"How it's going to affect our home values." That's what a nearby resident asked Delaware's city council in February 2025, during a rezoning hearing for nearly 260 acres of farmland at the southwest corner of Sawmill Parkway and U.S. Route 42. At the time, the answer was mostly speculation. The land was still zoned agricultural and light industrial. The hockey arena people were already talking about was a letter to the city, not a building permit.
Eighteen months later, that corner has a name, a tax district, and a construction budget. If you live anywhere near Sawmill Parkway in Delaware County, here's what actually changed, and what still hasn't.
The corner in question
The project is called Maridel, a mixed-use development proposed by Daniels Hinkley Housing, LLC, led by Bruce Daniels, on land that sits near the Delaware Municipal Airport. In March 2025, Delaware City Council rezoned the site from agricultural and light manufacturing to a Commercial Planned Unit Development, splitting the roughly 258 acres into nine sub-areas for a mix of uses the developer's team floated as including restaurants, retail, a hotel, an automotive dealership, office space, a motorsports park, and a sports arena.
The arena is the piece that has advanced furthest toward construction. The Ohio AAA Blue Jackets, a youth hockey organization affiliated with the Columbus Blue Jackets that has operated in central Ohio for two decades, picked Subarea A, a 13.45-acre parcel on the southwest corner of the Sawmill Parkway and U.S. 42 intersection, for what they call the Performance Impact Arena and Pavilion.
Why a hockey club, and why here
The pitch from Ohio AAA Blue Jackets president Ed Gingher has been consistent for a year: Columbus is short on ice. The organization has argued that the region has only 10 full sheets of public ice and hasn't added capacity since 2004, which means tournaments that want to come to the area routinely get turned away. Building a multi-rink facility in Delaware County, rather than competing for scarce space closer to Columbus, was framed from the start as filling a gap the market hasn't solved on its own.
The scope has grown since the original filing. The 2025 development plan called for a 127,000-square-foot building with three indoor rinks and a convertible outdoor rink and amphitheater seating up to 6,000 people, according to council records from June 2025. By the time the city approved a tax increment financing district this July, the project on file had grown to a $30 million, 150,000-square-foot facility with three to four ice sheets, on Subarea A of the larger master plan.
What's actually happened, in order
Here's the sequence, because the pace matters more than any single announcement:
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| Feb. 2025 | Rezoning hearing held; residents raise noise and traffic concerns |
| March 2025 | Council approves rezoning into nine commercial sub-areas |
| May 7, 2025 | Planning Commission approves development plan for the arena's Subarea A |
| June 2025 | Council unanimously approves the plan, confirming the 6,000-capacity pavilion |
| Oct. 2025 | Delaware City Schools finalizes a compensation agreement tied to future tax revenue |
| Jan. 2026 | Ohio AAA Blue Jackets launch a $5 million campaign to get "shovel-ready" |
| June 2026 | Delaware County commissioners buy 140 adjacent acres along Sawmill Parkway |
| July 2026 | Council approves the TIF district funding Phase 1 construction |
The arena has approvals and a school district revenue agreement already signed, but no firm groundbreaking date has been set.
What the tax district actually pays for
The financing mechanism is a tax increment financing district, which the city approved in mid-July, per reporting from Delaware Source. A TIF doesn't waive property taxes. It redirects the increase in taxes generated by new development toward paying off the bonds that funded the construction, rather than sending that increase straight into the general fund right away.
Delaware Director of Economic Development Nic Langford was quoted by Delaware Source describing the facility this way:
"If you're familiar with the chillers in the area, this is going to be a Class A chiller."
The refrigeration detail matters because it signals a serious ice facility, not a seasonal rink. On the money side, Delaware City Schools negotiated for about a year before agreeing to terms in October 2025. Under that deal, the district still gets 10 percent of the property tax value as an annual base payment, the same amount it would have received without the TIF at all. After debt service is covered, half of any leftover TIF funds also goes to the schools. Once the bonds are paid off entirely, the full stream reverts to the district.
What's confirmed and what's still a plan
It's worth separating the parts of Maridel that have public approvals and are moving toward construction from the parts that are still just concept sketches:
- Confirmed: rezoning, the arena and pavilion development plan, the TIF district, and the school compensation agreement
- Confirmed: the $5 million capital campaign the Ohio AAA Blue Jackets launched in January 2026 to reach "shovel-ready" status
- Still undetermined: the hotel, motorsports park, retail, and office components floated in the original 2025 rezoning letter, none of which have gone through their own planning approvals yet
- Still undetermined: a firm groundbreaking date, though the organization's stated goal is to break ground sometime in 2026
Parking requirements and the shared plan
The original development plan for the 13.45-acre arena subarea included just 263 on-site parking spaces, well under the city's own requirement of 745 for that scale of use, according to the June 2025 council vote. The workaround was a shared parking plan pulling from adjacent Maridel parcels, bringing the total available to roughly 1,200 spaces, plus an assumption that rideshare and Delaware County Transit would absorb the rest.
Council members raised the shortfall directly during the June vote, and the approved plan requires the shared parking arrangement to be built out before any structure gets final zoning sign-off. That's a real condition, not a formality, but it also means the parking answer for a 6,000-person event still depends on infrastructure that doesn't exist yet.
The county is betting on the same stretch of road
The arena isn't the only signal that Sawmill Parkway is being treated as a priority corridor rather than a leftover farm road. In June 2026, Delaware County commissioners approved buying 140 acres of additional land along the same corridor, on both sides of Sawmill Parkway and directly across from the Maridel and arena sites. County Economic Development Consultant Dana McDaniel framed the long game plainly, saying the strategy could eventually mean attracting a large corporate campus or advanced manufacturing facility.
That purchase builds on more than $35 million the county and city have already put into the corridor since it was formally designated a growth priority in the city's 2023 economic development strategy. In other words, the arena is one piece of a corridor the local government has been deliberately building toward for three years, not a standalone project that happened to land there.
What this actually means if you live nearby
If your daily route touches Sawmill Parkway or U.S. 42 near the airport, construction activity could pick up sometime in 2026, though the Ohio AAA Blue Jackets are still working toward their fundraising goal and have not set a firm groundbreaking date. If the current timeline holds, the arena and pavilion would open with the capacity to host tournaments, public skating, and outdoor concerts, which is a genuinely different kind of foot traffic than the corridor has seen. And if you're one of the residents whose property backs up to the site, the parking and noise questions raised back in February 2025 are worth revisiting once an actual construction schedule is public, since the shared parking plan and any sound mitigation still haven't been detailed beyond the conditions written into the zoning approval.
None of this requires a real estate transaction to matter to you. It's simply what's changing on a road a lot of Delaware County residents already drive.
If you're weighing what growth like this means for your own street or your own plans down the road, the team at MORE Ohio tracks these local shifts as part of how we think about the county, not just when someone's ready to buy or sell. Reach out any time you want a straight read on what's actually happening near you.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
