Hutto ‘Field of Dreams' on its way: $800M development anchored by baseball scouting organization
HUTTO, Texas - If you build it, they will come. It’s the single largest economic development deal in the history of Hutto: an $800 million investment. Soon the Central Texas town will be home to the headquarters of a nationally-known baseball scouting organization and mixed use development.
Hotels, retail, apartments, office space and more...all anchored by the new national headquarters for “Perfect Game,” a baseball scouting organization responsible for seeing more than 11,000 players drafted by Major League Baseball.
“The site itself will have 24 turf fields in it, it will have a Hall of Fame for Perfect Game. It’s just a tremendous facility that’s planned,” said Hutto City Manager Odis Jones.
Soon the corn fields at the site now will be home to a 13,000-seat indoor sports and events center along with a convention hotel generating a demand for more than 150,000 hotel room nights per year according to the City of Hutto. “It’s going to bring 600,000 visitors here to the City of Hutto also to a direct spin of $200 million a year. I mean that’s big,” said Jones.
Jones calls the public-private partnership a “game changer.”
And they’ll be able to make improvements to existing city parks.
“We’re able to leverage our $50 million bond, park bond we got...into $800 million of investment and simply put — when we initially looked at doing a park bond what the community said they wanted is 10 ball fields, they wanted 4 mutipurpose fields and a rec center. And out of that we’re going to be getting use of 30 ball fields, 6 multipurpose fields,” Jones said.
Obviously this is huge for Hutto. Hutto Mayor Doug Gaul says the city has about 32,000 people right now and expects that population to get to 60 or 70 in the coming years.
“When I moved here it was a small town with one yellow blinking light, we’ve kind of seen the growth but the last 3 years the council really took aggressive growth on...saying ‘you know what? We’re open for business,’” Gaul said.
Cassie Sanchez is a Hutto mom and former coach. “It will allow for the kids league to grow. We’ll be able to have more practice space, more game spaces,” she said. “It’s going to be maybe a little bit of a shock at first but it’s going to be really good for our community. It’s going to help us grow.”
The City of Hutto says ground will likely be broken on the project this summer.
With a Perfect Game grand opening no later than Memorial Day 2021.
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