Reds stadium needs new seats, so county gets creative

A little more than a decade after Great American Ball Park opened, the stadium's seats are falling apart and must be replaced. The cost to taxpayers, who are on the hook for the repairs, will be about $1.3 million.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that Hamilton County's solution to the problem is a case study in how necessity – and a really tight budget – can be the mother of invention.

Faced with costs as high as $5 million, desperate county officials ended up turning the job of replacing 39,000 seats into a massive do-it-yourself project. They hired a local firm to design new molds for the seats, found a plastics company to make the seat backs and bottoms, and are paying former jail inmates and others about $10 an hour to install them.

About 17,000 of the new seats already are in place, and county officials say they're stronger, better looking, more durable and less expensive than the originals.

"We think we have not only a better product, it meets all specifications," said Joe Feldkamp, who oversees the stadiums for the county. "We're in the seat business now."

It's not a business the county ever expected to be in, especially so soon after the original seats were installed. Stadium seats typically would be expected to last as long as 20 to 25 years, but Feldkamp said Great American's seats began to fail as early as 2008, just five years after the stadium opened in 2003.

Cracks formed on the plastic backs and bottoms of the bright red seats, and some of them split open into wider gashes. Feldkamp wasn't on the job then, but, by the time he took over a few years later, the problem was stadium wide.

The county contacted the manufacturer, Hussey Seating Co. in Maine, and the company agreed to replace about 1,000 seats, Feldkamp said.

A company spokesman, Chris Robinson, said Hussey replaced the seats despite what he described as a "warranty issue" with the county. He said the company makes seats for stadiums and arenas across the country and typically does not have a problem with failures like those described at Great American. "It's a pretty durable product that lasts a long time," Robinson said.

County officials say that wasn't the case here, though they don't know why. Hussey has installed seats in other cold-weather stadiums and the company said the seats here are no different than those.

When Feldkamp went looking for replacement options, he didn't like what he found.

The original contract with Hussey was for about $3.4 million, but quotes from a competitor to replace the seats ran about $5 million. It was the middle of the recession, and the county didn't have that kind of money. Still, the county's lease with the Reds requires it to maintain the seats, and so Feldkamp knew he had to do something.

On a lark, he searched online for some plastic mold companies and found Borke Mold Specialists Inc. in West Chester. He drove to the company headquarters with a cracked plastic seat and asked company president Fritz Borke if there was anything he could do.

Borke, whose company usually makes molds for things like airplane food trays, told Feldkamp he could "reverse-engineer" the molds, essentially making molds from the existing seats instead of the other way around. The county then hired Pinnacle Plastic Products in Bowling Green, Ohio, to pour gobs of hot plastic into the molds.

The work was complicated because the stadium uses four different sized seats, from 19 inches to 22 inches wide, depending on their location. (That's why some seats may feel more snug than others when you sit in one at a game.) Four different sizes meant four different molds, so Borke and his team had their work cut out for them.

Borke, a Cincinnati native, said his employees worked closely with Pinnacle and county officials to improve on the original design. They made the hollow seats thicker and stronger and added hardware to help the seats fasten better to the stadium's steel and concrete.

"We saw some design flaws, and we fixed those," Borke said. "We said, 'If we're going to do this, let's do it so they look really good.' "

Feldkamp said the seats look so good the county might be able to make some money on the mold designs by licensing them to other stadiums. He said he's already in talks related to a project in Michigan, but he won't say any more about it.

The final step was finding someone to install all those seats. The original contract covered everything from mold designs to production to installation. This time, though, the county was doing it alone and needed a cost-effective option.

That's when Feldkamp heard a presentation on the Hamilton County Re-entry Program, which helps former inmates and others adapt to the working world. He set up a training program, hired about 60 participants, handed each a bag of tools and put them to work.

They hit a few bumps in the road. As it turns out, not everyone is very handy, and not everyone had a great work ethic. Eventually, though, they found a core group of workers they could count on and have slowly built up a reliable team.

"The tools are basic tools, but the learning curve was difficult," said Jim Morgan, the project manager.

Some workers have excelled. Alonzo Franklin started out installing seats and is now a supervisor. "It gives us an opportunity to be proud of something," he said. "It makes you feel good that you get to be part of something so big."

Feldkamp said some workers may find long-term employment with the county or the Reds when the seat work is done. Overall, he said, the project is ahead of schedule.

The goal is to finish no later than the All-Star Game in July, though Feldkamp is quick to say the seat replacement project has nothing to do with the game and would have been necessary regardless.

The old seat bottoms and backs are being recycled; the county expects to recoup about $25,000 from that.

As for the new seats, they're noticeably heavier and feel sturdier, but most fans probably won't know the difference. Despite the pride they take in the work, Morgan and Feldkamp said that's the goal.

"We're trying to make it as seamless as possible," Morgan said.