Over the course of a two-hour workshop, members of the St. Pete City Council talked about the ins and outs of wooing the Tampa Bay Rays, who are poised to prematurely leave Tropicana Field because they can.
Ultimately the council resolved that, yes, the Rays should stay in St. Pete and unanimously voted to ask the Mayor Rick Kriseman’s office to study the team’s real economic impact on the city, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
“If there is a value to a major league baseball team, then a study should clarify that,” said council member Steve Kornell.
That way, they’ll know whether all of those staff hours and meetings about spending hundreds of millions on a new stadium are, you know, not being wasted on something that really wouldn’t matter much, anyway, and would be better spent on something like, oh, I dunno, economic development on the south side or environmental restoration or the arts.
They also talked about asking the Pinellas County Convention and Visitors Bureau to keep setting aside the annual $6 million in bed tax money reserved to pay for the stadium’s debt up through 2016, money that will be freed up soon, and for which multiple entities have lined up for a slice.
The mayor was not in attendance, which makes sense, given that he wasn’t a fan of having such a workshop and said he thought the council was jumping the gun.
Members of the council had called for a workshop back in December moments before they voted to reject Kriseman’s agreement to let the Rays explore potential stadium sites within Hillsborough County, which would have fined the team millions if they left the Trop before 2027, when their obligation to play there ends.
At the time, members of the council were not happy with a provision in the team’s agreement to play within the city that allows the Rays to collect half of the money made from developing the Trop site long after the team leaves.
Some members of the council were put off by the Rays’ honchos apparent inability to think in terms other than what will benefit the Rays.
Executives from the team, as one might imagine, were not present at Thursday’s workshop.
City Council will again take up the issue at their regular meeting March 5.
This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2015.
