June 28, 2010

Rays stadium wars, day eight: Don't look to Tampa for money

As Noah Pransky noted on Friday, newspaper coverage of the Tampa Bay Rays stadium battle has finally started to include some actual investigations, now that Rays owner Stuart Sternberg has declared that it's on. Yesterday, it was the St. Petersburg Times taking a look at how a new stadium in Tampa might be funded.

And as the Times' three reporters wrote: "Sternberg asked the community to at least start to have this conversation. He might not like how it sounds." It sounds, according to the Times, like this:

"Thank you very much, Rays, for telling us to have this conversation," likely mayoral candidate Ed Turanchik said. "Now please go away for a while. Because we've got to deal with more pressing matters.

"There's no public money for this."

"You're talking about trying to keep your police department and your fire department intact," possible mayoral candidate Dick Greco said. "As much as we love baseball, it may be a very, very difficult thing to make happen."

Bob Buckhorn, definite mayoral candidate, posted on his Facebook page after Sternberg's announcement: "If the Rays are going to move, why not a downtown Tampa stadium?" A few days later, though, on the phone, his initial pep was more muted. The chances his would-be taxpayers might pay for part of it?

"Nil," he said, "or something similar to that."

"We're in the middle of a financial crisis at all levels of government," Hillsborough County Commissioner Mark Sharpe said. "We're not in a time when the government can be laying out hundreds of millions of dollars for a new stadium."

And so on. Now, it's not uncommon for elected officials to make "no tax money" pledges about sports facilities, as they know that public funding is generally looked down upon by the public — it's why TIFs, which have the pretense of being "new" revenue, have become such a popular option. Still, this is a pretty hard line to be taken by politicians being wooed by a sports franchise, especially when you consider the number who say they don't think public money will be worth discussing even five or seven years down the road when the economy improves. (Or not, as the case may be.)

The upshot is that it looks like Sternberg's stadium campaign is going to be a long, long-term affair — declaring that they want to consider all their geographic options is no doubt not just a sign that he'd ideally prefer to be closer to the Tampa side of the bay, but an acknowledgment that he's going to need to cast his net as wide as possible in hopes of finding somebody, anybody who can cough up $400 million in stadium subsidies. As one stadium expert — okay, it was me — told the Times, this is how stadium campaigns have been waged for two decades now: "They find the weakness in the opposition, and just beat people down."