A Once in a
Lifetime Project
OSU’s Kevin Callan helped find financing to construct Seattle’s Safeco Field

Kevin Callan

By Scott Holter
Amorning mist hangs over Seattle’s SODO district, south of downtown, and Safeco Field, home to Major League Baseball’s Seattle Mariners, is engulfed in quiet. It’s a peacefulness that is most rare in this neighborhood at this point of summer, the season when 45,000 baseball fans fill up the 3-year-old ballpark 81 times between April and October.

On this early weekday most of the traffic is heading away from the stadium, south toward the blocks of renovated warehouses that now house advertising agencies, outdoor apparel distributors and the worldwide headquarters for Starbucks Coffee.

Here at Safeco, where First Avenue meets Atlantic Street, a tiny, unassuming office is tucked behind home plate just inside the media gates. This is home to the Public Facilities District (PFD) — creators, builders and operators of this half-billion dollar baseball facility, and unless you know this office is here, well, you don’t really know it’s here.

"That’s the way we prefer it," said Oregon State alumnus Kevin Callan, ’79, the PFD’s executive director and only employee apart from a part-time receptionist. "If no one knows about us, it only means we’re doing our job."

Callan’s been doing the job in Seattle’s construction business for more than two decades, building a career in the town in which he grew up. A 1974 graduate of Seattle’s Kennedy High School, he was the seventh of 10 kids raised by a single mother and attended OSU on a football scholarship.

"My dad died when I was 5, and I really needed that full ride," said Callan, who was recruited by former Beavers’ coach Dee Andros, but played mostly for Andros’ successor, Craig Fertig. "I was a running back in high school, but did more place kicking at OSU. I was that rare soccer style kicker back then. But I grew up in Catholic schools playing soccer. I didn’t think it was a big deal."

By his junior year, Callan had suffered injuries to his knee, ankle and hand, and thanks to the prodding of his older brother, his "steering force," he decided to concentrate more on school. "My siblings pointed me toward the school of business, and with good reason," he said.

Callan left Corvallis in 1979 with long hair and without a suit, taking his initial job with an architectural engineering firm. Today he is a respected veteran of Seattle’s construction and development industry. In the summer of 1997, just after the Seattle ballpark broke ground, Callan came aboard as director of finance administration for the PFD, created by Washington State and King County in 1995 to build the ballpark and identify the sources of revenue that could be used to finance it.

"With $300 million in bonds issued, there was a real need to manage the construction process," said Callan, who left a CFO position with another firm to join the PFD. "I went out to lunch with them, and they offered me the job. It was an easy decision. I mean, how many times do you get a once in a lifetime project?"

But this was a project that also had one-of-a-kind challenges that began even before Callan came aboard. After a public vote to pay for the ballpark with a .01 percent sales tax increase failed by the slimmest of margins (49.9 percent to 50.1 percent), a special state legislative session authorized a different funding package and the creation of the PFD.

"We felt a bit under the microscope every day," Callan said, "because for everyone who was excited about the stadium, there was someone who wasn’t."

When the project’s entire accounting staff resigned just before Callan assumed the financial reins, he hired a close confidant to serve as right-hand man. "I wanted someone I trusted, and the two of us really did it all," he said. "We were used to doing 20 projects at once. Instead this was one giant project. It was essentially like building a mid-size tower. But once we got our arms around it, it was pretty manageable."

Callan’s office during construction was across Atlantic Street in a space that is now a pre-game food and beer court. Equally comfortable in boots and hard hat as he is in coat and tie, he was on site daily, checking expenditures, answering questions, and walking dignitaries through the process and progress.

Under the auspices of the PFD, two construction companies — Huber, Hunt & Nichols and Kiewit Construction — formed a joint venture, Hunt-Kiewit, working together to identify creative techniques in building the stadium.

The initial construction budget called for an estimated tally of $417 million with the Mariners on the hook for $45 million of the capital cost, plus any cost overruns. But the Mariners also wanted the new ballpark to open in mid-1999, which would allow the team to have the only "new" arena in Major League Baseball at the time. This led to an even tighter time frame, a hurried construction schedule and $81 million in additional costs.

There were also site challenges, mainly the plot of land chosen just south of the Kingdome. These were former tidelands covered with landfill the consistency of oatmeal and, in an area known for its vulnerability to earthquakes, the earth was not solid enough to support such a large public facility without a little innovation. That came in the form of 1,400 bright yellow beams pile-driven 90 feet into bedrock strong enough to support the foundation.

Due to seismic requirements, Safeco was built as seven separate buildings so that during an earthquake it could shift against itself without breaking. "Construction was done in a circle, like following around a clock," Callan explained. "It was one crew chasing the next all the way around. Every imaginable trade worked together. At the height of the project we had 1,100 people on site at a cost of $1 million a day."

What set the construction of Safeco Field apart from its predecessors was the retractable roof, which business leaders said was "essential" to play baseball in the city’s uncompromising weather patterns. The 650-foot span of the roof, larger than many bridges, made it the largest of its kind to date. Because the roof and stadium bowl were two separate construction entities being built at the same time, space was rented along the eastern train tracks that carried Burlington Northern north and south through Seattle.

"We could not delay the trains, so each time a train came past we had to halt construction," Callan remembered. The roof contractor and crane operators also had to halt operations whenever winds blew more than 25 mph. And the winter of 1998-99 was especially windy.
It took 27 1/2 months — the same amount of time it took to build two roofless parks, Denver’s Coors Field and Cleveland’s Jacobs Field — until the Seattle Mariners were finally able to escape the dank, gray confines of the Kingdome. Under sunny skies, they opened their sparkling new digs on July 15, 1999, against the San Diego Padres.

The biggest misconception is how this stadium was paid for, Callan said, rattling off numbers like the alphabet. State monies came from lottery ticket sales and a special Mariners’ car license plate. King County chipped in with a tax on rental cars and a .05% tax on restaurant and bar sales within the county. And .017 percent of an already existing sales tax was earmarked for the ballpark.

"There was no increase in sales tax," he said, "and unless you played the lottery, bought a license plate, rented cars or ate and drank in King County, you didn’t pay for it."
Baseball has provided a rebirth to Seattle’s SODO neighborhood, and Safeco Field has become the city’s new gathering post, spurred on by a baseball team that has made it to the American League Championship Series each of the last two years and tied the Major League record for victories in 2001 with 116.

As executive director of the PFD, which owns the ballpark, Callan assures the public that the stadium’s tenant — the Mariners — takes care of the building. "The club has a 20-year lease, so it’s a landlord tenant relationship," he said. "They have 24-hour, 365-day use of the facility, and they are doing a fabulous job. Walk around this facility every day and you can eat off the floors it’s so clean."

Callan gets to see his finished masterpiece often. When he’s not in his PFD office at Safeco, he is manning his other job, that as CFO for P.T. Foley, a firm that represents a group of manufacturers in Washington, Oregon, Nevada and California. His Third Avenue office is just a couple miles south of the ballpark.

"Safeco Field is something we all should be proud of, whether we worked on it or not, whether we’re baseball fans or not," Callan said. "A whole lot of people came together and did something magnificent in a very short amount of time. It’s the signature project for a lot of people — brick masons, carpenters, steelworkers. There are not a lot of projects like this in a person’s career.

"My nephew is actually more impressed that I played football at Oregon State. Sure, this was an accomplishment I’m proud of. But I always just move on to the next deal." OSU

Scott Holter is a Seattle freelance writer.