Let’s liveblog the crap out of the Pinellas County meeting on the Rays bonds!

Today’s meeting of the Pinellas County Commission that is supposed to vote on Tampa Bay Rays stadium bonds (or not!) is finally almost through its first batch of agenda items, it was all about debris removal and floodplain insurance, don’t the commissioners know that there’s a baseball team owner waiting to find out if he’ll get a billion dollars? I mean, priorities!

Anyway, item 22, “Pinellas County adoption of a Tourist Development Tax Revenue Supplemental Bond Resolution Supplementing Resolution No. 24-42 adopted on July 30, 2024, and approval of the documents to support funding for the design and construction of a new stadium in St. Petersburg to be the new home of the Tampa Bay Rays Major League Baseball franchise,” let’s do this:

3:30 pm ET: Rays management released a letter saying “we will not be answering questions” (though they’re at the hearing) and the bond issuance was supposed to be a “formality” and now that it didn’t happen in October this “ended the ability for a 2028 delivery of the ballpark” and “decades of work [and] more than $50 million” invested by the Rays has been “jeopardized by the county’s failure to live up to its agreement.” So why didn’t the stadium agreement require bond issuance to happen before March if — oh, sorry, that’s a question, my bad.

3:44 pm ET: The commission just moved on item 35 to item 2, then skipped immediately to item 18. If you’re scoring at home, please do yourself a favor and stop now.

3:51 pm ET: “We are going to the long-awaited item 22.” Here we go!

4:05 pm ET: The public has sent lots of emails, says commission chair Kathleen Peters! The two new commissioners didn’t get them, which is a shame, because they tell a beautiful story that cannot be summarized! Anyway, on with the public testimony!

“Are we dealing with stupid Stu or are we dealing with sly Stu?” “Now is the time to move forward with our legally bound requirements!” “What would it tell other businesses in the future if we said at the 11th hour that we are going to pull the rug out from under the Rays?” “We have seven times the amount of vacant units as we do homeless people!” “This is not about opposing baseball; it is about prioritizing what truly matters for the future of Pinellas County.” (I have sat through a lot of public testimony in my day, and I gotta say: It’s not working. You can almost hear the commissioners actively not listening.)

4:14 pm ET: “Look at Oakland, who lost all of their sports teams! No longer a thriving city!” If you were still wondering why MLB owners approved John Fisher’s move to Las Vegas: It may end up a catastrophe, but at least it gives his fellow owners a handy cautionary tale.

4:19 pm ET: Oh hey, can I embed the hearing video here? Let’s see if this works:

4:22 pm ET: There are some okay enough arguments being made here and there — one guy noted that if St. Petersburg holds off on stadium bonds while the Rays go play in Tampa for two years, that’ll provide some useful data points about how important the team is to the city economy — but I swear, the first person who chooses to forgo reading from a stilted two-page essay and instead submits their testimony in the form of a freestyle rap will get a standing ovation, or at least encourage the attendees to lift their heads from their desks.

4:31 pm ET: Down to the final public speaker. The rhetorical lines for the public testimony have been pretty clear: “Just because you voted in July to do something dumb doesn’t mean you have to go ahead with it” vs. “No backsies!” Time to find out which one the elected officials agree with!

4:44 pm ET: Chris Latvala is first up, leading off by confirming that he doesn’t have to recuse himself from voting just because the Phillies and Rays both donated to the campaign fund of a family member of his. (So many questions.) He takes issue with the idea put forward by Rays owner Stu Sternberg that the delay in approving the bonds “upended” the stadium process, noting that there was, you know, a hurricane, and the Rays took their sweet time finalizing the agreement in the first place, so don’t start with me about delays!

Latvala asks if there’s a possibility that the Rays will never return to the Trop, and instead play in Tampa until a new stadium is ready. St. Pete city administrator Rob Gerdes takes the podium and says it could happen, but he doesn’t expect it. Latvala asks if the Rays could sue the city if it doesn’t repair the Trop; Gerdes says the city intends to repair it, so that’s not an issue.

4:57 pm: Dave Eggers: “I am not going to feel rushed by the statements that are made by the Rays.” Also: “I’m not an anti-stadium person. I just want to make sure we get a deal done and it’s fair.”

Then he asks if the stadium deal and development deal are separate in that the one can go forward without the other? Chief assistant county attorney Don Crowell says, “The answer to that is a very lawyerly answer of: It depends.” Not issuing the bonds today, Crowell says, doesn’t kill anything. If the Rays fail to meet their requirements, then there’s a provision that would prevent them pursuing the greater development, but not if the county is the one balking.

