As one might imagine, Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn was pleased with the events of January 14, 2016.
That was when St. Petersburg's City Council voted 5-3 to support a deal that would allow the Tampa Bay Rays to explore new stadium sites in Hillsborough County, which had heretofore been verboten due to the team's agreement to play at Tropicana Field through 2027.
At a Friday press conference, Buckhorn heralded the deal as one that looks out for taxpayers while securing the baseball team's commitment to stay in the Tampa Bay area.
“Mayor Kriseman, to his credit, laid out a plan that was acceptable to his City Council," he said. "I think it is a plan that is in the best interest of the entire bay area and I have to give him an awful lot of credit for perseverance and for crafting a plan that has the best interests of the citizens of St. Petersburg, protects their investment in that stadium and at the same time recognizes the fiscal reality of the situation.”
He said that the question of whether or not they end up in Pinellas or stay in Hillsborough is less important than that of how to keep them in the metro area. But he thinks downtown Tampa would be the best option of all, of course.
“I have said, long before anybody cared about what I said, that I think Tampa would be a very, very competitive location given the history of baseball in the bay area, given the length of time that we have been sending players and managers to Major League Baseball," Buckhorn said. "We have a very long, colorful, celebrated history of baseball in the Tampa Bay area.”
While he admitted that anything he discussed at this point was for the most part speculation, he said there were a number of potentially feasible sites for a baseball stadium in Tampa. He said he preferred a site in the city's urban core so it could be accessible by multiple modes of transit, including foot traffic and the trolley.
One site that seems to be of particular interest is a plot of land that sits between Ybor City and downtown Tampa, one that's currently the site of Section 8 housing. Knocking down housing slated for low-income people would obviously be a problem; Tropicana Field was developed on what was once a predominantly African-American neighborhood, something that's served as a symbol of city officials' disregard for low-income minority communities.
If the team chooses that as the site for its new stadium (assuming the landowner is willing to sell), Buckhorn said taking care of the population currently living there would be the biggest challenge, but he's confident the situation would be remedied, likely with vouchers that would allow those residents to move to the area of their choice.
"But I think as long as you treat people with dignity, particularly the senior citizens that have been living there a long time, understanding that this is going to be disruptive for them," he said. "I think you can manage this, and many of those residents, if history is any indication, find better places to live than what they were living in, they get their kids in better school districts because they have the liberty to choose. So there's positive aspects to this, but clearly that's one thing that the owners of the property and the government would have to wrestle with.”
While he didn't want to estimate the timeframe over which the team's site evaluation and selection process would take place, he did estimate that a buildout would probably take about five years.
As for money, he said he wouldn't want the top-end price tag to exceed $600 million (a sixth of which would include a retractable roof).
Public funding of a stadium would also be a question mark, but Buckhorn said neither he nor officials at the county level are willing to raise taxes for residents (though upping taxes on tourist amenities might be an option).
He added that he doesn't want public money to pay for the entire thing as it has other stadiums in the past.
“The Rays clearly are going to have to come to the table with a significant amount of money," Buckhorn said. "I can't tell you what 'significant' is, but this will not be, I can tell you this, another entirely taxpayer-funded stadium like Raymond James Stadium.”
This article appears in Jan 14-20, 2016.