I’m writing to provide an update in our Mountain View baseball and softball facility project.
We were able to break ground for our Mountain View indoor baseball and softball facility project last month. This will be a roughly, 4,200 sqft indoor baseball and softball facility. A story with additional details was recently featured in the Anchorage Daily News.
Click Here for a link to that story:
I want to send a special thanks to all of you that innately have understood the need for this project and jumped in early with whatever support that you could offer.
Here is a brief summary of this project for those of you that are just starting with this program or just becoming aware of our efforts with this project.
Explanation of Need
When first proposing this project, we became attracted to the idea of developing a facility in the Mountain View neighborhood of Anchorage, over other locations, as it sits in a key area that supports multiple Northeast Anchorage areas to include JBER, Chugach/Eagle River, as well as underserved families living in Mountain View, Debar, Russian Jack, and Nunaka Valley areas. We believed that this was the right project for the city and saw a developing path for the project to be funded.
Baseball in Alaska is a geographically restrictive sport. What this means is that kids generally play where they live. As a result, if Abbott-O-Rabbit, Anchorage’s southern most baseball and softball program is scheduled to played Polar Mountain View, Anchorage’s northern most program, those teams need to travel to each other's areas to play. Northeast Anchorage, for the past 25 years has had struggling programs. This is generally because Northeast Anchorage is an economically disadvantaged area, and baseball/softball require a heavy investment in facilities, people to operate programming, and often times travel. Northeast Anchorage's high schools and middle schools have a Title One designation, which means that their students qualify for free that reduce school lunches based on lower household income levels.
Mountain View, at times has been identified as the most diverse neighborhood in the entire country, and so have it's schools. Despite all of the culturally richness of the neighborhood, there is no denying that Mountain View is currently not experiencing it's best days...Having a facility in this area is important to us because kids do not get to decide what zip code they live in. All kids deserve a stable footing for success, and we wanted to take the opportunity to create a program that encourages success in an Anchorage area that needs it.
This project is being funded by generous support from Hilcorp Energy, The Rasmuson Foundation, Alaska Community Foundation, Murdock Charitable Trust, MLB-MLBPA YDF, GCI, ConocoPhillips, and families like yours that wish for positive outcomes for all kids!
The Project
Construction is being executed through three separate contracts and phases as this works best with our secured grant funding sources. The phases of the project are listed below:
Phase One (Site Work/Excavation/Foundation)= $420,000 (Near Completed)
Materials + Change Orders + Shipping= $280,000 (Completed)
Funding Source (Municipality of Anchorage, Rasmuson Foundation)
Phase Two (Constructing the Building/Interior Finishes)= $250,000 (Secured)
Funding Source (MLB-MLBPA YDF)
Phase Three (Paving/Signage/Landscaping) $250,000 (Pending)
Funding Source Murdock Charitable Trust)
Currently Status
We are currently preparing for Phase Two. We will likely need to stop construction for the winter as the wall panels for the building are scheduled to arrive in late November or December. The interior concrete slab cannot be exposed to our extreme Alaska weather. Heating the slab for the winter will create an unanticipated expense, so as a result, we probably won’t be able to complete the foundation work needed to install the building until the spring.
Expected Completion: June 2025
Support Opportunities
Funding Gap - We are working to raise $75,000 to support any gaps in funding that we might have. Change orders are a way to call on unforeseen changes in a project that were not calculated in the original construction budget. Change orders are common in the construction process and for this reason, it is customary to have around a 10% contingency fund. You can support this fundraising effort by clicking the link below and donating.
Donation Link:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/