Green Monster: Red Sox Cash In With Car-Focused Spring Training Park

Remember how the otherwise-green-conscious Red Sox moved to a new spring training facility called JetBlue Park in Fort Myers, FL that virtually forces you to drive there? Turns out there's plenty of green motivation behind the lack of transit and bike parking - the cash kind:

Fort Myers’ coffers retained parking fees collected from Red Sox games under the terms of the city’s 1991 contract.

Today, the teams keep all the money generated from game day parking, tickets sales, concessions and advertising, while the county pays for expansions that increased the teams’ ability to sell those items.

As the article details, Lee County is on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in ballpark costs while the Red Sox and nearby Twins owe only a small fraction of that in lease payments - and that doesn't cover the cost for road expansion & maintenance to bring all those cars to JetBlue Park.

But even with the driving mandate and JetBlue Park's total lack of solar energy despite the park's Sunshine State location, the Red Sox still got a baseline LEED green building certification, because the U.S. Green Building Council apparently is now giving them away to anyone who recycles.

Red Sox Get Bigger Footprint: Sprawling Spring Park Skimps on Green

Given that Fenway Park is a green diamond, I was surprised to find on a recent trip to Florida that the new Boston Red Sox spring training facility, is the least-environmentally conscious new sports venue I've visited in recent years. And if they couldn't get JetBlue Park's green right, is it any wonder they also screwed up the height of its Green Monster?

"Environmentally-sustainable features will be incorporated throughout the facility and Complex, and the considerable landscaping will feature vegetation indigenous to the area," reads the JetBlue Park website. It's hard to tell exactly what that means, or whether more ambitious environmental efforts will be undertaken down the road. But how do you build a new ballpark with no solar panels in Florida, one of the states most threatened by global warming?

JetBlue Park's meager positive environmental measures are more than offset by its sprawling location. While its predecessor, City of Palms Stadium, was located in the center of the city, JetBlue Park is 10 miles outside central Fort Myers. That meant the vast majority of fans had to drive and most of them came came off the same exit of I-75, backing up traffic for miles. Even if the stadium was powered with 100% renewable energy, its carbon footprint would still be high because it asks 12,000 fans each game to drive so far outside the city.

And the fans who did take advantage of the ideal biking weather in Florida in March didn't get an ideal reception:

For the grand opening of jetBlue Park, 300 people biked to the new stadium. Those cyclists saved about 2-3 acres of parking. When asked, 76-percent of the bicyclists said they wanted to bike to future games. But jetBlue Park only has permanent bike racks for 50 bikes, with some temporary French barricades on standby.

Given the messed-up Monster, bad traffic and brutally long lines at concession stands, I didn't find the dearth of environmental amenities surprising. I've come to think of a venue's lack of green features as Van Halen viewed brown M&Ms - a warning sign that someone's just going through the motions. Poor environmental planning often goes hand in hand with a poorly thought-out overall customer experience.