City Council makes step towards 20 year agreement with Myrtle Beach Pelicans baseball team
Myrtle Beach’s only Minor League Baseball team isn’t going anywhere. At least, city politicians hope so.
A Memorandum of Understanding, or government agreement, was made on Tuesday between the owners of the Myrtle Beach Pelicans and city council. It’s “non-binding,” the resolution said.
City council members voted unanimously in favor of the MOU, with council members Jackie Hatley and Mike Lowder saying their yes votes were “reluctant.”
Instead, definitive costs and repairs will be outlined in the new 20-year lease agreement between the city, Horry County and the baseball team. A copy of that lease was not included in Tuesday’s meeting packet and has not yet been publicly shared.
The team is expected to pay a new annual lease of $750,000 for the stadium, meeting docs showed.
The city’s meeting agenda says renovations to Pelicans Ballpark in downtown Myrtle Beach will cost approximately $20 million. An exact line item breakdown of that $20 million was not included in Tuesday’s meeting packet.
City manager Fox Simons said that $20 million would be paid by using bonds.
“We are not bonding anything right now, we are not spending any money right now, but this just allows us to move forward,” council member Bill McClure said at Tuesday’s meeting.
Records show that 70% of the stadium is owned by the city and 30% is owned by Horry County. They’ve jointly owned the downtown baseball stadium since 1998.
That’s almost $40 million off what meeting docs from Horry County last fall showed.
They said Pelicans Ballpark renovation costs would be approximately $58.7 million through the fiscal year 2028.
Prior to the vote on the new MOU, council members and top city staff spent nearly an hour in executive session. One of the main topics of that session was the contract with the baseball team.
With millions going into the renovation of the current baseball stadium, it’s unclear if future plans for a new minor league baseball stadium at the old Myrtle Beach Pavilion site have been trashed. Just last August, the city received $10 million from the state for downtown projects, with plans that include a potential new stadium.
With no hard copy of the lease, it’s hard to say what the city will do with the old Pavilion site, which is owned by the local real estate giant Burroughs & Chapin.
At the start of 2025, the city also entered another new agreement with a longtime partner, Sheraton, for the hotel next to the city-owned convention center.
A Freedom of Information Act request for that new agreement was submitted on Jan. 15, 2025, and has not yet been fulfilled as of Tuesday morning.
