The proposed Tampa Bay Rays stadium in the Ybor City section of Tampa, which has been off the table since 2018 because nobody wanted to pay for it, though nobody told the lawn signs, may now be even more off the table because somebody noticed that stadiums are tall:
Once the league nixed the split-season plan [with Montreal], a stadium with a retractable roof was back in play because of Florida’s rainy season. A roof will potentially add hundreds of millions of dollars to the stadium’s price tag — and could mean that the former Kforce property is no longer an option.
[Tampa Mayor Jane] Castor said that league standards require enclosed stadiums to stand approximately 25 stories tall. The Kforce site is within Ybor City’s historic district boundaries, and any development proposal of that height would require approval by the city’s Barrio Latino Commission.
“The location they’ve proposed is probably not going to be the best fit for that type of building,” Eric Hart, president and CEO of the Tampa Sports Authority, told the Business Journal. “If it’s going to be a full-time stadium with a retractable roof, that location — because of the height restriction — is going to become a problem.”
The Tampontreal Ex-Rays plan has been dead since January, so not sure why it took until now for anyone to realize that Rays owner Stuart Sternberg would want a retractable roof if he had to play in Florida in the summer, or that Ybor City has height restrictions. It all seems to be part of Castor suddenly playing, if not quite hardball, then a less soft form of ball than she has in the past. Per the same Tampa Bay Business Journal article:
“Our position is we’ve gone as far as we can without having the specific renderings or details that they’re looking for in a stadium,” Castor said.
That is on the one hand reasonable, in that it’s hard to negotiate who’ll cover the costs of something that just amounts to “I dunno, whatcha got?”, and also kind of abrupt given that Castor has been happy to negotiate with Sternberg on that basis for her three years in office so far. If she just means “Do you really need a roof?” then okay, but it does feel marginally more demanding than she’s been in the past, especially given where she went next:
Castor reiterated her support for Major League Baseball’s presence in the Tampa Bay region. But she had hoped the conversations with the Rays would be “moving more quickly by now.”
“We have a lot of significant issues that we have to deal with here in the city of Tampa,” she said. “We have a housing crisis right now. We’ve got transportation issues that need resolution. It’s very important to determine where the funding from a baseball stadium would come from. I am in full support of the Tampa Bay Rays staying in Tampa Bay, and I would love to have them in the city of Tampa. But, you know, that is a balancing act as well.”
Maybe I’m overinterpreting this, and it’s just frustration at being ready to throw (some) money at a wealthy sports team owner and not being able to get any information on how many bundles of unmarked twenties to stuff in the suitcase. Or maybe, just maybe, Castor has realized that with Montreal seemingly out of play, she has some leverage and can be slightly demanding, even if that demand is just to demand to hear what Sternberg is demanding?
Castor is also running for re-election next spring, and though 58% of voters support her over her opponent of Nobody Yet, she probably would like to have a Rays deal, or at least some signs of progress on a Rays deal, to show off by then, so maybe that’s it. Anyway, no response as of yet from Sternberg, so clearly he’s not going to be rushed into deciding what to ask for, no matter how much “urgency” his commissioner says there is. Gamesmanship can get weird!
Fyi the bcdc vote is tommorrow for the A’s ballpark. Since most of those people are appointed by the governor and there were no tough questions during the hearing on june 1 I suspect it will pass. HT is still up in the air
In other Rays news, the new mayor of St Pete has thrown out the last three years of work on the Rays’ stadium site redevelopment. The city will reissue a new RFP later this summer:
https://stpetecatalyst.com/welch-restarts-bidding-process-for-trop-site-redevelopment/
Will Stuart Sternberg, whose plan was rejected by the previous mayor,* resubmit a plan that includes a new stadium? Is this just a ploy by a new mayor to curry favor with the local bigshots? Do the changes Covid has wrought with the world over the last three years really require a new RFP? Will the spurned finalists of the previous RFP take their money and go home?
All this, and more, in the next episode of How Too Much Sun Can Bake Your Brain!
* The old mayor was term-limited, and did NOT lose his job because of his lukewarm support of the Rays.
There’s this theory:
https://twitter.com/StadiumShadow/status/1542201295058124801
Thanks for the link, Ralph.
Yeah, those reasons seem unconvincing to me. Here’s hoping that the pols actually start working on the premise any real estate deal is founded on… get the party who wants something to make a formal bid first.
Why do cities and counties always start bidding against themselves when their trading partner has made no commitment of any kind to any bid?
I was hoping Welch’s big commitment wouldn’t be “the Rays need to stay here”. That’s a doomed negotiating position from the get go and an invitation to be fleeced by the developer and /or team owner.
“Why do cities and counties always start bidding against themselves when their trading partner has made no commitment of any kind to any bid?”
Funny you should ask:
https://globalsportmatters.com/business/2022/06/28/why-politicians-subsidize-unpopular-sports-stadiums/
The Ybor K-Force site was too small for a stadium with a roof, so it wouldn’t matter if the building was 25 stories tall or 2 feet tall, that location was already out.
And re JP Peterson’s comment that St Pete delaying just gives more time for Stu to play Tampa off vs St Pete in a bidding war…so far the only site with money attached to it is the Trop (OK, some of it’s TIF money, but still) and that makes no sense after the Rays have spent 15 years bitching about what an awful location it is. But Stu would be just fine with it if you threw enough money at him.
St Pete could take another 6 years to decide on what to do with the Trop site. It’s land, it’s not going anywhere.
I know you’re not a fan of the largess going to billionaire sports team owners, but why don’t they just end this merry-go-round and build a baseball only ballpark with a retractable roof in the Florida Fairgrounds area where I-4 and I-75 intersect and a high speed Orlando-Tampa rail line will be passing and the Tampa Bay Area Rapid Transit system that will be built could be one of the stops. Would put the ballpark in a more convenient location to the entire region as well as the Orlando region. New ballpark will be coming , might as well put it where it makes the most sense.
That’d be great for fans in Tampa and Orlando, but would be pretty much unreachable from St. Pete, no?
Anyway, finding a site isn’t the problem, it’s finding the money. The holdup has never been about where to build a stadium, it’s that Sternberg doesn’t want to pay much of anything toward one. If somebody arrived with a billion-dollar check, they would figure out siting pretty quickly. (Of course, if someone arrived with a billion-dollar check, they should use it to just buy the team from Sternberg, but that’s another story.)
Neil – Sounds like Ybor City is out.
I don’t live in the Tampa Bay region but have visited it so I am familiar that its transportation systems limitation that getting from one side of Tampa Bay to the other is time consuming. Guess they all wish the Pinellas County Loop highway through to New Port Richey and making it a full highway down US 19 to the Bay Bridge would have been built, but I digress.
Point is, they need to just make a decision about the most available land to put a stadium to get to the most people. And with a high speed rail coming to connect Orlando and Disney Springs to Tampa, putting a stadium in the Fairgrounds area makes the most sense to reach the most people. Will really make the Rays able to market as much to the full Tampa-Orlando I-4 region. Also, with all the infrastructure $$ out there, the Tampa Bay Regional Transit Authority can now actually build a cross bay area rapid transit bus lane & or light rail system that could go to the Fairgrounds. Again I digress – and maybe dreaming a bit.
I doubt the TB Rays are relocating and wont be playing at Trop Field into the 2029, so pick a sight and figure out the financing.
Do find everything you write very informative.
Soon enough both sides of the bay will be underwater, and everyone can get to the games by kayak.
Then the good news is they can call their area behind the RF Wall “McCovey Cove East”!! (LOL)