When the city of St. Petersburg and Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg announced their plans for a new $1.3 billion stadium a couple of weeks back, there were tons of unanswered questions, especially since all we had to go on was the press conference, not any actual written deal language. But now the final version of the proposal has been revealed, and — sorry, the “final version of an outline” of the deal has been revealed, and — okay, none of the news outlets reporting on this have included a link to the actual language and it doesn’t appear to be on the St. Petersburg city website, is it even worth going on with this, since we’re now going to be looking at a report on a summary of a proposal? I guess we’re all this far in to this paragraph, we may as well carry on, but I warn you, I’ve already lost all enthusiasm for this post.
Tampa Bay Times, whatcha got?
it is non-binding
Oh, goodie, so now we’re looking at a report on a non-binding draft of a summary of a proposal. Please go read something else if you want, I hear good things about that New Yorker expose of Dan Ariely.
The outline divvies up the ballpark’s total $600 million public contribution like this: $287.5 million from St. Petersburg and $312.5 million from Pinellas County…
According to the 21-page outline, St. Petersburg will contribute $287.5 million from “revenue bonds” issued by the city and tax increment revenues from the Intown Community Redevelopment Area, which includes Tropicana Field. The issuance of city debt through bonds will also have to be approved in a council vote.
Pinellas County will contribute $312.5 million from tourist development tax revenues and money from the community redevelopment area.
So that’s still $600 million from taxpayers, including an unspecified amount of money from the CRA — a TIF by another name, kicking back future taxes from a development project — plus an unspecified amount of hotel taxes plus “revenue bonds” based on revenue from ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I am so glad we have actual reported numbers now, this is so much clearer!
It calls for the city and county to each have their own exclusive suites and complimentary tickets
Perks for elected officials, an American tradition.
The “New Stadium Project”outline does not include any details related to the redevelopment outside of the county-owned stadium, which will take up 17 to 20 acres on the southeast portion of the 86-acre property. The term sheet regarding the redevelopment of the Historic Gas Plant District is still under negotiation.
So, we have some vague numbers about the stadium subsidy part, but the agreement for the surrounding development, which is part and parcel of the stadium deal, is still under negotiation? This is a lot like saying “We’ve agreed on a price for selling you your new house, but we are still negotiating the price for the roof and driveway, that will be revealed at a later date.”
Okay, the Times isn’t quite the only news outlet left in Tampa Bay, anybody else report anything more substantial? WTSP?
Key votes will have to be held at the county level to approve using revenue generated by the hotel tax on the project. Commissioners meet in two weeks.
Will the actual stadium deal, let alone the development agreement, be ready for public perusal in two weeks?
“I’m hopeful that we can bring our part of it to a close by the end of this year,” Pinellas County Commission Chair Janet Long said.
Not the question I asked! St. Pete Catalyst, it’s all down to you:
Rays officials plan to gather public feedback about the stadium plans at three community events.
The first will be held Oct. 9 at 7:30 p.m. in Tampa’s Westshore area. Meetings are also scheduled for Oct. 12 at 5:30 p.m. and Oct. 17 at 7:30 p.m. in downtown St. Petersburg.
If anyone plans on attending and needs some questions to ask, I will remind you about those that I first posed when this “deal” (gotta do the scare quotes at this point) was first announced last month:
- If Sternberg will be leasing the stadium site from the public, does that mean he won’t pay property taxes on it?
- What, if anything, will he pay for the stadium land lease?
- Who will get the revenues from the surrounding $6 billion development, to be built by Sternberg’s development partner Hines?
- Is Hines’ reported $105.3 million price for the surrounding land a reasonable fair market value? And will Hines pay property taxes on those parcels?
- What’s the deal with the reported $130 million in city money for “public site infrastructure,” and who’ll pay cost overruns on that?
More news as events warrant. Oh yeah, and the Rays were also bounced out of the playoffs this week after the two worst-attended postseason games in over a century — maybe telling fans your stadium sucks so hard that you need to spend $1.3 billion to build a new one next door isn’t the best marketing strategy, just throwing that out there.
St. Pete is a neat and tidy enough city, and I’ve long favored that side of the Tampa Bay area on my jaunts over to that part of Florida. There’s a new condo or two popping up every time I visit, and the downtown core (which the Trop is pretty close to, contrary to popular belief) isn’t quite as sleepy as it was before.
There still isn’t anything that points to it being a viable location for an MLB ballpark outside of (possibly) having more land available for a new ballpark and whatever developments can (possibly) take place around it. But it feels like that the only thing driving the Rays’ course of action in all of this.
