The Bay Colony Sportsplex Was Supposed to Break Ground in May. The City's Own Calendar Says Otherwise.

Drive down Calder Drive past Ervin Street and you'll pass a fenced 106-acre field that has been "coming soon" since 2020. If you live in Bay Colony, you've probably stopped checking the signage. The land has carried a name, a design, and a construction date that all seemed to shift every time the city updated its parks page.

That's about to change, though maybe not on the schedule you last heard about.

A Park That Outlived Its Own Name

The site was originally called Bay Colony Park when League City's council approved its first design back in 2020. On February 25, 2025, council voted to rename it Pat Hallisey Park, honoring the former mayor who also spent years directing both League City's and Galveston County's parks departments. Council member Tommy Cones made the case for the name change, saying Hallisey "loved his community" and had spent his younger years building a vision for what League City would become.

The rename happened fast. The construction hasn't.

The Budget That Kept Moving Too

When the project first went to council in 2020, the estimate was about $7 million with a 2022 groundbreaking. Neither number held. By the time Galveston County's Daily News checked in, the price tag had grown to roughly $44 million, and the start date had slid to spring 2026. Community Impact later reported the capital improvement figure at over $45 million, funded through park dedication fees and sales tax revenue routed through the city's 4B Industrial Development Corporation, not property taxes.

Then, in April 2026, the number moved again, this time in a more granular way. At an April 28 council work session, staff walked through two competing base bids, one from Forney and one from Spawglass, alongside thirteen numbered alternates that could swing the total by millions depending on what gets built. Cutting the baseball complex and its parking would save more than $7.4 million. Adding synthetic turf to the baseball infield would add back somewhere between $1.1 and $1.7 million, depending on which contractor builds it. A state permit filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation lists the project at $41 million, which tells you the final number was still being negotiated line by line as recently as this spring.

None of the swings are enormous by public infrastructure standards. What they show is a project still being priced out in real time, not a fixed budget waiting on a shovel.

What's Actually Going In the Ground

Whatever the final number, the scope has stayed remarkably consistent across every version of the plan:

• Five softball fields
• Four baseball fields with batting practice cages
• Two full-size soccer fields
• Twelve pickleball courts
• Two tennis courts
• A nine-hole disc golf course
• Two playgrounds
• A 5K trail loop

For a neighborhood that's watched a chain-link fence for six years, that's a genuinely large amount of amateur athletics infrastructure headed to a walkable distance from your front door.

Why "Late May" Quietly Became Something Else

Here's the part that matters most if you're reading this in August and still see the same fenced lot you saw last spring. In January 2026, Community Impact reported that construction was slated to begin in late May, with design wrapping in February and bidding running through mid-May. A state permit filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation lists an even more specific target: July 1, 2026.

Both of those dates have now come and gone. Neither appears to have produced a groundbreaking visible from Calder Drive or Ervin Street.

The council's own April 28 work session explains why. Staff laid out a calendar that pushed the real decision points later than either public estimate suggested: a preliminary pre-award decision targeted for May 26, a backup date of June 9, debt issuance authorization projected for June 23, bond funds expected by September 24, and a formal council vote to award the construction contract not until October 13, 2026. The first three of those dates have already passed as of this writing, and the city has not published anything confirming whether they held on schedule. What the minutes make clear is that as of late April, the document that actually authorizes a crew to mobilize was still nearly six months from a vote.

That's the real answer to the question every Bay Colony driveway has probably asked at some point this year. It isn't "why hasn't this started." It's that the state permit's July 1 target was filed against an anticipated schedule, not a signed construction contract, and the city's own procurement calendar never supported that date in the first place. The number in a press release and the number that governs when equipment actually shows up are not always the same document.

What This Means If You're the One Driving Past It

Practically speaking, expect the visible work, mobilization, fencing changes, equipment staging, to follow the October contract award rather than the earlier summer estimates. Once underway, the city has said construction should run through April 2028, which puts a realistic opening somewhere in that window rather than sooner.

The delays themselves trace back to something bigger than budgeting. City officials have pointed to shifts in the Grand Parkway alignment, the still-unfinished Highway 99 loop around greater Houston, as the reason detention pond design and drainage modeling had to be reworked more than once. Once a highway segment's final path is locked, everything downstream of it, literally the drainage, has to be redesigned to match. That's the kind of infrastructure domino effect that rarely shows up in a headline but explains years of a fence sitting where a ballfield should be.

When the park does open, city officials have suggested it could become a genuine tournament venue given its size and amenity mix, which would bring visiting teams and their families into League City on weekends, not just local leagues on weeknights. That's a different kind of neighbor effect than most residential subdivisions experience from their local park.

For now, the honest answer to "when does it open" is by the state-permitted completion date of April 30, 2028, assuming the October contract award holds and the final scope doesn't reshuffle again once those thirteen bid alternates get sorted out.

A Note From Joe

I've spent plenty of time on ballfields myself, coaching and coordinating rather than just watching, and I understand why a project like this one matters to a neighborhood well before anyone's thinking about buying or selling a home near it. If you want to talk through what's happening in Bay Colony, whether that's this park, the surrounding streets, or anything else specific to living there, Exclusive Agent Collective is a call away. Let's Connect.