5:12 pm ET: Rene Flowers is asking questions of the county administrator, but it’s unclear where she’s going with them. The stadium and the greater development “are somewhat intertwined,” she says, and this appears to be an opportunity for the community to benefit from construction and other jobs, okay, got it, don’t want to make the perfect the enemy of getting at least something. If she’s mentioned the amount of money the county and city would be paying for that something and whether that’s a reasonable return, I didn’t hear it.

Flowers says she understands why the Rays wouldn’t want to play in Pinellas County, because she’s been to Al Lang Field for Rowdies games — “I don’t know much about soccer, I just cheer when the ball go in the goal” — and anyway, if the Rays owners say that and the Phillies stadium in Clearwater aren’t good enough for them, that’s good enough for her.

Definitely going in a pro-stadium-bonds direction here, but then, she’s not one of the four strongest opposition votes on the commission, one of whom needs to be flipped to get the bonds passed — that’d be Latvala, Eggers, Nowicki, and Scherer.

5:14 pm ET: The county’s bond counsel pops up to quickly confirm that the county isn’t on the hook yet for any delays in issuing bonds. “That cost us a lot of money, I’m sure,” quips someone, sparking the first laughter of the afternoon.

5:20 pm ET: Vince Nowicki asks county administrator Barry Burton how come the Rays are set to pay the Yankees $15 million a year to rent their Tampa stadium while they’ll only be paying $1 million a year in rent: “To me that’s a bad deal, no?” “Not at all,” says Burton, because the Rays will be taking on the risk of future improvements to the stadium in exchange for getting all the revenue (and not paying much in rent). He’s not wrong, per se — evaluating any deal means looking at the costs and benefits — but he also doesn’t explain how he calculated that this deal is better than in other cities, let alone good.

5:28 pm ET: Nowicki cites a figure that only 3% of local tourists go to Rays games: “Maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze?”

He asks Crowell what happens if the bonds aren’t passed. His answer, in lawyerly words: Dunno — the agreement doesn’t say.

Nowicki: “We’re hearing a lot about the Rays, but not from the Rays.” Would kill for the camera to cut away to Rays co-president Brian Auld right now.

Scherer, the final strong “no” vote, is up. “I’m very disappointed that the Rays are forcing this issue today,” he says. “I don’t see that it’s required, it’s not a condition of our contract. I don’t even see that it’s needed … why do we even need to float bonds? I don’t know that we do. … This is an egregious demand, and it reeks of corporate selfishness. .. I have a lot of questions about the feasibility of financing a new stadium and our infrastructure needs. … If I’m going to make an error, I’m going to err on the side of caution.”

This is sounding an awful lot like it’s headed to a 4-3 vote in favor of holding off on the bonds and — maybe? — trying to renegotiate the deal, but we’ll know soon enough, hopefully.

5:41 pm ET: Brian Scott says he has no questions (yay), only comments (groan). These come down to: We spent a long time negotiating this deal, and if we reopen the deal we could end up with something worse. Then he also gripes about Sternberg’s letter, saying sayig a three-week delay kills the deal is a “totally ridiculous statement” — if the Rays owner doesn’t win this vote via his 11th-hour threat gambit, he certainly didn’t win any friends with it.

He also says that Auld surprised him by saying that the Rays were worried the numbers were no longer looking good on their end. “This is the first indication I had that the Rays were having second thoughts,” he said. “At this point you can only conclude one of a couple of things: Either Sternberg wants out of the deal, he wants to renegotiate the deal, and he wants to hang the failure on the county commission, particularly our newest members, who I think he’s counting on the vote no, personally.” Bold reverse psychology move: Voting no on the stadium bonds is exactly what Sternberg wants, don’t give it to him!

5:44 pm ET: Peters is last up, and argues that the St. Pete city council president was for the Rays stadium deal and was re-elected, so clearly people in St. Pete like the deal! This is not how polling or elections work, but she’s on a roll, let her have her moment.

5:50 pm ET: Now she’s on to arguing that people from Pennsylvania move to Clearwater because the Phillies play spring training there. And if Tampa Bay loses the Rays, it won’t get major league soccer! And her sons love baseball! The defense rests.

6:00 pm ET: A twist! Peters says she supports kicking the can down the road so everyone can think on this, and especially so the new members can learn more about it. (Again, wish the camera would cut to Nowicki and Scherer to see how they feel about being called clueless newbies.) This wouldn’t really decide much — there’s no real deadline for issuing the bonds, apparently — but would give Sternberg more time to try another tack that’s not “You guys ruined everything, maybe I’ll just take my team and leave.”

And I, unfortunately, have to go afk and can’t see this through to the final vote, or decision not to vote, or whatever it ends up being. Feel free to continue to discussion in comments, and we’ll reconvene for a full recap and reaction tomorrow morning.