GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — For years, Grand Rapids, Kent County, the Convention and Arena Authority, and Grand Action 2.0 have worked together to bring an amphitheater to the banks of the Grand River. Thursday, the project took another step forward.
201 Market Ave. SW is home to a bunch of government buildings. Come early 2024, the hope is it will be home to the Acrisure Amphitheater — part of what's being called a series of transformational projects for Grand Rapids.
Another meeting and another step was accomplished at the Kent County Board of Commission chambers on Thursday in the process of making the downtown amphitheater project a reality.
“What we’ve seen is the next step in moving forward as a partner with Grand Action 2.0 and the convention arena authority and the city of Grand Rapids on the development of the amphitheater and the soccer stadium,” Al Vanderberg, Kent County Administrator, said.
The public-private partnership is a complicated one, but the bottom line is on Thursday things moved forward, with the Kent County Commission passing a Convention and Arena Authority operating agreement for the amphitheater.
“With partnerships among governmental agencies, there’s a lot of different actions that has to be taken. This is just one big day in a series of actions,” Vanderberg said.
This is welcome news for Grand Action 2.0, the private portion of the partnership.
"This is an exciting step forward for Grand Action and the overall amphitheater project itself to get the funding needed,” Executive Director for Grand Action 2.0 Kara Wood said.
Grand Action says the county kicked in $15 million of tax money, from a hotel and lodging excise tax, to add to the capital campaign. The project is still in its design phase. The amphitheater would sit along the Grand River and host up to 12,000 people.
Early renditions of the project look like this.
“We’re going to keep working on design. We’re in the development stage of the project. We’ll finalize those missing pieces of the capital stack and begin construction hopefully in the spring,” Wood said.
For the mayor of Grand Rapids, it's reminiscent of major projects that have transformed the city in the past.
“The magnitude of this project, it’s really hard to put it into perspective. The closest thing we have to look back on is the Van Andel Arena and the convention center. That truly was a public-private partnership,” Rosalynn Bliss said.
Also approved at the meeting was a memorandum of understanding for a soccer stadium in Grand Rapids, so the earliest stages of conversations about that project can begin. An official location for that stadium has yet to be named.
Grand Action 2.0 says the hard work for the amphitheater is behind them.
“I’m very confident that this is going to be built," Wood said.
