The Maple Leaf Performing Arts Center proposal will take one more step toward becoming reality Tuesday, Aug. 22, when project organizers go before the Area Plan Commission to request rezoning.

Since the first public meeting about the new music venue at the Brown County Playhouse on June 20, residents have raised a variety of questions and concerns on social media and in public meetings.

Organizer Barry Herring is asking for 13.74 acres behind Brown County Health & Living Community to be rezoned from primary residential/floodplain to general business/floodplain.

Chuck Snyder owns that land, but he’s agreed to sell it to the county for $2 million to build the 2,000-seat entertainment venue.

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If the Area Plan Commission approves the rezoning request, the project will need to go before the Brown County Convention and Visitors Commission, the county commissioners and the county council for various approvals. Dates and agendas for those meetings have not been set.

Project plans will also have to be submitted to the Indiana State Department of Health, the department of homeland security, the department of fire and building safety and to the local planning and zoning office.

Organizers have said that the Maple Leaf — estimated at $10.2 million for the building, plus $2.3 million annually for operating costs — will be paid for by visitors, not by local taxpayers. The innkeepers tax is the revenue source.

Herring is a member of the Brown County Convention and Visitors Commission, a group of appointed volunteers who manage the innkeepers tax revenue.

CVC President Kevin Ault and Herring sat down with The Democrat last week to answer the following questions.

Q: What other similar venues from similarly-sized markets were reviewed to determine the basic feasibility of this venue? For instance, how does this differ from the Palladium in Carmel?

Ault: The cost of this doesn’t reach (the Palladium’s) operating costs. That’s a $200 million project and we’re a $10 million project. Other than comparing seats. I think they have 1,600 seats and we’ll have 2,000 seats. We’re probably easier to compare to the Murat than the Palladium.

Herring: We met with the gentleman that put Palladium together and he gave us some ideas. It’s like there’s no comparison. … I think the Murat sold 180,000 tickets and we only have to sell 60,000.

Q: What were you comparing when you were looking at other venues?

Herring: We were looking at like-size venues. We were looking for approximately 2,000-seat venues. The thing people keep forgetting is we had one in town. (The former Little Nashville Opry.) There’s no market research that can tell you more than having something in town. Kevin and I can look at occupancy rates when this was operating in town compared to what they are today. Even though we’re doing well today, we were doing better when the Opry was open. There’s no better market research that can be done than history. Why hire a study when you’ve already had one and you already know the impact of it?

Ault: We looked at one is Wisconsin.

Herring: There was one in Louisville, too.

Q: Why this location? Why not the flea market property in Gnaw Bone?

Herring: It’s too far away. … This was the closest location to Nashville. There’s only two sites in the entire county that have enough land outside the floodplain where this structure could be built (Gnaw Bone flea market property and Snyder farm).

Ault: You start putting something that far out of Nashville, people are going to be staying in Columbus. If you went to the (former) Ski World (vacant land on State Road 46 West), people would go to Bloomington. The flea market was pushing it, though, to have enough land outside the floodplain.

Q: Are you guys predicting any changes to be made after your conversation with Willow Manor and Hawthorne Hills residents Aug. 17?

Herring: We’ve already made changes to the plan since our original conversation at the Playhouse. We’ve redrawn Hawthorne Drive to show expanded sidewalks, to show three lanes.

Q: Has there been any more conversation with Scott Wayman (the owner of the Little Nashville Opry)? Was that land ever a possibility?

Ault: It was the first site that the Realtor contacted to see if he was interested in selling it. They didn’t tell him what the project was, but would he be interested in selling, and he said absolutely not.

Herring: Jane Ellis and I sat down with Scott about a month ago. He’s a very nice guy. He still states he’s going to build it. He had one concern, (which) is he wanted us to say that we would not book country events, and I told him we could not handcuff ourselves. We’re going to pursue all types of music. … It was a pleasant conversation.

Q: How exactly will the funding work?

Herring: What happens is that the innkeepers tax, let’s call it $850,000 a year, while the Maple Leaf is under construction, those funds will come from the innkeepers tax. The innkeepers tax will always be basically guaranteeing those bond payments. But once the Maple Leaf opens and builds up its profits, it should be self-sustained. … We’re assuming that (if) by chance it does lose money, the innkeepers tax props it up.

