Fact-checking Tampa councilmember’s “busting myths” video about the Rays stadium proposal

With the Tampa city council set to vote today on its share of $2 billion–plus in subsidies for a $2.36 billion Tampa Bay Rays stadium, councilmember Lynn Hurtak has posted a video “busting myths about the Rays stadium proposal.” Let’s see what she came up with:

“I’m a huge baseball fan.”

When she and her husband got married, they skipped a honeymoon so they could use the money on Rays season tickets instead. TRUE.

“Actual peer-reviewed studies by real economists show no tangible impacts of new stadiums on local economic activity. It’s basically the one thing all economists, from Marxists to the Chicago school, agree upon.”

The video includes a screenshot from a February 2026 J.C. Bradbury and Brad Humphreys paper titled “Yes, There is an Economic Consensus That Professional Sports Facilities are Inadvisable Public Investments,” but the same thing was also found by a meta-study of more than 130 studies of sports venue impact by Bradbury, Humphreys, and Dennis Coates, as well as a survey of economists and another survey of economists and talking to economists when they get together to swap papers about sports. TRUE.

“Economist Allen Sanderson said you generate more economic activity by throwing a billion dollars out of a helicopter.”

Sanderson actually didn’t put a price tag on how much money you’d have to throw out of a helicopter to generate more economic activity than building a stadium, but given that he said this as early as 1997 with regard to a Minnesota Twins stadium at a time when stadiums cost a lot less than a billion dollars, he probably would have accepted tossing even fewer moneybags. TRUE ENOUGH.

“Money that could be spent in or around the stadium is money that is currently being spent doing something else in the area.”

Probably not all of stadium spending is cannibalized by spending elsewhere in the area, depending on how you define “area”: In Bradbury’s studies of the new Atlanta Braves stadium in Cobb County recounted in his new book, he found that around one-third of the spending in and around Truist Park was reallocated from elsewhere in the county. And that didn’t include spending reallocated from the rest of the Atlanta metro area, or the state of Georgia as a whole — the larger a circle you draw around an attraction, the more entertainment dollars are just being shuffled around within it. So while Hillsborough County will likely steal some economic activity from Pinellas County if the Rays move across the bay, it’ll still be Florida spending replacing other Florida spending, which isn’t a net plus for Florida taxpayers. MOSTLY TRUE.

“The new stadium has a negligible effect on total tourism numbers.”

Hurtak notes that even the Rays selling out every game would be a drop in the bucket compared to existing Tampa tourism numbers, but there’s an even better case for this argument: Studies of what happens when spring training is canceled because of strikes and lockouts have found that there’s no measurable negative impact on Florida tourism. IF ANYTHING, UNDERSTATING THE MYTH.

“Lots of stadium projects over the past few decades have been mixed-use, and none of them have paid back the taxpayers.”

I can’t confirm “none of them” without a lot more research than I have time for this morning, but there are certainly tons of examples of mixed-use projects that have been seas of red ink for taxpayers. In fact, some of the stadium projects that promise to be the costliest for the public are mixed-use developments, if only because the scale of the subsidies is even larger when team owners receive tax and land breaks on the non-stadium portions as well — as would be the case for the Rays stadium complex in Tampa. PRETTY DARN TRUE.

“A loan is when you give someone money and they promise to pay it back. The Rays have not committed to paying anything back. The current proposal is no different from the previous one, other than that the money being committed from your tax dollars is coming from a different bucket — the same bucket that we currently use to pay for renovating fire stations, fixing police cars, and paving roads.”

Yup. I hadn’t actually realized that Rays stadium proponents were arguing that the city spending $80 million toward a stadium and paying it off by siphoning off property tax revenues was a “loan,” but if so that’s completely bonkers — even Oscar Madison could tell you that. EXTREMELY TRUE.

“Even if you live in Tampa, the majority of your property taxes go to the county, which is poised to spend almost $700 million on this.”

Yup yup. (I actually have it as slightly over $700 million in county money, but it’s possible the county price tag has come down slightly in the latest iteration of the deal.) TRUE.

“The contract puts Tampa taxpayers on the hook for a blank check to pay for any additional costs of stadium renovations and repairs in the future.”

The proposed stadium development and funding agreement isn’t all that clear about how the “waterfall fund” of additional tax moneys to be used for future upgrades would work, and in fact pushes off a lot of the details around this to a future TIF district agreement that hasn’t been negotiated yet, but GENERALLY TRUE.

As a (sometime) professional fact-checker, my overall rating of Hurtak’s six-minute video report is: MORE ACCURATE THAN MOST NEWS ARTICLES BEFORE THEY GO TO A FACT CHECKER. The problems with handing over $2 billion in tax dollars in order to get the Rays to play home games in one part of Tampa Bay rather than another should be self-evident at this point, but if you want proof, Hurtak’s research checks out. Or you could be like councilmember Bill Carlson and declare that he knows “the best economists in the world” and the ones who are against stadiums are probably just “politically biased”; I’d love to fact-check those statements, but Carlson refuses to answer questions about any of his voluminous tweets on the subject, so we’ll have to settle for hopefully watching Hurtak ask him at today’s council hearing, which kicks off at 9 a.m. [EDIT: the Rays agenda item actually starts at 10 a.m., sounds like] and will be viewable online here.