Should baseball remain on the Boulevard?

For Mayor Dwight C. Jones, the answer is a ringing “No,” not if Richmond wants a bigger return from the prime property that The Diamond baseball stadium occupies. It needs to go, he believes.

Some members of City Council aren’t so sure, given the site’s identification with baseball since 1954. That’s when minor league teams in Richmond began playing at Parker Field, and later at The Diamond.

Still, Mayor Jones has spent much of his two terms in office trying to end the Boulevard-baseball relationship.

First, in recent years, the city has spent a small fortune — upward of $12 million — relocating the city and school operations that occupied part of the site and then clearing their buildings.

Then, early in the mayor’s second term, he sought to move Richmond’s minor league team to a new Shockoe Bottom stadium to open the 61-acre Boulevard site for a retail, office and apartment complex that could yield millions of dollars annually in new tax revenue.

Now that the Shockoe stadium plan has died, Mayor Jones has begun promoting the next big thing: Replacing the stadium with a state-of-the-art children’s hospital, along with other big-ticket developments.

The theme through it all: “It makes no economic sense to have baseball on the Boulevard,” Grant Neely, the mayor’s chief of staff, commented Monday night in expressing the administration’s view.

The sport may draw crowds, he said, but baseball generates a negligible return for the city, which needs all the tax dollars possible if it is to tackle numerous projects ranging from fixing crumbling schools and streets to developing a modern arena in Downtown, all distant prospects at this point.

Maybe minor league baseball was right for the Boulevard when the area north of Broad Street received little attention, Mr. Neely said. With a spate of other developments going on nearby and revamping the area, The Diamond is in the path of progress.

Expressing the mayor’s view, Mr. Neely said baseball should be played elsewhere after the 2017 season, when the lease on the stadium held by the Flying Squirrels ends.

He said Mayor Jones already has told the team that hospital advocates have identified the Boulevard as the preferred site for their project, whose cost is expected to top $400 million and could spur other projects nearby.

Under an announced agreement, the team is supposed to look around the Richmond area for another possible stadium site then come back to the mayor and representatives of Chesterfield and Henrico counties, once partners in The Diamond, for approval and talks on how to finance a new ballpark.

Councilwoman Kathy C. Graziano, 4th District, agrees that given the Boulevard’s development prospects, baseball no longer fits and should have no future there.

Others are less certain baseball will be gone from the Boulevard after 2017, when Mayor Jones, whose term ends in December 2016, will no longer be in office.

After hearing Mr. Neely’s view that baseball does not make economic sense for that area, Councilman Jonathan T. Baliles, 1st District, said, “I think it ought to be left to private developers rather than city bureaucrats.”

By that, he meant the private companies that the city would ask to compete for the right to redevelop the cleared Boulevard property. Earlier, Mr. Baliles had shown support for a private developer’s idea of building a stadium in exchange for the rights to develop a big chunk of the Boulevard property.

He’s not alone. Councilman Charles R. Samuels, 2nd District, also said that it is too soon to tell what the future of baseball in Richmond will look like. Maybe it will be gone after 2017, maybe not.

Other members of the council, including Councilwoman Cynthia Newbille, 7th District, are more focused on gaining a children’s hospital.

“My focus is on the children,” she said. “We need to provide them with the best health and education we can.”

As for the future of The Diamond and a new stadium, she said she would consider that when “there is an actual proposal.”