Q: Is there a backup for innkeepers tax?

Herring: I can’t imagine any scenario that it would go beyond that.

Ault: In essence, the bond payment will always come out of innkeepers tax because the county auditor, county treasurer, all of these, draw those funds from the innkeepers tax fund, and then any shortage from the CVB’s (Brown County Convention and Visitors Bureau’s) budget would come from profits or the operating side of the Maple Leaf until we build that (CVB budget) back up.

Herring: When you do bonds, they come out as two payments a year. … The first payment will be July 15, 2018, which is like half a year of interest, which is $115,000 (approximately). The next payment will be July 2019, which will be about $148,000. The reason those numbers are so small is because we’re pulling the money incrementally out, so we don’t fund it, the whole $10 million, at once. When we take down the land, we want to pay interest on just the land portion, so we’re not fully funded until we spend every construction dollar. The nice thing about it is if the Maple Leaf opens in January of 2019, it’s conceivable that the next payment of July 15, 2019, would be made out of profits. It’s conceivable that only about $260,000 would come out of the CVC (budget) for the first year.

Q: Were private investors approached about funding this project? Why or why not?

Herring: Nobody came forward, for one thing. The nice thing about it being a public venture is the financing that we can afford to put on the project. The public financing on a bond is probably in the 3 percent range. A private investor doing a venue like this would have to probably come up with 25 percent equity, so on a $10 million building, you’re looking for someone to invest $2 million, approximately, into a facility of this size. We didn’t have any private investor that came forward that was willing to put in that type of equity to build a project like this. A private investor couldn’t demand that type of interest rate.

Q: What type of bonds will be issued?

Herring: It’s a first mortgage bond. It’s the same bond they used to build the jail. It is the traditional bonding mechanism that all municipalities use to do their projects. We’re not recreating the wheel here. It’s all standard stuff.

Q: Will this bond affect the county’s total bonding capacity?

Ault: It will not. It’s kind of like with the jail, too. There will be a building corporation formed, so that’s who will actually handle all of that.

Herring: Basically that corporation will lease the revenue stream from the CVC and then that corporation then will issue the bond, using that revenue stream, to make a bond payment, which is the same way as the jail is done. Because of that lease scenario, it’s what keeps it away from it applying toward the debt limit.

Q: Is there a way to guarantee county (taxpayer) money won’t be used for the project?

Herring: If you look at the revenue stream, what will have to happen is the Maple Leaf will have to get built and every hotel in town would have to go bankrupt and close for it to have any impact on local taxpayers. The worst, worst, worst possible scenario would be that the CVB’s budget would be impacted and wouldn’t have the funding that it did, but I can’t calculate a way that it would ever impact the county.

Ault: If for some reason the Maple Leaf did not succeed, you can lock the doors and all you have to do is pay the bond payment every year, so the most we are going to be out from the innkeepers tax is $560,000 a year.

Q: How were the operating costs determined?

Herring: We sat down with Live Nation (a booking agency) and basically, over a series of like five or six meetings, they detailed to us how much certain groups cost, and then we came up with a ticket price.

Q: Could local artists open for main acts?

Herring: We haven’t really gotten that far yet, but it sounds good, though.

Q: Do you know who will pick the artists to perform?

Herring: We would hire a booking agent. I guess what the booking agent does is they give you a sheet saying, ‘Hey, this group will perform and they want X-amount of dollars,’ and it’s up to us to decide what the ticket price will be, etc. Then what we’re hoping is that we can share the booking with a local taking certain days and Live Nation taking other days. We’re hoping we can do that. I think we can do it where we can book all the local acts ourselves.

Q: Would someone be hired to book local acts?

Ault: Somebody will be hired. There will be some staff. Whether we go with Live Nation, or something like that, they typically have people that are their people on site.

Herring: There’s a per-performance budget of about $10,000 that goes toward putting a particular show on. It goes from ticket takers to bartenders to parking lot attendants to cleanup crews to lighting and sound. But there’s also an annual payroll budget to have somebody on site all the time, like a manger or maintenance, marketing people, etc. In addition to the normal people that are there every day, there are blasts of people that come in to take care of that particular performance that’s temporary. We’re hoping a lot of those people will be volunteers, etc., to offset our operation costs.

