A development group is hoping to build a spring training facility for the Atlanta Braves in Pinellas County, Fla., at the Toytown site.

SportsPark Partners LLC was one of three proposals Pinellas received to develop the 240-acre "historic landfill" in the central part of the county. The partnership, led by Echelon's Darryl LeClair, includes the Atlanta Braves and the Gary Sheffield Sports Foundation.

"The Project is an international, destination facility that will host sports events and tournaments for more than a dozen sports and will also be a destination location for entertainment and cultural events," the proposal reads.

The facility's anchor would be the Braves spring training home.

The project also would have a dormitory, hotel and office components according to documents filed with Pinellas County.

The Braves are looking for a new spring training facility as the team comes to the end of a 20-year contract at Disney's Wide World of Sports complex in Orlando in 2017. With the upcoming move slated for the Houston Astros and Washington Nationals out of central Florida to a combined facility in South Florida, the Braves will be the only team left in the central part of the state except for the Detroit Tigers in Lakeland.

The Braves made it clear after the Astros and Nationals announced their move that the team would be looking for a new home.

On Sept. 21, Atlanta Braves President John Schuerholz told Atlanta Business Chronicle the team is working on finding a new spring home and that the team will stay in Florida for spring training.

“We have communicated with a couple of communities in Florida,” he said. “We will follow up with a couple of them. We have a number of others that have expressed some level of interest. Some of them have money, some of them don’t have quite as much money, so we are ferreting all of that out. The goal was to have a decision either by the end of this season, which likely won’t happen by the end of this calendar year. If we have a decision by the end of this calendar year, which I’m hopeful we will, and I believe we can, it gives us plenty of time to build the kind of spring training facility that we want. We are hopeful that the people we are talking to, which I’m not at liberty to say who it is right now at their behest, it will be a part of a revitalization and redevelopment of areas as a mixed used development where the stadium will sit at the end of a nice corridor, maybe on a lake.”

Echelon, which previously made a bid to draw the Tampa Bay Rays to a proposed new stadium in Carrillon, confirmed it is part of a partnership with the Braves to develop Toytown, but declined to discuss the proposal in depth.

The Toytown site is a prime location with access to Interstate 275 just west of the Howard Frankland Bridge coming from Hillsborough County. Adding the Braves would give Pinellas its third spring training facility to complement the Toronto Blue Jays in Dunedin and the Philadelphia Phillis in Clearwater.