Category: Tampa Bay Rays

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.

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.

 

The revised Tampa Bay Rays stadium plan paperwork was released on Friday afternoon, in a classic Friday news dump. The idea behind these is to dominate the discourse just as everyone goes home for the weekend, so that by the time Monday rolls around — in this case, with a city council vote looming on Thursday — it will be too late for anyone to muster significant analysis of 173 pages of extremely convoluted legal language.

With that said, let’s dive in to the documents — a stadium development and funding agreement, a nonrelocation agreement, and a guaranty — and see where things stand.

• As expected, the main update is councilmember Bill Carlson’s replace-one-city-tax-pool-with-another switcheroo, with $180 million in spending coming entirely from property taxes instead of a mix of property taxes and sales taxes. Though it’s not spelled out in the documents, $100 million of this is being described as a “private placement” of bonds by the Rays — which is true in that the Rays would be selling the bonds, but not in that they would get to pay it off with their own city property tax payments on the surrounding development. So as discussed last week, it still amounts to the same $180 million total city cost, the Casino Night Fallacy notwithstanding.
• Or maybe more: The funding agreement doesn’t actually specify the exact amount of redirected city property taxes, instead kicking that can down the road to an Increment Interlocal Agreement to be decided by a future City TIF Ordinance, to be passed by December. And it does spell out a “waterfall” account to use excess TIF moneys to pay for future bond costs and “capital repairs, renewals, and replacements of Overall Public Infrastructure Improvements and/or Capital Maintenance and Repairs of Public Project Improvements within the District” — in other words, if there’s additional property tax proceeds after paying off the first $180 million, it can be used for additional future expenses. Total city public cost, then, is TBD, but setting aside future tax receipts for upgrade costs can add up quickly; in the Atlanta Falcons deal, a similar waterfall fund meant that an official $200 million public cost has ballooned to about $700 million.
• Reporter Shadow of the Stadium notes on X that “🚨Public subsidies go way past $1B,” which is accurate but nothing new: The original plan included $976 million in city and county cash, $839 million in forgone property taxes and parcel fees on the stadium, and at least $250 million worth of free state land, so this was always a $2 billion–plus subsidy. (The total stadium construction cost, meanwhile, now stands at $2.36 billion, according to the latest documents, meaning public cash and tax breaks will cover at least 85% of  Rays owner Patrick Zalupski’s stadium costs.) The waterfall fund could make it even more spendy, though — Shadow calls it a “bottomless” subsidy, and as written at present, that appears to be correct.
• There is a “first-class stadium facility” clause, but this appears to only require the city and county to build a first-class stadium, not to maintain it as first class. If so, it couldn’t serve as a state-of-the-art out clause that Zalupski could use to demand more money before his lease is up, so that’s a positive, or at least not an additional negative.
• On the subject of that lease, the team is reporting that it would agree to pay $4 million a year in rent as part of the new plan, which would trim about $60 million off the public’s expense. However, this figure appears nowhere in the new set of documents, so it’s tough to say if it would come with any hidden catches.
• Nothing to do with funding, but Zalupski has the option to make this the lowest-capacity MLB stadium in existence: Only a minimum of “28,000 fixed spectator seats” is required, with another 2,000 standing room tickets. This would be even fewer seats than the Athletics‘ 33,000-seat stadium under construction in Las Vegas, and the smallest purpose-built MLB stadium since Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis in 1920, looks like. This may be fine for a team that hasn’t averaged 30,000 in attendance since their inaugural season, but it’s also in line with modern strategies for boosting ticket prices via artificial scarcity.

Would this be worse for taxpayers than the Kansas City Royals stadium plan announced last week? It’s tough to say, as there are so many unknowns remaining in both cases. But either would be the most expensive MLB stadium subsidy in history; if they both pass, all that’s left to determine is who’s #1 and who’s #1a.

Tampa stands to be undeniably #1 in one particular form of self-own, though:

At a news conference Friday afternoon, Tampa City Council member Alan Clendenin unbuttoned his dress shirt to reveal a Rays jersey customized with his name.

“I just can’t understate how big this is,” said Clendenin, appearing alongside Tampa Mayor Jane Castor. “We are a major-league city with major-league sports.”

With Carlson on board as a swing vote, it certainly looks like this enormous bigness will pass the Tampa council on Thursday, leaving its fate in the hands of the county commission, which already voted 5-2 to approve a similar deal in May. We could be looking at the first $2 billion MLB stadium subsidy, and somehow it’s going to be for the Tampa Bay Rays — guess Stu Sternberg wasn’t so dumb to turn down a $1 billion offer from St. Petersburg after all, even if it took selling the team to a more politically connected owner to get the extra billion.

