Recently the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce's executive committee voted to make the financing of a new ballpark for the Tampa Bay Rays one of their top three focuses for 2011. The full board will vote on whether they want to utilize their resources on that goal next week.
But Chuck Sykes, the chairman of the chamber, stressed today that too much was being made of his published comments on the matter from last week, saying that "we're not ready to advocate for anything," when it came to the issue of a new park. "We want to get armed with facts, manage by fact, not conjecture."
Speaking at a meeting that involved members of the Hillsborough County Commission, the Tampa City Council and the Hillsborough County School District, Sykes said that the chamber "acknowledges the work that the leadership has done in St. Petersburg on that stadium, " referring to Tropicana Field, and said they honored and respected that. But he said that the issue of what to do with the Rays is something that Tampa officials need to invest more energy in. He said he currently watches the Rays nearly every night during the course of the baseball season, "but our community didn't have to underwrite a single bit of the stadium….but at the same time every time we sit in these presentations with companies that we're trying to entice them and tell them how perfect a place we are, we brag about the Rays! We brag about the Bucs! We brag about the Lightning! So it's still part of our value, yet we didn't have to pay for any of it. So it hits the Chamber's radar, because we don't want to lose them."
Sykes added that the Chamber's interest is strictly to keep the Rays in Tampa Bay, not Tampa. He said he had held lots of conversations with business officials in St. Petersburg who understand that the chamber's interest at this time is not in poaching the team from Pinellas County. "They're all cool with it," he said.
This article appears in Dec 2-8, 2010.