I have a buddy who has been a baseball nut for decades, who knows the sport inside and out, a season ticket holder, a true fan. He's also a successful business owner and civic leader. Two weeks ago, he sent me 12 reasons why the Rays won't get a new stadium.
Twelve, count 'em, 12. He didn't even stop at 10. Surely it couldn't be that bad? The Tampa Bay Rays' new ballpark and vision for Downtown West (the new name for the Tropicana Field site if it is torn down) is ambitious and surprising and smart and visionary. It gives us a chance to revisit St. Pete's biggest mistake — building a subpar indoor baseball stadium on spec, without a team to play in it, without the support of MLB, to the indignation of residents and beach businesses that saw tourist taxes sapped away to pay for it.
Finally: a remedy for one of St. Pete's biggest municipal blunders.
But, unfortunately, my buddy may be right.
It's a shame. It appears we have a decent ownership for a change, far from the PR and marketing nightmare that was Vince Naimoli's reign of terror. Majority owner Stuart Sternberg seems genuinely committed to winning (even if he hasn't dropped mad cash on the Rays' payroll and they remain one of the worst teams in baseball). And Rays officials lay out cogent arguments in favor of the new project.
You can read those arguments in detail in this week's edition of "The Influencers," facing page. But I'm taking a cue from my friend. I've liberally adapted some of his reasons, disproved others that I dropped and added some new ones to come up with my own list of 12 reasons why this shouldn't — and won't — happen.
1. The Trop has been a disaster, but this is throwing good money after bad. Can you imagine what could have been done with the more than $150 million in public money that has already gone into building the Trop if that wad had been spent directly to create jobs or improve education or lure creative industries to the city? Where the city would be two decades later? Sure, that's Monday morning quarterbacking, but it gives us a direction to evaluate whether those tax dollars should be shifted around, extended for more years or otherwise used to build a new ballpark.
Rays officials don't dispute the desultory past performance of the Trop as an economic development engine, but they counter that their plan is the only possible way to fulfill baseball's promise of redevelopment in St. Petersburg and pump $1 billion of new construction into the downtown. The team promises no new taxes for the project; they only want to tap into taxes that already go to support baseball — almost. They do hope to take a share of those taxes collected from downtown growth, mostly new condos, in what is called the tax-increment financing district.
But the fact remains that $300 million of public money would go into a new ballpark, give or take a few dozen million. They may be taxes already aimed at the Trop or that can only be spent on a sports facility, but they are public dollars nonetheless. In some cases, such as the hotel bed tax that pays $5 million a year for the Trop, existing taxes could/would be extended decades beyond their current expiration dates to pay for part of the new ballpark.
The Rays believe that swapping the stadium for a waterfront ballpark will "release" property taxes at the Trop site, which now go uncollected because it is a publicly owned facility. Handing it over to a developer to build an urban village of homes, shops, restaurants, parks and entertainment venues would put the Trop's 86 acres back on tax rolls. But since the stadium site is within the tax-increment financing district, those new taxes (except for those designated for public schools) would have to be spent downtown and likely would be committed to paying for the new ballpark. Taxpayers in the rest of the city wouldn't directly benefit by seeing lower taxes or more government services.
2. There are legal and political problems with the tax-increment financing district anyway. TIF districts, as they are known, are in a state of limbo. A Florida Supreme Court ruling last year prevents cities and counties from spending those TIF dollars — including borrowing bond money against their future revenues, a popular financing method for large projects such as the one the Rays envision — without a voter referendum. The ruling said, "the Constitution requires that the people who are to pay the bill should be given an opportunity to approve the debt before it is incurred." Politically, the current downtown St. Petersburg TIF has been the subject of past political tussles between county officials (who must approve it) and the city over how the money is spent. Reallocating TIF dollars for a new Rays ballpark would take a good bit of luck at the courthouse, commission chambers and, possibly, the ballot box.
3. The plan hinges on finding out what the Trop site is worth, which the city of St. Petersburg is doing, but the city doesn't even own the site — yet. While the city of St. Petersburg retains the rights to the building and land, technically it is Pinellas County that owns the site. Years ago, the county bought the Trop for $10 to save St. Pete from paying a huge property tax bill. As part of the deal, the city automatically gets ownership of the Trop and its land once its lease with the Rays has expired or is terminated. So the city can legally proceed with a Request For Proposal (RFP) and do whatever it likes with the Trop. But morally, don't they owe something to the taxpayers of Pinellas County who, for the past 21 years, paid millions in tourist taxes as their stake in the building? The county has chipped in $75.5 million to date and is obligated to pay another $42 million through 2015, when its share of the Trop's mortgage would be paid off. There is no provision for Pinellas County to be repaid for that $118 million investment if St. Pete were to sell the Trop site to a redeveloper.
The second problem with the RFP process is that the ability to pay for a new ballpark hinges on getting the most money for the Trop, which means redeveloping it at an intensity that city residents may not want, or need, or be able to afford when they go shopping for its homes or in its retail establishments.
