When the Tampa Rays said they needed to demolish Hillsborough College’s flagship campus to play baseball, students were told they’d still be able to learn on-site in a temporary facility.
Yesterday, exactly two months after the deal was approved, faculty and students were informed that there will be no temporary educational facilities on campus after all.
The change is prompting calls for transparency, and for a binding contract to give staff and students clear, reliable expectations moving forward.
Tuesday’s announcement comes just days before the Rays’ proposed community benefits agreement comes before Tampa City Council on Thursday. Michael Bishop at the Tampa Monitor opined that the deal relies too much on the Rays voluntarily keeping their promises.
HC President Ken Atwater held an informational meeting Tuesday at the Dale Mabry campus. Creative Loafing Tampa Bay was removed from the meeting but obtained a recording.
The meeting consisted of a brief overview of future plans followed by an audience Q&A. Atwater’s words were often met with boos or laughter from the hundreds of students, staff and faculty members gathered in the auditorium.
Outside the meeting, CL overheard a few prospective students on a tour wondering how their plans would change if this campus was about to be demolished.
Atwater will present the plan to the public today at a scheduled Board of Trustees meeting on HC’s Brandon campus at 10451 Nancy Watkins Dr.. The board has a workshop beginning at 3 p.m., and the meeting begins at 4 p.m.
Hillsborough College’s new temporary plan for its Dale Mabry campus
HC’s Dale Mabry location is the first and largest of the college’s five campuses. It serves as the primary campus for over 22,000 students—more than the average number of attendees at Rays games.
Last February, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s cabinet approved gifting 22 acres near the campus to HC—valued at $21.5 million-$26 million—to help facilitate a stadium deal. Critics called the move a flip-flop for a governor who vetoed past attempts to help the Rays with land in Pasco County.
DeSantis’ Super PAC has also received hundreds of thousands of dollars from entities connected to Rays co-owner Patrick Zalupski, who DeSantis appointed to the University of Florida Board of Trustees in 2023.
Plans to tear the HC Dale Mabry campus down to build a Rays stadium were met with quick criticism from educators working there.
The Rays quelled these fears with promises of temporary teaching accommodations on-site as construction began on a new Dale Mabry campus.
Dubbed “The Nest,” the temporary campus would consist of dozens of mobile classrooms stationed on the Dale Mabry campus away from the construction site until the new site is completed.
The college’s current estimates put that completion date in 2030.
“These are really nice classrooms, and we got to get going with plumbing and electrical and civil engineering to get the college in a great place so when students arrive in January for the spring semester that they’re ready to go,” Rays CEO Ken Babby told WDAE radio of The Nest in August.
Atwater announced at yesterday’s assembly that there will still be mobile pods on campus, but they won’t be hosting any classes, just student services.
For classes, students will need to leave the old site for one of two nearby temporary campuses—medical classes at the USF Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation in downtown Tampa (aka CAMLS), and most other classes at a nearby office park called Tampa Bay Park.
HC’s health sciences building and adjacent labs will not be demolished and will still house some classes.
Since there won’t be enough parking for all students at those sites, many will need to park at the Dale Mabry campus and take a shuttle.
When Atwater announced the shuttle service, he was roundly met with unanimous booing.
Atwater said this new plan was better, because it places students in permanent structures rather than mobile classrooms. He cited the adjacent construction site and weather concerns.
“You know it rains here in Tampa, and how do we manage the weather, having temporary modulars to where you have to go in and outside a building to go to different areas?” Atwater asked the audience.
But many students will have classes spread across multiple campuses, which could result in even more disruptions from inclement weather, one student noted.
HC’s current goal is to begin the transition in January 2027, and be fully settled in its temporary, disparate campuses by the end of spring break.
Throughout the meeting, Atwater stressed that these plans were just drafts, with many of the details not yet fleshed out. That didn’t soothe the crowd.
At the Oct. 27 meeting, Hillsborough College students and staff wanted a concrete plan
At yesterday’s meeting, students and staff were given the opportunity to ask Atwater questions about the project and voice concerns.
The most common complaints were about a lack of definite funding for the new permanent building, an anticipated decline in quality of services, and the administration’s lack of communication with the faculty and students.
HC’s head of security sat by the microphone as students were permitted to approach.
Student government member Justin Yearwood spoke first, saying that proximity to other buildings is one of the campus’s greatest strengths. Atwater interrupted to say that the campus will only be divided until the new campus is constructed, which could be as early as 2030.
Another student noted that it’s a 40-minute round-trip drive between two of the temporary campuses. Atwater again interrupted to say that only a few programs were affected by that drive, and that shuttles would operate “very frequently.”
A student named Sabrina asked what would happen to the many clubs located on the campus. “They will be able to operate out of the mess that we have,” Atwater replied.
Another student asked if tuition would be reduced, a question met with raucous applause from the audience.
Atwater said no. He said services wouldn’t be reduced, but that there would be “inconveniences.” He later said that tuition hasn’t gone up at HC in 14 years. For the last seven years, in-state tuition has been frozen statewide.
Another student said that when their middle school was displaced for construction, standardized testing scores dropped by 25%, on average.
Several students asked how anyone on campus benefitted from this deal, since the Rays were only paying for the temporary facilities and not the new campus.
Atwater noted that the sports internship program would expand tenfold. A student noted that there are only two internships today, so that would mean 20 internships in the future for over 20,000 students.
Atwater said the biggest benefit is the new campus. He said the state wouldn’t have agreed to replace the 58-year-old campus facilities if not for the agreement with the Rays.
