When I reported Friday on the St. Petersburg city council refusing to go along with the Tampa Bay Rays‘ lease-breaking deal if they’d have to give Rays owner Stuart Sternberg a cut of development rights to the Tropicana Field site, I didn’t have a figure for how much those rights would be worth. Noah Pransky of Shadow of the Stadium did, however, and helpfully pointed it out:
When the team pitched a waterfront stadium in downtown St. Petersburg in 2008, a developer bid $65 million to buy the Trop property and load it up with $1.2 billion of mixed use construction. Property taxes and fees for the city were estimated at $7.5 million a year, with a like amount for county government and schools.
Okay, that’s 2008, and a lot has changed since then. Still, if we take that as a reasonable guesstimate of what the Trop property is worth, then giving half of that to Sternberg would be worth $32.5 million — or nearly as much as St. Pete would be getting from the Rays owner as a payment for breaking his lease. It’s starting to become clearer why this became a major sticking point — though when you consider that even $32.5 million is just equal to three years of James Loney and two of David DeJesus, it’s slightly possible that Sternberg got a bit greedy here.
This is the reason I spell his name ‘$tu’.