And on that point, this is maybe a bit more serious — or not, depending on how you seriously you take the idea being a “good sports town” — but given the Buccaneers’ attendance issues outside of the Dungy/Gruden and Tom Brady years, and given that even the Lightning had to give away free tickets for years before they eventually got to a place where they can sell out every game, maybe the Tampa Bay region simply doesn’t have the capacity to support three teams at once from the attendance perspective.
Tampa Bay is bigger than Detroit, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Denver, and Miami, each of which have four teams. None of them have a giant body of water at their geographic center, though. (Plus Miami has its own attendance problems, which suggest that maybe Florida is a special case for sports fandom.)
America is, or is at least said to be, a melting pot of the rest of the world. Florida is basically the melting pot for the other 49 states of America. Which is to say, the percentage of people in the Tampa Bay area (and South Florida, and really any decent-sized metro in FL) who are actually from the region is quite low, and that the potential audience for the Rays — who were the third and last “major” franchise to set up shop in the area — is significantly smaller than the overall population size would indicate.
It’s possible that there will eventually be enough first-generation Rays fans in and around the area to get the team out of the attendance cellar, but I’m not sure there are any good cases to be made for that, either. I’m not going to pretend that diehard Tampa sports fans don’t exist (they absolutely do); whether there are enough of them to sustain the amount of teams they have is a whole different matter.
The Rays are turning a profit and winning ballgames. I’m sure they’d love to sell more tickets, but they’re certainly sustainable — somebody has to be last in the league in attendance.
I am an import to the Tampa Bay Area for the last 18 years. I do support the local teams, except the Rays.
There are plenty of people in the area, and the TV numbers are really strong.
The difference is that the Bucs have been here for 50 years. The Bolts do extensive community outreach to be a part of the area. There are Bolts flags and gear everywhere. If the Bolts could ever get an outdoor game at Raymond James, that place would be filled.
The Rays? not at all. Stu has done everything he can short of being John Fisher telling us that he wants to be anywhere but here.
I’m not sure that’s really true. The only alternative Stu really seemed to get behind was the stupid Tampotreal thing which never had a chance. If he really wanted to leave, he’d be trying harder to move to Charlotte or Nashville or Orlando. But nothing has really materialized with any of those, which makes me think that he doesn’t really like any of the alternatives and just wants to create leverage over St Pete and/or Tampa.
But I can understand why people there don’t feel like it’s a good idea to become emotionally invested in the Rays – or perhaps MLB in general.
If they built a new stadium in Tampa near the Lightning’s building, a lot of that would go away and they could really start to build the fanbase. But that’s probably not going to happen.
In St Pete, they’ll be able to convert more people on that side of the Bay, but there just aren’t as many people from that side who are willing and able to come to games.
Part of my family lives in St Pete and they are devoted Rays supporters. They were very demoralized by the poor attendance last week (and the 0-2 sweep). It feels hopeless.
The thing is, the Tampa Bay market is bigger than those markets, but the actual cities that make it up are not that large. Tampa is only the size of Wichita, St. Pete the size of Birmingham, Clearwater comparable to Macon. And there’s less interplay between the cities than there is between say, Minneapolis and St. Paul. This is partly because of the Bay itself, and partly because of laughably bad transportation options, but mainly because these are actually fairly distant cities with somewhat independent economies that have grown into each other over time. There is a misconception, mainly among out-of-towners and Tampeños, that Tampa is the dominant city in the area and the economic center of the region and everyplace else is a backwater, but really there is no dominant center to the region. There really is no good place (fan-wise) for a ballpark in the Tampa Bay area. And some of the fantasies of Tampa ballpark proponents were pretty nonsensical (like the idea that Tampa would somehow draw fans from Orlando when even Celebration is a much longer drive from Ybor than Wesley Chapel is from St. Pete).
Uhhh, the Twin Cities have 6 top-flight pro teams and Miami has 5. Did you not notice all the attention CF Miami has received via Lionel Messi?
Fine, “at least four.” The point is that Tampa Bay is bigger than either — we can argue about whether MLS should be considered a top-flight league elsewhere.
I don’t think it negates your broader point about the complications of the region’s geography but per the 2020 Census, at 3.2 million people the Tampa/St. Pete metro area is actually smaller than Miami (6.1M) Detroit (4.4M) or MSP (3.7M), but slightly larger than Denver’s 3M.
