St. Petersburg City Council expected to have a public conversation Thursday about Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg's dictum that he wants a stadium to be built for his team anywhere in the Tampa Bay area except their current domain, downtown St. Pete. But Council members got a surprise: City Attorney Rick Wolfe said they need to "watch what they say" (as former Bush White House flak Ari Fleischer said after 9/11) — at least when it comes to any competition between St. Pete and Tampa about the Rays getting a new home.
Mayor Bill Foster is playing things very close to the vest, and having had only a couple of days to digest Sternberg's call for a new home at a press conference Monday (comments that Foster says were different in substance from what the two men discussed in private), we really can't say he's doing anything wrong in maintaining the city's leverage, five days into the "new normal."
But others disagree.
This article appears in Jun 24-30, 2010.