St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch has made his decision of which developer will get to redevelop the Tropicana Field site, and the winner is … the Tampa Bay Rays! Or the developer who partnered with Rays owner Stuart Sternberg, anyway:
Hines and the Rays hope to build senior living, a sports sciences incubator, arts education space, plant a tree canopy, incorporate higher education, connect Woodson African American Museum to the Heritage Trail, Campbell Park, and the Deuces, plus, implement a restoration program for Booker Creek and downstream waters…
The ballpark will be the “anchor” for the entertainment and economic areas of the development. They said small and medium storefronts would be the focus and an opportunity to attract new local, independent retailers and for existing St. Pete business owners to relocate to the site.
Welch also talked a lot about honoring the “sacred ground” of the Gas Plant District, the African American neighborhood that was bulldozed to make way for the stadium site; this may be an important urban planning and restorative justice issue (or just empty rhetoric, who am I to judge?), but for the purposes of this site let’s stay focused on the central sports question: Are the Rays really gonna build a stadium now, or what? The problem for the Rays was never finding a site for a stadium, it was finding $800 million or more to build one, which was tough given the caveat that Sternberg didn’t want to have to pay more than $350 million out of his own pocket. And so the Rays saga has dragged on, with various sites in both St. Pete and Tampa coming and going. Will this one be any different? Hey, Fox 13, what do you say?
St. Pete officials say funding sources for a new ballpark will be up to the Rays and the city, adding that negotiations on how to fund it will eventually begin this year. At the moment, the city is unable to identify a source.
To what extent and how much funding is still uncertain, according to the city. So, will enough money come from the city, county, and state? Will voters have to approve a tax referendum?
The city says it’s all on the table but nothing is certain yet.
Okay then! All that money stuff will have to be worked out in two separate agreements that need to be negotiated with the mayor — a term sheet with the developer Hines and a use agreement with the Rays — which will then be submitted to the city council for approval. City economic and workforce director Brian Caper told the Tampa Bay Times that he hopes to have a term sheet done by May and a binding development agreement for the council to vote on by October, but also said talks could drag into 2024 or longer, which is a pretty good sign that this is going to be a bunch of people sitting around a table going “Okay, who has an idea for where to find a billion dollars?”
So the real takeaway here is that Sternberg now has a place to build a stadium, if he wants to build a stadium, which he does, only not with his own money, and that’s the only money he has so far. (There’s also the matter of Sternberg previously complaining that the Trop is a terrible place for a baseball park, so right next door would presumably be terrible too; as of this past weekend the team was still issuing statements that “Our goal remains keeping the Rays in Tampa Bay for generations to come,” so presumably building in Tampa is still on the table as well, if someone finds money there somehow. Or if he just needs a stalking horse to scare St. Pete officials with.) And, I guess, that he apparently has a friend in Welch, at least if him granting Sternberg the development rights is any indication. We’re still very much at the introducing new characters phase of whatever number reboot we’re in of The Great Rays Caper, so settle in for a long season.
I’m shocked, shocked that the Rays proposal was selected after the previous selection was thrown out and replaced with a new RFP that included a requirement for a baseball stadium site of a suspiciously specific size, and the submittal date was delayed by a month so the Rays could finish typing their thing up.
Not sure why the sources are totally unknown, since there is already a TIF district in place and the county has tourist tax money that they’ve been holding back on committing until the Rays decide what they’re doing. In other words, the same sources that have been available for the last dozen years or so for any location on the west side of the bay. Unfortunately, the price tag is now routinely quoted as $1.2 billion so it won’t cover as much as if they had done this before the whole Tampontreal fiasco.
I don’t know how they would convince anyone that the Trop site is now magically wonderful after years of trashing it. Stu would definitely prefer Tampa but that’s going to be tough after the Bucs start demanding a new $2.5 billion stadium to replace Raymond James.
The estimates I’ve seen for the TIF/CRA are around $150m, which isn’t going to go very far. Are they talking about a new CRA for the Trop development site as well, or just the ones that are already established?
The Trop site is currently part of the “Intown CRA”, which includes almost all of downtown St Pete. The most recent CRA plan allocates at least $75 mil for infrastructure improvements on the Trop site. The revenue projections probably don’t include the property tax revenue from the new stuff that’s in the Rays-Hines plan, so that would theoretically also be available for stadium stuff .
There are two other CRAs adjacent to the Trop site, one of which takes in about half of the entire south side of the city. If the city was serious about making amends for past wrongs, they’d forget the stadium and add the Trop site to that southside CRA to make some real improvements in that area.
Or they could kill all the CRAs and put the money into their General Fund to pay for cops, firefighters and other things that actually make a real difference in people’s lives. Not holding my breath for that option.
Also, if I’m reading it right the County is sitting on about $80 mil cash in tourist taxes and it looks like there might be as much as $30 mil a year available to support bond issues. Unless they use it for something like replacing the beaches that keep getting washed away.
$155m in cash isn’t going to go far, but $30m a year and you’re starting to talk real money — maybe you can get to $600m then. More if you add the incremental tax from the rest of the Trop site. So there’s definitely money to throw down a hole if St. Pete wants to do so.
Stu is in line to receive millions of dollars if the Rays stay in St. Pete. The money is from Trop development rights proceeds. It’s in the agreement. The TBBJournal once estimated those proceeds could be worth $100 million.
Maybe that’s high, but it could be low – as development in St. Petersburg and specifically the Edge district continues to boom. There are 4 projects – at least a full city block and 12 or more stories, under construction or ready to break ground within a half mile of the Trop. There’s plenty of wiggle room in the Hines/Rays plan to maximize development revenue.
If Tampa wants the Rays, they are going to have to figure out where to put the stadium and how to fund it. Included in that funding will need to be the 8 or 9 figures going straight to Sternberg that he would miss out on. Try building THAT into an agreement Tampa/Hillsborough.
Sternberg has been playing Tampa all along to get a better offer from St. Pete. He knows that Pinellas bed tax revenues (primary local funding) is more than double Hillsborough’s, thus more robust and more available. However, state money is still going to be necessary and the odds of that being approved while DeSantis is governor is almost zero.
I mean, it doesn’t ultimately matter to Sternberg how he gets his money, right — TIFs, tax breaks, free land/development rights, suitcases full of crisp twenties — so long as he gets it. The issue is how much Welch and the council are willing to negotiate away.
But all Rays fans talk about how far it is from Tampa Bay and that’s why no one goes to games. So the solution is build in the same area.
So…it makes no sense for the Rays to rebuild on the Tropicana site, since it’s an undesirable location and they need their new ballpark elsewhere.
But…why don’t the A’s just rebuild at the Coliseum, which the only reason it’s not in a bad neighborhood is because it’s in the middle of nowhere?