St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch issued a new request for proposals for redeveloping the Tropicana Field site on Friday, after being unhappy with the bids that the old one resulted in. This time around, the requirements will include:
- Setting aside 17.4 acres for a “state-of-the-art” baseball stadium for the Tampa Bay Rays. “It is imperative that proposals provide certainty on the availability of space for Major League Baseball on the site for decades to come,” according to a Welch press release.
- Providing affordable housing, business opportunities, and economic development that “benefits all,” in order to make up for the fact that when the Trop was built, “residents and businesses were forced to relocate with the promise of jobs, opportunity and equitable development which did not materialize.”
- Supplying every St. Petersburg resident with a pony (probably).
Okay, this is all nice in a can’t-get-if-you-don’t-ask way, but some skepticism is probably warranted. Carving out 17 acres for a baseball stadium — even if the developers don’t have to pay to build the thing, something that isn’t covered in the RFP itself — is only going to reduce the amount that anyone is going to pay to build on the site, so it will come at a cost to the city. Likewise, all the other goodies like affordable housing are excellent goals, and it’s worth seeing what developers can come up with along those lines, but promises are easy and following through is hard, as witness that line about how the promised benefits “did not materialize” when the Trop was first built back in the ’80s.
Mostly, this seems to be the newly elected Welch trying to put his own stamp on the Trop site project, by saying he’s gonna make sure it provides a stadium to keep the Rays and helps his constituents and pays for itself and wins a Nobel Prize for Vaportecture all at once. (If he were really interested in gathering all the best options for the city, he might have started by requiring that RFP responses include options for with and without a Rays stadium, to see which one looks better in terms of both price paid to the city and things like economic development.) Proposals are due on November 18, and Welch can pick a winner on his own without any public discussion if he wants, so this has “vanity project” written all over it; whether it’s a vanity project that can actually be all things to all people like Welch claims it can, tune back in three months from now and find out.