Tampa council swing vote opens talks with Rays about his price for approving stadium deal

Anytime you have a one-vote margin on a stadium deal, as currently exists on the Tampa city council, you can expect to see team officials see what it’ll take the peel off a swing vote to get themselves a majority. And we’re starting to see what that haggling is going to look like for the Tampa Bay Rays, as councilmember Bill Carlson — who cast the deciding vote in May to approve a Rays MOU but since then has voted against moving ahead with the plan — met with Rays CEO Ken Babby on Friday and emerged to say:

• He told Babby to meet individually with all seven council members, and Babby agreed. (Carlson instructed him to hold individual meetings to get around state sunshine laws that would otherwise prevent the content of discussions from being withheld from the public.) “If the Rays hit the reset button today, they might have a chance,” said Carlson.
• Carlson, who is running to replace term-limited mayor Jane Castor in the fall, blamed her for “sabotaging the negotiations” by excluding councilmembers from talks so she could blame the council if the project failed.
• He said he doesn’t like the current deal, because “my constituents don’t want to spend any money to subsidize projects like this. They want us to spend on basic infrastructure.”
• In particular, Carlson suggested capping the amount of property tax kickbacks going to the Rays from a downtown Community Redevelopment Agency, something he said would allow more money to be used for roads and sewers — “If I can say we’re moving $20 million a year to repair your roads, it would make it more of a win-win outcome” — without costing Rays owner Patrick Zalupski additional money. Carlson did not explain precisely how that part would work, given that if the city spends less on a stadium, somebody else would have to cover that shortfall.

It’s hard to know exactly how to read all this, other than that Carlson clearly wants to paint himself as both the defender of the public purse and the guy who’ll get credit if a Rays deal gets done. (Or blame! There is always the possibility of blame.) If he really uses his leverage as the swing vote to get major concessions from Zalupski, then that could make the Rays deal somewhat less wasteful, though it’s unlikely to shave much off the projected $2.1 billion total public cost. If he just ends up shuffling public money from covering one part of the stadium development plan to something else that seems more infrastructure-y, that’s even less promising.

It sounds like all this is going to get hashed out behind closed doors — thanks to Carlson’s plan to evade sunshine laws, something he presented as clever rather than devious — so in the meantime the most we can do is read tea leaves and try to run the numbers on who would pay what under a revised deal. I’ll do my part here, Tampa media outlets, can you try to investigate it as well rather than just waiting for the next press statement from the council?