If you were following along yesterday’s liveblog on the Tampa Bay Rays stadium hearing and wondered how the cliffhanger ending turned out: The Pinellas County Commission voted 6-1 to wait another four weeks to make any decision, scheduling its next vote for December 17.
To anyone who watched the whole hearing, though, those six votes were clearly cast for a couple of different reasons. Four members — Chris Latvala and Dave Eggers, who voted no on the stadium deal back in July, and Vince Nowicki and Chris Scherer, who were newly elected this month — were strongly opposed to the county going ahead with selling $312.5 million in stadium bonds at all, arguing that it’s a “bad deal” for the Rays to only pay $1 million a year in rent on a new stadium when they’re paying $15 million to play in a minor-league stadium in Tampa for a year (Nowicki) and that the entire thing is an “egregious demand” by Rays owner Stu Sternberg when he could just go to a damn bank and borrow the money (Scherer). With seven members on the commission, that was enough to block the bond sale.
Commissioners Kathleen Peters and Brian Scott, meanwhile, voted for a delay in the bond vote only because they didn’t want it to fail entirely — as Scott said, “I’ll freely admit I was never the best at math, but I can count to four.” Only Rene Flowers, whose district the stadium would be built in, voted no on the delay, arguing that further debate is pointless and the commission may as well decide and move on.
This puts the ball firmly in the Rays’ court, and so far they’re not talking. Team presidents Brian Auld and Matt Silverman attended the meeting but did not speak, instead letting their letter saying they had “suspended work on the entire project” stand for itself. The other theme of the day was that that letter went over very badly — even Peters and Scott called it out during the meeting, with Scott terming it “totally ridiculous” — and the commission members are not about to be rushed into making a decision on bonds that the July deal itself said don’t need to be approved until next March at the earliest.
What looks to have happened here is that the destruction wrought in the Tampa Bay region in October, coupled with uncertainty about where the Rays would play while the roof on its current stadium was repaired, led Peters, Scott, Flowers, and the since-departed Janet Long to join Latvala and Eggers in pressing pause on the bond sale. Then, a week later, election results tipped the balance on the commission, adding stadium deal critics Nowicki and Scherer, and suddenly it’s too late for Peters, Scott, and Flowers to unpause the bonds, even though they would now like to.
It will now be down to those three, plus Rays execs, to peel off one of the four no votes by December 17, and it looks like that won’t be a trivial task: None of the four diehards focused on whether the Rays will play games temporarily in Pinellas, for example, instead focusing in on wanting to renegotiate the entire deal so taxpayers don’t foot as much of the bill. That’s not to say it won’t happen — horses are born to be traded — but none of the core four proposed an easy path to winning them over. If they continue to hold out, Sternberg could be back at square one in his years-long stadium campaign — only now without even a major-league facility to play in in the interim, and with his fellow owners breathing down his neck to get something done in Tampa Bay so they can focus on exploiting cities like Nashville and Charlotte for expansion fees rather than leaving them open as Rays move threat targets.
Oh yeah, and the St. Petersburg council has its own votes coming up tomorrow, including one on whether to go ahead with repairing Tropicana Field’s roof. St. Pete administrator Rob Gerdes said at yesterday’s county hearing that the city fully intends to go ahead with roof repairs, but of course Gerdes doesn’t have a vote on that (though his nephew does). The city council meeting starts at 1:30 tomorrow and can be viewed here; I don’t plan on doing another liveblog, but feel free to chime in in the comments, or on Bluesky, or wherever your heart desires.
Didn’t you do an article (for defector or maybe Deadspin??) on this years ago?
As I recall the conclusion was/leaned towards “this may never end until the Rays move, and there really isn’t anywhere good for them to move to”. Oddly specific, and prophetic.
I am paraphrasing a bit on that because it was a long time ago… but there are many issues surrounding the Rays poor attendance (just as there are for other teams, like the A’s… although most other teams can drive decent/midpack attendance when their owners accidentally put competent people in charge and then, somehow, manage to not intervene to prevent them from doing their jobs…).
Anyone thinking a $1Bn+ taxpayer gift to Sternberg & co (he only owns 48%, right?) will ‘fix’ this hasn’t been paying attention to the long term effect of billion dollar publicly funded stadia elsewhere in the country (especially Florida).
Good work by the committee overall. But any time a decision is pushed to a later date, the worry is that one or two votes will be bought off and it then turns out that Uri Geller CAN TOO bend spoons with his mind after all…
Montreal Expos is what should happen
Montreal has not shown any real interest.
This isn’’t *that* Dave Eggers, is it?
Ha, no, the McSweeney’s Dave Eggers lives on the West Coast.
Montreal is not all that interested.
It was Deadspin, and the conclusion was actually: “The fate of baseball in Tampa Bay may come down less to whether the region deserves a team than to the state of the stadium bidding wars when we get to 2027. At least if Mother Nature doesn’t have other plans in the meantime.”
I was off by a couple of years, but otherwise…
https://web.archive.org/web/20190212225226/https://deadspin.com/what-s-the-matter-with-tampa-bay-1832565973/
I don’t understand how Stu’s threat is even a threat. It only makes sense if there’s an alternate location that’s ready or almost ready now. Assuming MLB won’t let him go to Oakland, where is this magic place?
Going to another site – even Tampa – would take even longer to design and build. If the Trop can be patched together by 2026, the Rays could stay there for another 3…or 10 … years, until they figure something out.
I’m hoping the County Commission says swell, you want to renegotiate, let’s start by you paying us something closer to market value for the Gas Plant District land…and give us the option to cancel your participation in the development any damn time we choose… And by the way, that $300 mil we were throwing in is now $150 mil.
If only.
Here’s a local news report on the impact on the community without the rays. People without jobs! The downtown area won’t thrive!
It would be nice if the media did a better job of covering the news…
https://youtu.be/xV1IwHiCNqk?si=TQcUCPybU5y8O6z3
I love the whole “people who work at the stadium will lose their jobs” bit when the people who work at the stadium have already lost their jobs. Those people are unemployed at least until the Trop is repaired, and there’s no guarantee they’d get those jobs back at that point. And the idea that downtown won’t thrive is ridiculous when Downtown St. Pete is already thriving better than Downtown Tampa right now, despite being several blocks from the stadium.
Seems like the Rays are terminating the deal. For once I kinda feel bad for Manfred- the clown car full of MLB owners is impossible to manage. Will his legacy be the pitch clock or 2 homeless franchises and no expansion?
He’ll always be Rob “Piece of Metal” Manfred to me