The location was always questionable as to its positive merit to any professional amusement park developer, which Minnick was and is not. Overall it had some major issues that cast a significant negative picture of the location. Minnick chose the location for three reasons:
A. Decades the music themed park, made some big media noise about building a park in Eloy, based on a feasibility study by a company who is relatively unknown as a feasibility company in the amusement industry. By the way Minnick came up with the 650 million number as the size of his family trust and the cost of the investment, because that was the number the Decades park promoters used. It had no relevance as to the actual cost of Minnick's park or any other relevance, except he thought he must at least match Decades numbers to give his project some validity. The Decades numbers as far as attendance / revenue and cost to build were way out of realistic
expectations.
B. Minnick found a parcel that was not only in development financial trouble, its size of 1,600 acres was unlikely to have many if any major buyers interested. While he claimed to have the property in Escrow and sometimes he claimed he had already bought the property, he actually did not have any legitimate or formal position on the property.
C. It was fairly easy to Wow the town of Eloy and Minnick was able to get center stage whenever he wanted and his ego demanded he get center stage as often as possible.
As many of you know who read this blog, my company, International Amusement Alliance LLC was contractually retained to be the Project Managers of the park and studio: design and construction. We had been American Project Directors on several new parks in Europe, so we were accredited and experienced. As park industry professionals we reached out to the leading park feasibility company in the world, who we know quite well and held a meeting here in Phoenix along with the master planning firm (also a world leader in park planning and friends of ours) to discuss the park location near I-10 & I-8. While the meeting was more of a "hi how are you meeting for Minnick" its main intent was to outline the scope of work to receive a
formal bid for feasibility study services and master planning services. I presented my description of the project at this meeting, which by the way Minnick lifted without authorization, almost verbatim, in the description you have on this blog. When I first met Minnick he has no written description of the project and just some sketchy ideas. Moreover I am the one who introduced Minnick and the project to Bob Boze Bell a good friend of mine and to his main partner @ True West Magazine.
In the Phoenix meeting I introduced one major hurdle to the location as being a good location and possibly a deal killer. That issue was where does one find 3,000 to 5,000 employees who will work for minimum wage and drive a minimum of 1 hour to the park and 1 hour back to their homes to work at the park. In reality minimum wage employees were out of the question. I also believed that some type of group transportation such as buses had to be provided on a seven day a week schedule and a minimum of 100 buses a day would be needed. A major financial cost to the bottom line and a major profit reducer.
At the meeting and then off the record I had an opportunity to privately discuss several other issues with the feasibility company representative and the master planning company as we both had reservations about the location, as well as some aspects of Minnick's grand plan. We agreed that the location and the plan had the following major issue challenges that would be difficult if not impossible to overcome:
1. Over the past 20 years or so, numerous feasibility studies have been conducted by the best companies in the world regarding a hard ride park in Phoenix and Tucson and all studies came to the same conclusion, a hard ride park (steel rides) were not feasible in the desert. Simply put, Hard Ride Parks are thrill parks that cater to teenagers who A may not have there own transportation and B can only attend an amusement park on the weekend during school and C in the summer it is too hot to touch any steel during the day. Misting systems only work for the Queue lines not on the actual ride's seats.
2. Minnick planned to use the various themed sections; Western town, Indians and Mexicans as film sets, as well as park visitor attractions. Several parks thought they could do the same concept and all of them failed. For example Universal Studios in LA learned very quickly that they had to separate the two functions, as the film people did not want that many people on their set while filming and the visitors did not want any part of the park blocked off from them while filming was on-going. So those studio parks ended up developing a stand alone amusement park and then conducted studio tours to location sets that were either not in use at the time or moved sets to an area where they were no longer used in films.
3. The drive time from both the Phoenix and Tucson convention centers was excessive to anticipate a major penetration into the convention market as potential visitors. 1.5 hours average both ways, depending on traffic.
4. The drive time from the two major hotel centers Scottsdale and Glendale, was also excessive to anticipate a major penetration into the short term tourist market.
5. The days of western themed major motion pictures popularity are long gone. There are two major film centers in Arizona for western themed films. One is Old Tucson (whose profits and revenues from film production are questionable) and the famed Northern Arizona 'Indian Country" landscape backgrounds of unique mountain landscapes. The Minnick location did not have either of the AZ or Western vistas (mountains, cactus etc) and the close proximity to the freeway was / is questionable as a noise control for on location live sound.
That is the scoop on the location's merits and I still believe that it is not the best location / area to develop a park.
Best Regards,
George E. Laibe
International Amusement Alliance LLC
email: iaa2009@q.com
web: http://www.iaaamusement.com/
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