The Hillsborough County Commission voted yesterday to ask the county attorney whether paying almost half a billion dollars toward a Tampa Bay Rays stadium with a county sales tax that voters were promised wouldn’t be used for stadiums would be legal, and an answer is expected back by the commission’s next meeting on April 15. The commission also rejected a motion by Commissioner Joshua Wostal to release all internal documents on the proposed Rays project, instead voting to hold a public “workshop” once the details of a deal are finalized.
Meanwhile, though, Tampa area officials have another potential billion-dollar-plus fish to fry, as Buccaneers owners the Glazer family have decided this is a perfect time to remind the city and county that they would like a freshened-up stadium too, and would like public dollars to make it so:
[Tampa] Sports Authority CEO Eric Hart said at a board meeting Tuesday that the Bucs requested a meeting to get started.
Board member Tony Muniz asked if Hart had a ballpark estimate of how much public funding the Bucs may be seeking, though he guessed it would be in the hundreds of millions.
“It’s a significant number on these stadiums,” Hart said. “What that number looks like, I don’t know.”
Hart then pointed to other teams like the Tennessee Titans and Buffalo Bills whose owners have gotten public money in excess of $1 billion for new stadiums, as well as the Jacksonville Jaguars, where owner Shad Khan is getting $775 million in taxpayer money toward $1.4 billion in renovations, as examples. “Look around the country and you can see what’s happening around in these arenas and the kind of money it’s taken to keep them state-of-the-art,” Hart said. “They’re significant, but they’re also big economic engines.” (Citation needed.)
There’s a deadline coming up of sorts for the Bucs, who must decide by the end of January 2027 whether to extend their lease for five more years beyond its current termination date of the end of the 2027 season. That’s really more pressure on the Glazers than on Tampa, since if they don’t extend their lease they’ll have nowhere to play in 2028 — it’s not like they’d be able to get a state-of-the-art stadium built elsewhere in a year and a half — but feel free to start the betting pool now for the date of the first article describing this as a looming deadline for Tampa area officials to “resolve the Bucs’ stadium issues.”
Tampa City Council chair and Sports Authority board member Alan Clendenin, at least, seemed to take the news of fresh Bucs stadium demands in stride:
“We’re talking about a baseball stadium and substantially more activation and enormous footprint of other economic development opportunities that didn’t exist,” Clendenin said. “And we actually have a team established in the Tampa Bay area, not one that’s threatening to leave.”
Clendenin said the sports authority sits in the “captain’s seat” and should maintain RayJay to keep it competitive. But he said the agency is not in the same position it was when it was first negotiating with the Glazers and the Bucs.
“You also don’t have to bend over and take it like the first deal,” he said to laughs Tuesday.
That’s promising in terms of at least one local elected seeming to have determined that the city has some leverage here, at least as much as any statement saying maybe this stadium deal will be better than a rape can be considered promising.
Anyway, this should all be a lesson that if you give public money to one local sports billionaire, the others will be quick to … I was going to say “me too,” but maybe in light of Clendenin’s metaphor that’s not the best.
What are the Glazers gonna do, shack up with Orlando for a year like the Jags are doing, at that sewer pit of a stadium, with no stadium resolution in place back home?
By the same token, everyone on Tampa’s side of the bay had to know this was coming after they essentially rolled over for the Rays — a franchise far less established in the region compared to the Bucs, an OG Tampa Bay institution. It’s a point I’ve made a bunch of times before: staying a “major league” town feels a lot more painful than becoming one feels good.
It’s not unlike the time I owned a horse while my kids were taking riding lessons. Buying a horse is cheap. Owning a horse is EXPENSIVE!
Same goes for kids!
One of Americas biggest welfare queens mooching off of hard working citizens. Let give them 1 billion dollars then complain about a poor mother with 5 kids getting $1000 for food
Neil,
If you were wondering:
I attended the public outreach event the Rays held at the highschool last night.
The same slide deck of really polished but completely baseless benefits stats, projections and side projects that will never ever come to fruition.
They did field questions, but all the answers were the usual polished answers that we saw with Stu.
Mixed crowd, but most didn’t seem to thrilled with giving away billions that were never supposed to go to buying another stadium.
It’s the psycho that will never end..
Stadiums tend to lifespan last 20-30 years because there always needs to be seating for the upper 1%. Soon there won’t be even be a lower seating bowl, but rows and rows of luxury suites and and an upper deck of nosebleeds for the little people.