The Hillsborough County Commission voted 5-2 on Friday to approve a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium development on the current campus of Hillsborough College, making the team’s long-running saga all over but the postmortems. (If you want those, you can choose from among Forbes, the Tampa Bay Times, and Florida Politics, only one of which name-checks “Obi-Wan Kenobi’s message to the surviving Jedi after Order 66.”) There are still a bunch of details to be worked out, including how exactly the property tax diversions will work and what kind of community benefits package will be provided, as well as what the team’s lease with look like — all the kinds of things you’d normally want to have down on paper before holding your final approval votes. But the general shape of the deal remains the same, meaning Rays owner Patrick Zalupski will be receiving at least $2 billion in public money, tax breaks, and land, by virtue of a friendly face in the governor’s mansion (for the next few months, at least) and a city councilmember who either doesn’t understand how taxes work or doesn’t care so long as he can make “I saved the Rays!” part of his current mayoral campaign.
The end of the county commission hearing, meanwhile, got super-weird as county officials gave their closing statements about why they were approving the Rays deal, which will cost county voters far more (about $1.3 billion counting tax breaks if I’m doing the property tax split right) than the city (a bit over $600 million counting tax breaks). First up was commission chair Ken Hagan, who has been stumping for a Tampa stadium for the Rays essentially forever, yet who apparently had to resort to some very 2026 methods to justify this deal:
By creating this sports hub — if AI is correct — we’ll be only the sixth city that has co-located their facilities, along with L.A., Seattle, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Kansas City. And I’ll give you one better than that: If AI is also correct, this will be the first development project in the country, that has an entire college integrated with a ballpark and its catalytic development. AI said this development is a historic exception to the standard model.
Yep, that’s right: It appears that the central player in getting $2 billion in public subsidies provided to the Rays’ billionaire owner outsourced his “this one will be different” reasoning to ChatGPT. I often say that not much has changed in the stadium game since the 1990s other than the number of zeroes after the dollar signs, but the reboots always come with a few new twists.
And then there was commissioner Chris Boles, who said first he used the calculator that doesn’t work to find out if the revised deal was better than the previous one:
We talked about AI earlier. Apparently Ken uses it to look at stats. But I used it as a data tool to look at the questions I had versus the document, stuck the two together, and about 90% of the things that I asked for were integrated in there.
This, apparently, is what the future holds for civic policy decisions: Elected officials will only be given a couple of days to puzzle through lengthy and incomplete documents dropped in their laps last minute before a vote, but it’ll be okay because we’ll have robots to read them for us.
And then, even more puzzlingly, Boles cited his daughter’s bedtime reading choices as a factor in his decision:
I have a 12-year-old daughter, when she was very young, I used to read her this book called “The Giving Tree.” If anyone has a child, you know what that book is about: You have a seed, and you let it grow, and it gives back over time, and it does all these things. And in a way, this park is like the Giving Tree.
You apparently didn’t read the book very carefully, because that is not at all how “The Giving Tree” goes: The boy protagonist doesn’t plant the seed that turns into the tree, he just shows up, finds the tree in the first, eats its apples, climbs its trunk, ultimately cuts it down, and then as an old man sits on its stump — “and the tree was happy.” That’s a very different metaphor, one that even inspired an alternate version called “The Tree Who Set Healthy Boundaries”; maybe when future elected officials are asking AI what books to read to their kids in advance of billion-dollar spending decisions, that’s the version they’ll get recommended, but somehow I’m not holding my breath.
The Tree That Couldn’t Say No which many people have argued for years was an example of bad parenting?
That was what you used to decide to vote?
Ironic! Tampa officials have been arguing that this decision shows they’re a “major league city” and the logic that went into it makes them sound like a bunch of stereotypical small town yokels.
County commissioners — now putting the DUMB, in “dumbfounded”!
To paraphrase a fictional Florida governor: “Florida…boy, I don’t know.”
Seeing some of people who end up in elected and unelected office at the local, state, and federal levels is discouraging enough. But seeing *those* folks basically offshore their voting decisions (and justifications) to AI makes me legitimately fear for what governance might look like in the years and decades ahead.
“Idiocracy” wasn’t satire. It was foreshadowing.
Forbes thinks the previous owner was STEW Sternberg which gives me a clue about the accuracy of their article.
Forbes became Bleacher Report a while back.