Padres Near Accord on New Spring Home : Baseball: Facility in Phoenix suburb of Peoria would be shared by Padres and Mariners.

The Padres are near agreement with the city of Peoria, Ariz., to construct a new spring-training facility they would share with the Seattle Mariners beginning in 1994, local officials said this week.

The facility in Peoria, a bedroom community northwest of Phoenix, would include one 10,000-seat stadium for Cactus League exhibition games and nine to 12 practice fields that the two teams would share, sources said. The project proposal also includes a hotel, houses and apartments in adjoining land that the Padre baseball club would help develop.

“It’s an interesting proposal that would allow us to find some housing,” said Bob Wells, Padre vice president/finance. “We’re not ready to settle on anything yet, but it’s still progressing. The important thing is that we haven’t met any roadblocks.

“It’s a delicate matter, though, because of our relationship with Yuma.”

The Padres have been training in Yuma, Ariz.--located three hours east of San Diego--since their inception in 1969. Although the Padres have no major complaints with the facility, they have become frustrated by the three-hour distance from Phoenix where five other teams train.

Each year the Padres are forced to leave Yuma for 10 days to two weeks while they train in Phoenix. They have no facility in the Phoenix area, and most often have to improvise by dressing for games and workouts at the team hotel.

“It’s been a big inconvenience,” said Joe McIlvaine, Padre general manager, “and it’s had an adverse effect on our camp each year.”

Said one official in Arizona: “The Padres are sort of driving the deal in Peoria. They made it clear they love Yuma where they train now, but that the distance is too far from the other teams, about 3 1/2 hours. In Yuma they have to set up training equipment in several rooms and it isn’t very efficient.

“And if their minor league players were based in Phoenix they could play minor leaguers on other teams without traveling 3 1/2 hours. So another major issue is that the minor leaguers don’t have anyone to play.”

The new Peoria project would be build partially on open land and also where the city has an existing sports facility and park called the Greenway Sports Complex, sources said. The land is located about 12 miles from downtown Phoenix and 200 miles from Yuma.

Asked how soon the overall project would be finalized, one official said: “The city of Peoria would like to have this resolved very shortly.”

The development would be the first stadium-training complex built from the ground up with public monies raised through the new Maricopa County Stadium District. The district was created last year for the purpose of keeping and attracting Cactus League baseball teams, said Eric J. Anderson, policy adviser in the Maricopa County manager’s office.

Spring training is viewed in Arizona as a prime tourism and tax revenue generator, he said, and the district was created to facilitate stadium financing after the Cleveland Indians decided to accept an offer from Homestead, Fla., and relocate there from Tucson.

Arizona officials believe they must keep at least six teams in the Cactus League for it to remain viable. Currently, seven teams are in the league, all of which spend spring training in and around the Phoenix area, except the Padres and the Colorado Rockies, the expansion franchise that next year will begin training in Tucson.

The stadium district began raising funds Jan. 1 by assessing a $1.50 fee for each rental car contract signed in the county, Anderson said. The district disperses the money to build new facilities or renovate old ones. Since the funds are a cheap form of financing, there is keen interest among all teams for the money.

“I still think the Cactus League has to be careful how they treat their other communities,” said Yuma Mayor Bob Tippett. “Let’s not steal from Peter to pay Paul.”

If the Padres move to Peoria, the city of Yuma will lose about $8 million in revenue each spring, Tippett said.

“It certainly won’t devastate Yuma,” Tippett said, “but it’s going to have a big impact, particularly with the hotels, bars and restaurants.”

For Maricopa County officials, retaining the Mariners is a higher priority in granting the public financing for the new Peoria facility than attracting the Padres from Yuma. The Mariners trained in Tempe through the 1992 spring but failed to reach an agreement on a contract extension with Tempe officials and currently have no spring-training home.

The city of Tempe subsequently came to terms with the Angels, who are moving there from Palm Springs. The Tempe stadium is undergoing a $3.3 million renovation financed partially by the stadium district.

The Mariners reportedly were considering a move to Florida, a prospect that worried Arizona officials, hence the willingness of the stadium district to approve financing for the Peoria project. The Maricopa County board of supervisors, sitting as the stadium district board, are set to vote on June 23 whether to finance the Mariners’ practice facilities portion of the complex.

“We made it clear to Peoria that if they were coming for funding purely to lure the Padres,” Anderson said, “they would not be first priority. But that if they could do a deal with the Mariners, that would represent a top priority. If the Padres come along too, so be it.”

The Mariner front office, which has been in meetings for the last week after the recent sale of a controlling interest in the team to Nintendo video games tycoon Hiroshi Yamauchi, was not available for comment on the spring training facility.

The Mariners and Padres have both been waiting for the Mariners’ ownership situation to be finalized before signing a final agreement with Peoria officials, sources said. Major league owners approved the Mariners’ purchase last week. The Padres have been negotiating with Peoria officials for six months, sources said.

Although the stadium in the Peoria facility would not be complete until 1994, the practice fields would be ready for the Mariners to begin training in February 1993. The Padres would not move from Yuma to the new complex until the stadium is complete in 1994.

A similar Pima County stadium district has been set up in Tucson for the purpose of financing a new stadium and training complex for the Rockies by 1996, Anderson said.