Q: Have you planned in case you have to pay all of these people, if there are no volunteers?

Herring: We have it taken care of economically to pay people, but it will offset our operating costs (to have volunteers). Maybe … we’ll say, ‘Hey, look, if you want to use the venue, we won’t charge you, but you have to take care of X-amount of shows for us with your volunteer people.’

Ault: With some of these venues, like IU has the red coats, those are people who are ushers. Those people are volunteers because they get to watch basketball games for free, so you get volunteers because they get to stand there and watch the performance for free, whatever it is.

Q: Are there plans to cover the impact that this will have on local emergency services, like police and volunteer firefighters?

Ault: Part of the profits would be used to do that. PILOT is ‘payment in lieu of taxes,’ so if we have $500,000 a year in profit, then we can determine, ‘OK, this much will go toward the fire protection. This much is going to go to the police and this much is going to go back to the county for infrastructure, economic development. This will go back to the council.’ There’s lots of things that you can use those funds for. It will be based on a percentage and not a dollar amount. If one year it’s only $500,000 profit and the next year it’s only $400,000, you’re just going to take a percentage.

Herring: We are already in preliminary discussions with the town on what their shares of the profits would be to offset the costs on the police department.

Q: Will there be emergency ingress and egress lanes, or a fire lane in the design layout?

Herring: We’re talking about the (Salt Creek walking) trail somehow playing a role in emergency access. We talked to Keith Baker about that. He says maybe the trail could be used as an access point to help emergency (personnel get to the venue).

Ault: There are two streets going in and out. (Including a new road to be built on the Snyder Farm side of the fence row, behind Salt Creek Inn heading back to the building site.) If there’s an emergency, you can always direct traffic out one street and use the other one for incoming emergency traffic. Hawthorne Drive going to three lanes, you can easily take down to one lane for emergency traffic. That gives you two lanes in to get your traffic in and it gives you two lanes out, so there’s always one open for the opposite direction. If there’s an emergency, we have an abundance of parking at this facility. We’re looking at 600 parking spaces, so we could easily get people to the parking lot and allow emergency traffic to come in before you disperse cars.

Q: Was using innkeepers tax for other projects that would promote tourism, like a skate park or mountain biking, considered?

Ault: We actually use funds for mountain biking at this point for the promotion side. We don’t go out and build trails, but from a promotion standpoint, we spend several thousands of dollars a year promoting mountain biking.

Herring: I think it’s primarily supposed to promote heads in beds. It’s supposed to promote overnight stays, because it’s an innkeepers tax that’s generated by innkeepers. … It would have to pass that test and it has to be a 501(c)3. We can’t just give money to anybody. It has to be a nonprofit. It has to pass the test of, ‘Does it promote tourism?’ … If a skate park can’t pass the test of promoting overnight stays, then even if we wanted to, we couldn’t legally fund it. (Reporter’s note: State statute about Brown County innkeepers tax says that the money can be transferred to “any not-for-profit corporation, for the purpose of promotion and encouragement in the county of convention and visitation development.”)

Ault: Even with the Maple Leaf, the (Brown County) Convention and Visitors Commission is not giving the innkeepers tax to that. We’re guaranteeing the (bank) notes and they’re going to pay us, but at some point, the Maple Leaf will be able to make its own bond payment. We’re in essence leasing them that money.

Q: Would the CVC consider funding other projects with the expected Maple Leaf surplus in the future?

Ault: That would come through the PILOT program.

Herring: We’ve mentioned donating a major portion of the profits to the community foundation, then the community foundation has a lot more latitude with what to do with those funds than we would. Our hands are tied. It has to be tourism based, but if we donate the profits to the community foundation (there’s more latitude).

Q: Could the Opry be funded with the innkeepers tax? Was he ever approached?

Ault: No, because it’s a private venture. He would have had to sell the land to us.

Herring: We can’t loan money to private individuals. The only kind of vehicles he could have looked for is TIF financing or the ways he got his sewer plant but nothing basically to build his structure.

Q: Is a TIF district possible? Has it been considered?

Ault: Because of the type of funding we’re pursuing, it wouldn’t be any good for our project. I don’t think, legally, we could do it.

