Heroes and Icons with Greg Randolph and special guest Mike Acosta

GR:  We have a very special guest today. If you are a baseball fan, especially of the Houston Astros, the Houston Astrodome or anything cool, this gentleman needs no introduction. He is known as a Houston Astros historian; he is on the Astros Hall of Fame selection committee and is the world's foremost and leading expert on our beloved Houston Astrodome.

He is currently at the helm of both Astrodome Reimagined Project and is a co-captain of Houston City Beat with the lovely and talented Lisbet Marquez. You can find more information at HoustonCityBeat.com. Be sure to visit the website store for some seriously amazing Houston sports themed t shirts and merchandise that my guest has designed.

It's a tremendous honor to have you here with me today, sir. Mike Acosta, of course, is my guest today on the Heroes and Icons podcast. How are you doing? How's your family?

MA:  Greg, thank you so much. Hey, is the Home Run Spectacular going to shoot off now or is Elvis going to sing American Trilogy now or something? That was like a real big introduction, man. I appreciate it. Thank you. Everything's great. Everything's good. I appreciate you having me here. Kiddos are all good. Everybody's doing well. School has started back in session and, and so everybody's in careers or, or in school. It's funny how kids work. They get older and then all of a sudden they're not in strollers anymore. That's the idea. They're out working and graduated and in the education world. And so yeah, they're doing all sorts of stuff.

GR:  Excellent. Thank you, sir. So, bring us up to date, if you would. What are you working on present day? What projects do you have?

MA:  What am I not working on! I'm a partner in Houston City Beat and that's the primary thing that I'm focused on right now. And Houston City Beat, you mentioned Lisbet Marquez; she is the founder of Houston City Beat. She founded it back in 2020 during COVID, during the shutdown and everything. And she started Houston City Beat as a business directory and it was there to help small businesses grow. And she had a lot of things in place. She did some videos and everything. We met over a year ago and we were at a function and we met and we exchanged information. It wasn't really a networking event, but it was an event where we happened to network.

We wound up exchanging information and she, she told me what she did. She told me about Houston City Beat and I looked at it, I went online and saw some of the work that had been done with Houston City Beat and I’m from a communications background, right. And production, you know;  I spent 22 years with the Astros, and full-time years with the Astros. And in that world, at least from my perspective, I picked up a lot on, production and sponsorships and, how the organization runs and how it operates from behind the scenes and all these millions of little things that people don't see on the front end when they're watching the games, right?

So, I saw Houston City Beat and was really intrigued by it and I started to develop these ideas and so I loved the name, Houston City Beat. It sounded like the Big City Beat that was in the Houston Chronicle or the Houston Post way back in the day with Maxine Messenger and, it just stuck out in my mind and, if you remember Big City Beat from that time period in the newspaper, so it's a different era, right? You know, everybody's reading the newspaper and reading the physical copy of the newspaper. I mean, not digital. I mean, now everybody still reads  the Houston Chronicle, it is still very viable, you know, but it's the platform; the digital platform is where a lot of people get that information, right?

MA: So there are three different companies, they all kind of interconnect, but depending on what somebody needs that's what the way they're structured. Now, Astrodome Reimagined was established earlier this year. It was designed to further promote the renovation of the Astrodome.

As, as we know,  the Astrodome has largely been unused since about 2009, which was 10 years after the Astros left because the Astros last played there in 1999, the rodeo last performed there in 2002. And then they had events. They had high school baseball playoffs there. And that was in 2002 or 2003. In fact, Gerald Sanchez and I did the last baseball game. We broadcasted the last baseball game that was ever held in the Astrodome. Gerald can tell you a little bit more than, than I can. But I remember doing it and it was a really fun game and we were real cognizant at the time that that was going to be most likely the last baseball game there because Minute Maid had started to host high school baseball playoffs the year after that.

And so they really didn't go back to, to the Astrodome, but the Rodeo kind of used it as the Hideout up until about 2000. You know, but then the certificate of occupancy with the city of Houston was up. And the Astrodome project in general has been probably the most, not just the most politically charged, or one of the most politically charged issues in the Houston area in a very long time, but also one of the most misinformed projects.

GR: There's a lot of misinformation out there. Can you talk about that and dispel some of those myths?

MA: There's a lot of things that are said about the Astrodome. Number one that I think I probably hear a lot is that, oh, we already voted to tear it down. That's not the case. And it's clear and simple. There was never a ballot in Harris County or Houston, whatever. And let's get this straight too. The Astrodome is owned by Harris County. Not by the City of Houston. The City of Houston has jurisdiction over the certificate of occupancy because the building is within the city limits. But the property itself is owned by Harris County. So, Harris County has fully paid for the Astrodome,  and when they were looking to put together a bond issue, back in 2013, in late 2013, they wanted to have something that was called the New Dome Experience. And there were some renderings and some preliminary plans put out there. I think the people who were involved with that, even in the county government at the time, would probably tell you that they, it probably wasn't marketed the way it should have been. It was going to result in a tax increase of about $8 for that calendar year afterwards. And, you know, that's a trip to a coffee shop.

GR: That’s per taxpayer, per year?

MA: Yes. Per year. And that would've funded the bonds for the Astrodome project. Now again, you know, nobody wants taxes to go up and this and that, but you know, people also go to Whataburger to get a burger or they go to a coffee shop to get a, a Frappuccino or whatever it is they drink. I'm not going to really state that much about that plan, because I think it needed to be fleshed out a little bit more. It was a generic plan that would have essentially been a stage one plan for the Astrodome. It didn't really have a master plan for the, the various floors inside the Astrodome.

And so, for the longest time I had been hearing all this stuff. And I guess, what is one of the other things? Well, so getting back on as to why people were dispelling the rumor that people in Harris County voted to tear the Dome down, it was illegal. It was not legal. You could not legally put demolition onto a ballot in Harris County, like you could not do that. Harris County judge Ed Emmett at the time contacted the Harris County attorney to look at the language to see if everything was legal. And it was very clear cut and simple. You could not put demolition on a ballot. So no, and Ed Emmett will tell you today that that bond issue in 2013 was a bond issue. That's all it was. It was for an issuance of money to be applied to the Astrodome for that project. It had nothing to do with what the design was going to look like or whether it was going to be demolished and all this and that.

So that's not true. Harris County has not voted to demolish the Astrodome. It would have been illegal to put that on a ballot. Now, I think where some of that information comes from, and some of the people get the impression that that occurred, other than there's a lot of keyboard nazis out there, and that's the way they really act sometimes.