sports and entertainment authority.
However, the responsibilities of a potential independent agency, where it would get its funding and how it would interact with existing public and private facilities still need to be ironed out.
“There’s definitely some things on here we need to be looking at more,” Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeff McKay said after a staff briefing during the board’s Economic Initiatives Committee meeting last Tuesday (March 25).
In response to the board’s June 25, 2024 request for a review of available options for boosting local sports tourism, staff delivered a report on its study of three sports and entertainment authorities elsewhere in the Commonwealth.
Staff found a few key threads uniting the reviewed entities, including a clear focus on tourism, dedicated funding mechanisms and an ability to enter agreements for land acquisition, facility access and management, and revenue sharing. They were also all “tailored to an initial purpose and partnership.”
“They weren’t created in a vacuum,” said Scott Sizer, deputy director of the county’s Department of Economic Initiatives. “There has to be a clear objective and mission.”
Created under the Virginia Public Recreation Facilities Authorities Act, which gives localities the authoroity to establish sports and entertainment authorities, the reviewed entities were:
- The Henrico County Sports & Entertainment Authority
- The Historic Triangle Recreational Facilities Authority, serving Williamsburg, James City County and York County
- The Chesterfield Sports, Visitation & Entertainment Department
County staff noted that Fairfax County deviates from those jurisdictions in having a park authority, as opposed to a parks and recreation department. Some public investment might be required, likely from transient occupancy tax revenue.
“It’s not a magic money machine,” Braddock District Supervisor James Walkinshaw said of the experiences in those localities. “It is potentially a tool to partner with entities inside and outside the county to do more.”
The Fairfax County Park Authority and George Mason University would appear to be logical partners. The county also is home to a number of major private sports facilities, such as the 450,000-square-foot The St. James complex in Springfield.
McKay said any county efforts need to be done “in companion with the private facilities that already exist in the county, which in many ways are remarkable in their own right.”
While some of the downstate localities have been focused on bringing in outside sports teams for tournaments and training, Fairfax needs to focus its efforts on serving local needs first, McKay said.
“We have an enormous amount of demand that is unmet,” he said. “We all want to bring sports tourism in, without a doubt, but as I’ve said from the beginning and I’ll repeat it here, not if it displaces the needs of our own community.”
Mount Vernon District Supervisor Dan Storck agreed there are local needs that should be prioritized.
“The opportunities are there,” he said, pointing to limited indoor-track facilities that restrict opportunities for both adults and youth.
Beyond developing its own facilities, an authority would be able to provide grants to private entities as well as spend money on marketing efforts.
While most of the focus during the 45-minute presentation was on sports, Walkinshaw noted that the state legislation also creates options for arts and entertainment facilities.
“It may be for us, long term, there are more opportunities in that direction,” he said.
The state legislation allows localities to create independent authorities of between five and 17 members, which can be an independent body, a subset of the local governing body or a combination. Authorities have the ability to issue bonds, but would need a dedicated stream of revenue to do so.
Other localities have used a combination of funding sources, including revenues from meals and lodging taxes.
Led by Springfield District Supervisor Pat Herrity, the Board of Supervisors assembled a sports tourism task force in 2017 that projected sports-related tourism could generate an additional $3.3 billion for the county over 20 years with the development and investments in new facilities.
Completed in 2020, the task force’s report listed outdoor field complexes as the top priority, followed by indoor hard courts, indoor tracks, an ice complex and a natatorium with a competition-level pool and diving amenities.
The county completed Patriot Park North, a baseball stadium near GMU’s Fairfax campus and its first foray into sports tourism following the task force report, in April 2023.
However, an agreement with the developer Alpine-X for a resort with an indoor ski slope on a closed portion of the I-95 landfill in Lorton lapsed at the end of 2024. Though the developer indicated that it still hopes to pursue the “Fairfax Peak” project, the county is now weighing alternatives for the site after receiving an unsolicited bid for a waste processing facility.
The Fairfax County Park Authority put out a call in 2023 for more sports tourism proposals but ultimately passed on all of the submissions it received after determining that the sites weren’t suitable or the prospective developers lacked funding.