4. There's not enough room at Al Lang Stadium to build a major league ballpark. Even the Rays admit there isn't. That's why their plan calls for filling .6 of an acre of Tampa Bay to push Bayshore Drive out over the water — which is an estuary and features sea grasses vital to fish spawning — and make just barely enough space for the ballpark. MLB officials have told the St. Petersburg Times the site would be the smallest ever used in the league. Getting the various environmental and government approvals for such a filling project would take years under normal circumstances; with angry environmentalists and civic activists potentially blocking the whole project, it would prove nearly impossible.
5. There's lots of apprehension about summertime heat in an open-air ballpark. The innovative ballpark design by HOK architects envisions a giant sail as a retractable roof, cutting 10 degrees or so of the heat felt by game attendees. The Rays make the case that the vast majority of their games will be at night, when Florida summers are cooler. The park won't be air-conditioning cool, but it will be more comfortable than some open-air stadiums already operating. (If you've ever seen a game in the blast furnace that is St. Louis' Busch Stadium in the summer, you would agree.) But there is no doubt that some fans — and worse, voters — will have a mental block about the heat that makes the new design unpopular or unworkable.
6. Voters will never go for it. The Rays likely will be able to make a compelling case that the new ballpark and urban village projects will contribute more taxes and economic benefit than they will consume in public funds, but that doesn't mean city voters will buy it. We are in the middle of a tax revolt, which will not ease even after the Jan. 29 property tax referendum.
7. County commissioners who must approve any re-use of tourist tax or TIF dollars won't go for it. It's bad enough that the story broke before any of the commissioners knew about the project. Add to that their own re-election campaigns and the fallout from the Jim Smith property purchase scandal, and you have a board that is going to be very gun-shy about upsetting the tax revolters further. "The timing is atrocious," County Commissioner Bob Stewart told me.
8. The plan does nothing to address the historical wrong done to the African-American community when the Trop was built. OK, so let's compress history a bit and put it this way: An existing black neighborhood, the Gas Plant area, was taken away from homeowners, businesses and churches and bulldozed to build the Trop — with the promise that economic development would ripple outward into Midtown like waves in a pool from a fat kid's cannonball dive. Of course, that didn't happen. Now we see that their former neighborhood is worth possibly hundreds of millions of dollars to a developer. Who won't be paying them reparations. Or building businesses that the vast majority of poor residents in Midtown will be using.
9. The team's poor performance on the field loses them points with voters. Just about every elected official and civic leader I have spoken with bemoans the fact that the team didn't wait until it was having a better, or at least a winning season before pushing for a new home. As lifelong St. Pete resident and Pinellas County Commissioner Ken Welch put it, "Winning games on the field would go a long way toward building support for a new stadium in the future, but it would have to be financed by the team and by non-government sources." With fan support, you have the upper hand with voters. That's how the Tampa Bay Buccaneers wangled a new stadium and a sweetheart lease in Tampa — that and threatening to leave, which is something the Rays have not done, to their credit.
10. Parking on the waterfront is scattered and mostly in private hands. The Rays view this as a benefit, sending fans past local restaurants, art galleries and shops as they walk to and from games. But the price of parking, now about $10 at the Trop, surely will go up at private lots, maybe even double. And finding parking for novice game-goers will provide traffic nightmares if the team draws lots of fans, as it hopes. The city is doing a traffic study on how it will move thousands of cars off interstate exits and all the way to the waterfront. Good luck with that — unless you spend lots more money to improve downtown's mish-mash of one-way streets.
11. Speaking of traffic woes, moving the ballpark farther from the interstate won't be appealing to Tampa and north Pinellas fans, both of whom the Rays need desperately. There are good reasons why ballparks at the former landfill called Toytown and the Gateway area wouldn't work. But the truth remains that the proposed waterfront site — beyond its cool aesthetics and opportunity to plunk homers into the bay — offers non-St. Petersburgers even less reason to make the long drive.
12. Reputable economic studies are finding that large sports facilities aren't really the economic engine they were once believed to be. The studies, by well-known think tanks such as Brookings and Cato, are finding that big sports projects may actually cost the local economy, not benefit it.
What's more, as the St. Pete experience over the past two decades has proved, professional sports don't necessarily make a city hip, cool or vibrant. People, especially creative people, do that. And St. Pete's downtown already has the coolest boheme scene around here. Yes, it's small, but it is growing, mainly thanks to relatively low property values and rents and a government that, except for BayWalk, has stayed out of the business of tax-funding ginormous public-private entertainment-shopping whiz-bang projects that promise the moon but deliver little economic spin. The immediate effect of a waterfront ballpark likely would be to raise property values downtown and drive out some of the indigenous residents and businesses that give St. Pete its flavor. Can you say Ybor City?
This article appears in Jan 16-22, 2008.