Ever since Tampa councilmember Bill Carlson announced a few days ago that he’d be willing to consider casting a swing vote for a Tampa Bay Rays stadium if the city’s share came out of a different pot of property tax money, I’ve been engaged in a weird, slow-motion discussion with Carlson on the former Twitter about what exactly his plan is, and how it could possibly save Tampa any money. It started out like this:

Calling my report “false” while linking to the same WUSF report I had linked to is a choice, certainly. But I tried again, asking, “You propose eliminating $180m in CRA and CIT funding and substituting $180m in TIF funding for ‘publicly owned infrastructure.’ Could that be used toward the (county-owned) stadium? If not, who would cover the resulting $180m stadium funding gap?” To which Carlson’s reply, in its entirety, was: “The city is not involved in the financing.”

This brings us to yesterday, when the Tampa Bay Times reported:

Carlson said the city would provide an $80 million advance payment to the development district, paid in four annual $20 million installments, at the Rays’ request. He did not specify which city funds would be tapped for that money.

Carlson has yet to explain how sending $80 million to be used for a Rays stadium district is not being “involved in the financing,” though it’s possible he’s making a distinction between stadium financing and stadium district financing. (Carlson has insisted that any money under his plan would only go for “public infrastructure,” but didn’t answer me when I asked if that could include infrastructure for what would be a county-owned stadium.) Carlson also confirmed to the Times that, contrary to what he said on X, his plan would indeed kick back property taxes to support the Rays project, justifying it as “with the property taxes being generated, we can put some of that back in for the infrastructure.”

There are several possibilities here:

1. Carlson doesn’t understand how money works. This seems unlikely, given that Carlson is currently in his eighth year on the city council, and at least understands tax increment financing districts enough to write a proposal about how to use them. Elected officials, though, keep falling for the Casino Night Fallacy that taxes paid by a development project don’t cost anything for a local government to give up, so we can never rule out stupidity. For his part, Carlson tweeted on Monday, “You’re not dealing w an amateur here. I have been against these deals for years and I can see through BS on both sides,” which would leave us with…
2. Carlson is trying to pull a fast one. Before he was elected to the council, Carlson ran a public relations and marketing firm, and it’s entirely possible this entire tax switcheroo is meant as obfuscation, to convince the public that he’s cutting a better deal when he knows he’s not really. His X debating style certainly seems to follow the classic PR principle of “if you don’t like the question you’ve been asked, answer a different one that you wish you’d been asked,” so it’s very possible he knows what he’s doing. Unless…
3. There’s something here Carlson isn’t telling us. Maybe he really has come up with a way of spending city property tax money without spending city property tax money, despite that being not how tax money works. Or he’s figured out a way to use the city’s spending on things completely unrelated to the Rays project, without team owner Patrick Zalupski noticing that he’d be out $180 million. And he just hasn’t explained which it is yet, or where he plans on getting the $80 million down payment, because he’s really really busy, and also the dog ate his laptop keyboard.

All we do know for sure is that Carlson is proposing to withdraw $180 million in city sales and property tax spending on the Rays stadium project, and substitute $80 million in some money from somewhere plus some amount of other money from future property tax receipts — and we also still don’t know who covers any shortfall if those property tax revenues fall short. As for why Carlson is being so obscure, we’re ultimately left with the epistemological dilemma that prompted Hanlon’s Razor, but I for one don’t have enough evidence to say whether that conclusion applies here. It’s a fine line, indeed.

I’m on the road today, but did want to briefly note that Tampa councilmember Bill Carlson, the likely swing vote on any Tampa Bay Rays stadium deal, has come out with his plan for a new way of funding the team’s $2 billion stadium district subsidy demand:

Tampa City Councilman Bill Carlson has proposed a new financing structure for the city’s investment in a Tampa Bay Rays stadium project that requires only the property taxes generated by the team’s privately funded multiuse development around the ballpark.

The new arrangement would eliminate the city’s nonbinding agreement to use $80 million from the Community Investment Tax. It also takes out the originally proposed $100 million backed by the Drew Park Community Redevelopment Area’s future property tax growth.

In short, instead of using $100 million from property taxes in the Drew Park CRA district and $80 million from the CIT sales tax surcharge, the city would take $180 million out of future property tax payments on the Rays’ development surrounding the stadium. The amount of taxes collected would be the same, and the check from Tampa to Rays owner Patrick Zalupski would be the same, but it would come from a different city pocket.

Unless there’s more to it than WUSF is reporting, that’s pretty underwhelming, but it appears it’s all it will take to flip Carlson’s vote. The councilmember said that the new tax increment structure would have more public transparency and the money could only be spent on “government-owned property” like “stormwater, roads, sidewalks,” but if Zalupski can’t find $180 million worth of infrastructure to spend on out of a multi-billion-dollar project, he’s not really trying, especially given the increasingly flexible definition of “infrastructure.” Mayor Jane Castor has endorsed the tax switcheroo, and Carlson says Zalupski has been receptive as well; if spending from one pot of tax money instead of another is all it takes to buy his support, Carlson sold out cheap compared to some past Florida swing votes.