Tampa Bay Rays officials and their Hillsborough College partners in a proposed $2.3 billion Tampa stadium plan held the first of three planned community feedback sessions yesterday, and the theme appeared to be it’s all cool, man, don’t worry yourself over the details:
“We took a no-harm approach to the work that we’re doing. No part of our financial proposal will take funding away from other priorities that the city and county have committed to,” [Rays CEO Ken] Babby said. “No part of our financial proposal will take money away from other sports teams in the community that desperately also have asked for resources around an opportunity. The Rays will take on 100% of cost overruns on the ballpark.”
That’s nice about the cost overruns and all, but vowing that “no part” of $1.15 billion in city and county spending — actually more like $2.25 billion counting free land and tax breaks — would take funding away from any other spending priorities is quite the claim, especially when the WUSF article acknowledges two paragraphs later that “where that money will come from still needs to be worked out.” And especially especially when one possible option on the table — raiding a county infrastructure and schools fund — would in particular seem to take away from those other priorities. (Presumably Babby meant that the stadium will be such a cash cow that there will be enough money to go around for everyone: He asserted that the project could generate $55 billion over 30 years, presumably in “economic impact,” also citation needed.)
Hillsborough College President Ken Atwater, meanwhile, tried to reassure students that building a pro baseball stadium and surrounding development for Rays owner Patrick Zalupski on top of most of their campus wouldn’t disrupt their studies too much, because there are lots of other colleges that have classroom and athletic fields and stuff for however many years construction is underway:
“It may mean instead of moving to temporary, we move to rental facilities or some other location or we share locations for some of our other sister institutions like the University of Tampa or like USF, which may be a possibility,” Atwater said. “We will adjust accordingly, but believe me we will remain open and available to deliver the instruction we do.”…
“There are deals that we’re making in order to maintain all of our program, especially our athletic program. You will see that we’ll be using community gyms, high school facilities, and other facilities here in the area to help support making that happen.”
Some students raised questions about all this, with Hillsborough student government member Echo Durham asking why the college needed to turn over most of its campus to the Rays instead of simply renovating its campus itself. Atwater, according to the Tampa Bay Times, replied that the campus is heavily dependent on state funding, which seems to be a way of saying that Gov. Ron DeSantis wanted this for his pal and campaign donor Rays owner Zalupski, nobody’s gonna stop him from bigfooting his way to this project, even if his feet are growing smaller by the day during his last year in office.
If all this wasn’t enough distraction, the Rays also introduced a new vaportecture video featuring creepy AI-generated people doing barely sports-related things in slow motion. I’m not sure which is my favorite bit, the seemingly 10-foot-tall performers moving about a distant stage or the lovingly generated steam emerging from coffee cups and food truck items in the Florida chill (?), but I can assure you I will be rewatching it with awe, if maybe not precisely the kind of awe that Rays officials were hoping for.
Two more public sessions are on the calendar, next Tuesday and Wednesday evenings — can’t wait to see what tricks team and college officials pull out of their hats for those.
Being a lame duck leader in theory means that the mayors, governors, and presidents have diminishing influence over their own governments as their final day in office approaches. But in the 2026 version of America, it really just means that they can wreak a s— ton of havoc in every which direction on their way out. This is especially the case when basically said leader’s approach toward leadership is based almost entirely on a pay-to-play model, and when people with enough clout to stop the overreach are content to let them follow through (if not also in on the overreach themselves).
All of which is to say that DeSantis will do all he can to push this one last favor through for a major donor — an ultra-rich businessman who made most of his money in Florida, a key detail in a state where members of the billionaire class are almost exclusively imports or transplants — and will almost certainly succeed in making it happen. It’s really just a matter of how much this will end up costing all parties involved.
this is basically what giuliani did with the yankees and the mets when he was leaving office. as a going away present, he had the city sign last minute agreements with them that required the city to pay for their proposals to build new ballparks.
bloomberg did not terminate those agreements, so the byproduct of that was that, when team officials were sitting down with city officials to discuss the new ballparks, the city was paying for it’s own officials *as well as* the costs for the team officials to negotiate the new facilities.
never take your eyes off people as they are leaving office.
Yeah, there were entire negotiating sessions where the billable hours of everyone on both sides of the table were being covered by taxpayers. I got to break that story for the Village Voice:
https://www.villagevoice.com/yankee-lobbyists-on-taxpayers-tab/
People seem to think that community colleges have stadium land lately between this and the A’s having their plans on the Laney College land for awhile.
A team owner who is politically adept (unlike John Fisher) might have been able to get a ballpark built on Laney College property in exchange for giving Laney some land elsewhere in the city. And that would have been a far more lucrative deal than whatever the A’s will be stuck with in Vegas.
Unfortunately, I could see the vaportecture since WFTS has taken down the original story that contained it.
There was a stray character at the end of the URL — try the link now.