FC Cincinnati: Is there any hope for a stadium in West End? Schools to give update Friday

On Wednesday, it died.

FC Cincinnati threw down an ultimatum. Cincinnati Public Schools didn’t blink. It appeared the deal for a new soccer stadium in West End was dead.

On to Newport or Oakley, right?

Maybe not. CPS will unveil its latest stance to the club and the public on Friday.

“It’s not dead with us,” CPS board member Eve Bolton said Thursday. “I think there’s still a way to get to a yes.”

The Enquirer reached out to FC Cincinnati, but the club was mum on whether it is open to continuing negotiations with the school district. Obviously, everything hinges on that.

The West End site “could be voted down. …Then they could watch us have a press conference in Newport the next day," Jeff Berding, the club's president and general manager, told The Enquirer on Monday. But the team held no news conference Thursday.

The school board met in private, executive session for two hours on Thursday. Afterward, spokeswoman Lauren Worley issued a statement that said the district intends to carry on considering the potential of an FC Cincinnati stadium in West End.

The board will draft a proposed resolution aligning with what it has already told FC Cincinnati it wants. It will share that resolution by Friday with FC Cincinnati and the community at large, with plans to vote on the resolution on March 21.

If FC Cincinnati is out of the game, a CPS resolution means nothing. But Bolton said she’s confident there is still room to negotiate.

“I don’t think it’s dead at all,” she said. Bolton thinks that, even if land options in West End expired on Wednesday, the options could be extended or renewed by FC Cincinnati.

How we got here

FC Cincinnati is gunning for a Major League Soccer franchise, but before that can happen, it needs a soccer-specific stadium. The club has been juggling three potential sites – in Oakley, Newport and West End – but West End has long been the favorite.

In order for that to happen, though, FC Cincinnati would need to make a land-swap deal with CPS. The soccer club would raze CPS’ Stargel Stadium in West End, build its new soccer stadium on that site and build CPS a new Stargel elsewhere in the neighborhood.

For the West End site, FC Cincinnati initially offered the school district a starting amount of $70,000 a year in lieu of property taxes.

On Monday, the soccer club bumped that offer to $100,000 a year during the construction phase with increasing payments after that. CPS scoffed at the offer.

On Wednesday, the club offered $750,000 a year along with an ultimatum: Make a decision by 5 p.m.

The school board called an emergency meeting and went into a private, executive session to discuss the matter. After several hours and a rushed meeting between attorneys from both sides, CPS released a letter saying the club’s offer is half of what the school district wants.

So, maybe that’s it.

Berding has said a finalized stadium plan needs to be ready for MLS by March 31. He said on Wednesday that to meet the MLS deadline, real estate deals in West End needed to be finalized, hence the 5 p.m. deadline.

But Bolton said the school district all along was told it needed to make a decision by March 21. Wednesday’s 5 p.m. deadline, she said, was unreasonable and out of nowhere.

The board would have had to break open-meeting laws to truly comply with the ultimatum, she said.

"I understand their frustration," she said. "But, very frankly, we were working under the assumption that we had until the 21st, and we organized meetings around that."

The school board is asking for $16 million over 10 years, Bolton said, based on what a typical developer constructing a $250 million property would pay.

And it wants an actual plan to look at and potentially bring to a vote, she said – not letters back and forth between lawyers.