Herring: It’s based on the real estate taxes. Our entity is public and we don’t pay those taxes, (so) there’s no way of making a TIF district work for us. We don’t pay real estate taxes.

Q: What happens if the Opry does open? The attendance projections you used were from the Opry’s worst year. Have you considered what those numbers would look like if the Opry was also open?

Herring: We’re looking at it like a Branson (Missouri) scenario. We think the more, the better. Our operating budget, because of how cheap our loan is, we don’t need the level of business as if it was a private industry, so we’re comfortable we’ll be successful, and the more, the better.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Herring: We hope to have financing commitments within the next two weeks.

MAP: Maple Leaf plan as of August 2017

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The Aug. 22 Area Plan Commission meeting took place after this paper’s press deadline. Read how the meeting went at bcdemocrat.com this week and get more of a recap in the Aug. 30 paper.

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The senior citizens who live in Willow Manor and Hawthorne Hills apartments have questions about the concert venue envisioned to go up near their homes.

Last week, project organizers met with a large group of residents to provide answers and listen to suggestions.

“This is not a done deal. We have miles to go to get this approved,” Brown County Convention and Visitors Commission member Barry Herring said. “We’re here to listen.”

Herring, Brown County Convention and Visitors Bureau Executive Director Jane Ellis, CVB board Chairman Bruce Gould, architect Doug Harden and commissioner Diana Biddle attended the meeting.

Questions included: How long will event traffic take to clear the area? How much noise will there be? Why did project organizers pick the Snyder farm property that is so close to the senior apartments and nursing home? How will the residents who walk Hawthorne Drive daily be protected when there’s an increase in traffic? How late will shows go?

“We moved here because it’s nice, peaceful, quiet apartment buildings. Now you’re going to have all of this traffic and we have ambulances that come down here, home helpers that come down here,” Hawthorne Hills resident Marica Henson said.

“You’re asking us to give up our freedom, our piece of mind, our quiet, and that’s not fair.”

Herring told the group that since the Maple Leaf’s proposed location will use Hawthorne Drive — along with a second, new road that will be built on a 50-foot strip of Snyder’s property east of Salt Creek Plaza — the road and sidewalks will receive improvements that will help keep the residents safe around traffic.

The town of Nashville recently applied for funding from the Indiana Department of Transportation’s Community Crossings grant program to make Hawthorne Drive three lanes all the way back to the proposed music venue, and add sidewalks all the way to McDonald’s. The town will learn at the end of the month whether or not it’ll be getting that money.

Michael Mullen lives at Hawthorne Hills. He said he has already almost been hit by a car three times on Hawthorne Drive.

“If you make me cross three lanes, I’ll never make it,” he said.

“It’s bad enough now and we don’t need more traffic,” resident Neil Smith added.

Herring said the additional lane will handle the traffic better. “This project provides an economic emphasis to have these roads changed,” he said.

Smith said project organizers should consider using innkeepers tax funds to upgrade Nashville instead, so that it will “keep attracting” tourists because it’s “lacking charm.”

One senior citizen had a question about what will happen to the Nashville police station, which would have to be moved, according to existing plans, in order to take Hawthorne Drive back to the Maple Leaf.

Harden said project organizers are still in negotiations with the town about moving the station. One option would be to put it on a corner of the Maple Leaf land, he said.

Nashville Police Chief Ben Seastrom told the seniors that when he worked on Little Nashville Opry traffic control years ago, most traffic was out of the area within 20 minutes.

Harden said the shows at the Maple Leaf could end around 10:30 or 11 p.m.

Diana Pegram said residents need to be reassured that they will get the help they need when there’s an emergency.

“I think that’s the biggest thing I’ve been hearing from people,” she said. “We need assurance that a helicopter could get in here if we needed a helicopter to get out, or if we needed to get some place because we can’t breathe.”

Seastrom said residents will be made priority over traffic. “You always have been. Nothing is going to change,” he said.

“That’s what we need to hear,” Pegram said.

Biddle said if an emergency does happen, there are other options for people to get into the venue, such as by using the new road or an extension of Chestnut Street that organizers are working to make happen.

At the end of the meeting, Ellis encouraged apartment residents and other seniors in the room to stop by the under-construction Visitors Center at Van Buren and Washington streets with any other concerns or questions.

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