But the handoff of land to the Rays wasn’t without controversy. HC’s board—all of whom were appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis—approved a 99-year lease with the Rays that will commence when construction begins. Students and faculty said they didn’t have any significant role in the decision, and many students weren’t even aware that they’d be displaced.
Funding for Hillsborough College’s new campus won’t be guaranteed before old campus is demolished
English professor Stephanie Lance voiced her concerns.
“This plan effectively—and again, this is my opinion—dismantles the campus as an instructional location and disperses our students, faculty, and academic programs across three separate sites,” Lance said at the meeting.
She also said that there’s no guarantee that the college will get funding for the construction of the new permanent facility.
The Rays aren’t paying for the new building; it’s up to the state to finance that. But the state has only set aside $50 million for construction. Final costs could exceed $200 million.
Atwater said he can be trusted to successfully lobby the state for the remainder of the funding.
He also said it took the college nearly a decade to raise $22 million for the Allied Health Building that opened in 2019.
“Do you think I would lead the college down a path where we don’t have the funding in order to complete this?” Atwater told Lance. “That would be almost insanity, and that’s not what we do.”
Several audience members interjected in agreement when Atwater said it would be “insanity” to make this change when funding wasn’t guaranteed.
Atwater continued, saying the board and administration are “secure” that they will get the remainder of the funding.
“But feelings are different than contractual agreements,” Lance said.
“OK, I just, I guess the thing you would say is that I’ve got as much contractual agreement from the state that I think is feasible to do,” Atwater replied.
Ex-cop and Hillsborough College’s head of campus security escorted reporter from the Oct. 27 meeting
This reporter showed up, took a seat, and waited until the meeting began, only to be personally escorted from the auditorium by the college’s top campus security official: Tampa Police Department’s former deputy chief, Michael Hutner.
The meeting was advertised on the campus’ website as the “Dale Mabry Campus Forum” and was open to the campus’ tens of thousands of students and all campus faculty and staff. Hundreds of people were in attendance, including some members of the public who made it in undetected.
Media was not allowed in, Hutner said, as it was an “internal meeting.”
HC representative Kaley Infield told CL the meeting was not open to the media, as it was an opportunity for students and faculty to have questions answered by the administration.
Infield pointed to today’s scheduled public Board of Trustees meeting on the Brandon campus. A student would have to leave campus during the school day and drive about a half-hour to attend.
When asked if CL would have an opportunity to hear the student questions posed at the Dale Mabry campus meeting, Infield said the students were welcome to attend the Wednesday meeting and repeat their comments.
Comms director Angela Eveillard later said that she was unaware that CL was interested in covering the event, and said HC is “happy to accommodate coverage requests.” But when asked if CL would be permitted to cover future conversations about the campus relocation, Eveillard clarified that only public meetings are open to the press.
“An internal meeting was a direct request within our College community,” she said in an email. “Individuals wanted an opportunity to attend a forum where they could participate without being recorded or quoted.”
Students and faculty CL spoke with said they expected the media to be present at the meeting. Only a small portion of HC’s student body showed up.
Faculty members at Hillsborough College aren’t optimistic about the temporary campus or the new campus
After the meeting, CL joined a few dozen faculty members as they commiserated at a nearby sports bar.
Many complained about the lack of communication from administration. One remarked that she’d only received four emails total about the campus being demolished.
Several faculty members worried that the campus wouldn’t open on time, and that enrollment would decline drastically in the meantime. They also worried that a decline in enrollment could justify the state cutting the size of the planned replacement campus.
One remarked that this new “Nest” was more reminiscent of the notoriously-sparse “stupid” nests constructed by pigeons.
Rebecca Todd is a tenured anthropology professor of 15 years with Hillsborough College who works on the Dale Mabry Campus; she spoke with CL after the meeting about her concerns.
Last year, Rays CEO Ken Babby presented plans at a college-wide internal meeting. Todd said that the deal was pitched as something great for students, and that at the time, plans were “palatable.”
Since then, Todd said, the situation has changed. “We feel like promises were made, and those promises have been broken,” she told CL. Already, she said, the timeline for the new building has been pushed back by a year-and-a-half.
“It’s hard to trust anything that’s not in writing when the promises keep changing,” she added.
Last month outside Tampa Theatre, CL asked Babby and Rays co-owner Patrick Zalupski if they could speak to community members who’re concerned that the Rays have essentially squeezed a handshake deal out of elected officials. They declined to comment on the record and have not yet responded to a new request for comment.
Todd said communication was a flop, and that most faculty and students are learning more from local media than they are from the college itself.
Students, she said, have received only two messages from the college about the campus relocation: one showing AI-generated visual renderings that have already been scrapped, and the invite to this town hall meeting.
Many of the students Todd has spoken to didn’t even know the campus was being demolished.
Todd said that in her 15 years, she had never seen this much security at a campus event before. All entrances to the auditorium but one were locked, and the only open entrance was guarded by several security personnel.
She was alarmed that Hutner, an ex-cop and the director of campus security, was personally escorting students away from the microphone to their seats.
Todd and other faculty members told CL that Hutner often placed a hand on the students as he escorted them. He even patted this reporter on the shoulder.
Ultimately, Todd said she feels that students are being treated as “collateral damage” in the deal for a new stadium. Most current students will never see the new campus, as HC generally offers two-year programs.
“Education is a public trust, and professional sports are a business,” Todd said. “The economic livelihood of my students being able to provide for their families in the future should be more important than watching any sports game.”
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This article appears in Oct. 22 – 28, 2026.
