On Tuesday afternoon, the meeting between Tampa Bay Rays management and the Pinellas County Commission ended with an invitation for the Rays and Mayor Bill Foster to meet this Thursday morning.
The public offer came from Pinellas County Commission chair Ken Welch. Welch read a letter given to him by Mayor Foster, who left the meeting early — a good example that illustrates the lack of communications between the two parties.
The question that must be posed after the baseball team’s executives were invited to talk to both the Pinellas and Hillsborough County Commissions in the past week is: Has this long-running saga advanced at all in the past week? The fact remains that Rays management wants to talk to Tampa officials, and Foster steadfastly refuses to grant such permission.
One could argue that public opinion might begin leaning more toward the Rays, who have now had the forum to broadcast their particular plight for the entire region to understand, and against Foster, who comes across as the bully fighting progress.
This article appears in Jan 24-30, 2013.
