Who? The two top Tampa Bay Rays executives working tirelessly to sell their vision of a new $450 million waterfront ballpark for their team. Part of the plan would redevelop the Tropicana Field site into a new neighborhood with shops and homes.
Sphere of influence: Kalt, 33, is a Rays senior vice president and has already negotiated three ballpark deals, including two in New York City, where he was a government official, with the Mets and Yankees. Silverman, 31, is the team president, a Harvard graduate who worked on Wall Street mergers and acquisitions for Goldman Sachs.
How they make a difference: By leveraging the Rays' desire for a new ballpark into a larger urban vision, Kalt and Silverman have put themselves at ground zero in the discussion about St. Pete's downtown future.
CL: Give us your best pitch … for a new ballpark.
Kalt: The basic pitch is, right now when you look at downtown St. Petersburg, there's about 100 acres of land that's being devoted to baseball. … about 20 percent of the land mass of downtown … [T]here's a more productive use of this land. … and we think there is a way to redevelop both parcels in a way that not only benefits the franchise but benefits the city of St. Pete and Pinellas County and the community as a whole. … because they accomplish a number of goals that have been stated in various different forms. … People have said they want to see more retail in the area so they don't have to drive across the bay. They want to see more opportunities in the form of affordable workforce housing and open-space development. … and the ballpark is kind of going hand-in-hand with the activity in downtown. So there's a number of positives that we see.
People have withheld judgment, and for good reason. … [O]ur announcement was just the beginning of the process. … Details still need to be worked out, not just on the financing but in the development as well.
Silverman: Baseball was supposed to be an economic driver for the city of St. Petersburg, especially downtown, and the Tropicana site was assembled for that purpose. Largely because the design of this facility was more of a suburban design, baseball didn't deliver on that promise. And our hope and expectation is that this proposal will finally help deliver on those economic benefits by creating a new economic engine on the western portion of downtown. … and creating a ballpark that activates the downtown and provides energy to the downtown, unlike Tropicana Field, which currently just serves to bring people into the ballpark, allows them to watch a game and then leave to go back to their homes.
Give me some of the — well, there's not even enough numbers to do math — but give me some of the bare bones of the finances.
Silverman: We have an advanced concept design on a ballpark and a fairly detailed cost estimate that gives us comfort that it's somewhere in the range of $450 million. In terms of funding, we think as a franchise … that we can afford to put in about $150 million. That leaves a gap of roughly, we'll call it $250-300 million. … that needs to be made up from the value created by the Tropicana Field site. And that value, as we define it, is a combination of the value of the land itself and then the value of the taxes that are generated for the city and the county by virtue of the development taking place. …
You know, we're not going to a put a project forward knowing we have to go through a public referendum that's going to require people to [pay] out of pocket for it, either in terms of having to pay additional taxes or divert existing tax revenue. There's no mood for it; we're aware of it. So we don't really need to spin our wheels for a year going through a process if we are just going to lose the referendum …
[This] project can't involve new taxes, and it can't involve diverting existing taxes away from something other than baseball.
Kalt: There's a couple of things that we know are going to be created here that are significant pockets of funds. … For example … six or seven hundred million dollars of construction of the site is going to create an enormous pool of school tax revenue that we can't bond against for the ballpark. … There's sales tax revenue that is going to be recaptured or captured depending on who's purchasing.
One thing we've been careful about with this is we haven't come out and said we should build this thing because the ballpark itself is going to directly generate tax revenues of x, y and z. If we draw 2 million people instead of a 1.3 million, there is a major, major sales tax benefit to the city and to the county. There's going to be collateral real estate development that happens. We haven't quantified it. But those are very real numbers.
How was the timing driven by the prospect of Florida Hometown Democracy [and its stricter rules for approving land-use plan changes] being on the ballot this year?
Silverman: No, the timing is primarily driven by the opportunity that Al Lang affords us. We'll play our last spring training season there this year before we move to Port Charlotte in 2009, and Al Lang has not yet been committed for a future use. This is the time for us to propose this as the next use for Al Lang. It's been a baseball site for the better part of the century, and we're proposing to extend that for the next 30 years or so.
In terms of location, why not Toytown? Why not Gateway? Why not closer to Tampa?
Kalt: If we built at Toytown, we would have real financial issues in terms of that site; it's more expensive to build on that site. … You put [a new ballpark] in a place like Toytown and you're replicating what happened at the Trop.
[The waterfront location is] certainly good for downtown, and in the long run it's good for us, because it gives people reason to come to the downtown and come to the ballpark beyond what's happening on the field. It creates a sense of place.
In the ballparks that have been successful over the past 10 to 15 years, that's the main reason that they've been successful. The idea that someone who lives in the suburbs in Denver or Pittsburgh or Cleveland now has a reason to say, "Hey, let's go downtown because of all the stuff that is going on around the ballpark."
Silverman: It also gets to the highest and best use of land. We don't think that Tropicana Field's best use is baseball, especially considering how much of it is barren parking lots.
We are confident that Al Lang has great baseball significance and is a place where we can create that sense of place and a facility that we can all take pride in.
Kalt: We're aware that we didn't choose the path of least resistance. We consciously chose the Al Lang site knowing we will need a public referendum to build there. We see the advantages to the city and the county to be so great that it's worth the extra process involved. And frankly, at the end of the day, if we go through the referendum and we win the referendum, which we expect to do after the facts get put out, it's a huge benefit for us, because we get to then basically close the book on what's been 20 years of debate about whether Tropicana Field should have been built, how it was built, what have you, and we can basically, truly as a franchise start afresh, on the right foot with the community in the right way. That's the reason why we're proposing it.
This article appears in Jan 16-22, 2008.