I don’t know what happens if you rank by the larger Combined Statistical Area versus the MSAs I used above, as TIL that Tampa/St. Pete is weird in that it doesn’t actually belong to a CSA, and in fact is the largest MSA in the country that isn’t part of a larger CSA.
That might be more evidence of broader population/geography challenges that sports in the area face, I don’t know? It seems plausible to say that having a metro area that’s a statistical outlier in terms of its relationship with the surrounding region plays a part in sports fandom there, but there’s also the reality that CSAs are so big that they sprawl far past the distance that people usually travel for a game, like New Haven-Newark or Hagerstown-D.C.
I’m also someone who’s personally driven from Sarasota to Tampa for a sporting event (Frozen Four earlier this year, Go Blue!) so I’m perfectly aware that my views on how far is reasonable to travel for sports may be outside the norm.
I was going by Nielsen market sizes. MSAs and CSAs will be slightly different, each metric has its own pros and cons.
Sprawling, car-oriented metro areas just aren’t well-suited to trying to get 30,000+ people to the same place 81 times a year, especially on weeknights.
The Dodgers do pretty well. (I know L.A. is making strides toward mass transit, but the Dodgers drew 3 million fans in *1978*.)
If you could pave the bay, and take away all the other things Floridians prefer to do in the summer, I suspect the Rays would be fine.
As a Saint Petersburg resident, I think a nice stadium would draw people. But, MLB does not help the situation with afternoon start times on a weekday. That was just stupid.
Attendance figures are not the fault of the fans. The team has spent 15 years telling us that they want to move somewhere else. So, I, who otherwise am good for 10-20 games a year have willfully not made any investment in them, like I do the Bolts and Bucs.
Having seen Art Model rip my heart out in the 90s, I simply will not support a team that threatens to move.
Now that they are “staying” I will wait to see if there is an ironclad 30 year lease, and then support them.
Well said.
The stones on sternberg to insult the city and current location for a decade and THEN ask for a blank check to move across the street.
I can only hope the rest of the citizens see thru this absolute farce of a proposal.
“ maybe telling fans your stadium sucks so hard that you need to spend $1.3 billion to build a new one next door isn’t the best marketing strategy”
100% that. Win games and get your hands out of the public cookie jar. Then , *maybe* you earn fans.
Btw- links to the last 2 forums don’t seem to be working. Funny.
“Forums”? Which links are you talking about?
If you mean on the Catalyst page, they’re working for me, now anyway.
Yes, sorry those links.
The actual links work, but when I try to proceed with signing up, I keep getting this message:
“Sorry, we have received the maximum participants for this focus group”
Btw- are these city events or team events?
Thank you for all your hard work reporting on this.
It says “Rays officials plan to,” so I’m assuming they’re Rays events.
And I would assume that the error message means those forums are full — not sure what the capacity is of the meeting space they chose. (If it’s a phone booth, that would be one way of avoiding hearing unpleasant opinions.)
My thoughts exactly. A broom closet filled with 12 season ticket holders. “Great plan – love it!”
Is there any hint of when the city will hold open public forums for people?
There should be a public comment period at the county commission meeting in two weeks:
https://pinellas.gov/participating-in-a-board-of-county-commissioners-meeting/
Oh no, I take it back, that’s a “work session” and comments aren’t allowed there:
https://pinellas.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1001112&GUID=BC100ABC-61FB-43FF-8284-E137F6681AB7&Options=info|&Search=
There’s a regular commission meeting on Tues 10/7 at 9:30 am, but looks like they’re not talking about the Rays stadium then:
https://pinellas.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1001113&GUID=B00FA253-B14B-4A84-B69A-C08DB60B0206&Options=&Search=
Thanks – that’s a helpful link.
Again – much appreciated for all your efforts. It’s real journalism, and more people should be aware of your work.
Thanks! Any shouting you want to do from the rooftops is much appreciated!
We know that that stadiums don’t give the ROI, but if the surrounding development is so important any potentially
profitable, why not just build the surrounding development?!
^
Neil – this is not a comment for posting. I would like to meet with you to walk you through the money trail of tax-increment financing. It is an easy thing to do, all with old and current public documents that I have downloaded. Then we can look at city’s claims that TIF projects are paid for ONLY with the taxes generated from the growth in value of property in the downtown redevelopment district – so nobody but those property owners pay for the benefits their district receives (a lie). I can show you where, in my opinion, the mayor has already lied (The 09/19/23 announcement).
My telephone is 727 804 7920.