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Miami Herald
06-06-2025
- Business
- Miami Herald
The first step in keeping the Rays in Tampa Bay is a Trop extension
ST. PETERSBURG - All these years later, the Rays' use agreement at Tropicana Field is 90% completed, and still there is no hint of a long-term stadium solution in sight for Tampa Bay. There may, however, be a temporary solution. A tourniquet, if you will. The Rays and St. Petersburg officials need to come together to discuss a short-term extension of the Trop lease. This would look nothing like the 10-year extension the team proposed earlier this year with the team, the city and Pinellas County each contributing up to $250 million to refurbish the aging stadium. Instead, this would more closely resemble the team's one-year agreement at Steinbrenner Field this season. For however many years they decide on - it could be two seasons, it could be five - the Rays would pay rent, the city would be responsible for the stadium's upkeep, and the redevelopment of the property could begin on the eastern-most side of the vast parking area with the city reaping all of those profits under a new rights agreement. What's the rationale for the plan? It either buys time or solves problems for everyone involved. For the city? It lessens expenses incurred for the city's contractual obligation to fix the Trop roof and bring the stadium back up to a major league-ready status after Hurricane Milton. Instead of losing tens of millions of dollars just to get the ballpark prepped for the next three seasons until the use agreement runs out, the city could recoup millions in rent payments while getting several more years of baseball traffic in downtown. For the Rays? It gives them a longer runway to decide the team's future. Whether that means finding a new stadium deal in Tampa Bay or even planning a possible relocation elsewhere, there is no scenario where they would have a new stadium built by the time the use agreement ends. Without a Trop extension, the Rays would undoubtedly be looking at a temporary stadium situation in 2029, much like the Athletics today. For aspiring ownership groups? Same answer as above. Even if Stuart Sternberg sold to Tampa Bay buyers in the coming months - and nothing appears imminent - it could take years to secure land and funding for a new stadium, not to mention construction, and there would be a scramble for a temporary home. For Major League Baseball? It might theoretically satisfy commissioner Rob Manfred's request that Sternberg establish a "go forward" plan. It would likely delay MLB's hopes of a two-team expansion, but it could increase the odds that the Rays remain in Tampa Bay, which is Manfred's stated preference. It's not a perfect solution. It doesn't help the team's revenue problems. It won't magically fix the decades-long pursuit of a new stadium. And the Rays will likely balk at the idea of paying anything more than nominal rent - they're supposedly paying the Yankees $10 million for the use of Steinbrenner Field but are banking on getting reimbursed through a business interruption insurance policy - so there are kinks that will need to be worked out. But it could, in the long run, turn out to be profitable for the team. With everyone in baseball anticipating a work stoppage when the current collective bargaining agreement runs out before the 2027 season, it could have an effect on how much would-be owners are willing to pay for a franchise. By adding years to the lease, the Rays could see an increase in the team's value once a new labor agreement is reached. It also allows for tensions between the Rays and local politicians to dissipate. Time may not heal every wound, but future elections could change the makeup at city hall and in county offices. And while St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch has shot down the idea of negotiating with Sternberg about a new stadium in St. Pete, a short lease extension would ensure the Rays remain in the city beyond a second Welch term, should he win reelection next year. Aspiring ownership groups in Tampa Bay may not like the idea of taking the pressure off Sternberg to sell right away, but there are no indications that a quick sale is on the way. And without an extension, the Rays could be negotiating with other cities/buyers for a potential move in less than 40 months. Manfred's devotion to Tampa Bay will undoubtedly wane quickly if the city locks the Rays out of Tropicana Field and there is no full-sized stadium available here in 2029. Yes, a short-term extension is only a temporary fix. But, one way or another, it's necessary for Tampa Bay to keep baseball. Whether Sternberg sells the team to local buyers tomorrow or still owns it in 2029, a lease extension at the Trop is still essential. John Romano can be reached at jromano@ Follow @romano_tbtimes. • • • Sign up for our Sports Today newsletter to get daily updates on the Bucs, Rays, Lightning and college football across Florida. Every weekday, tune into our Sports Day Tampa Bay podcast to hear reporter Rick Stroud break down the biggest stories in Tampa Bay sports. Never miss out on the latest with your favorite Tampa Bay sports teams. Follow our coverage on X and Facebook. Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
With stadium deal dead, Rays free to find another home after 2028
The celebrated agreement to build a $1.3 billion stadium for the Tampa Bay Rays near downtown St. Petersburg expired at midnight. Alizza Punzalan-Randle, St. Petersburg's managing director of communications and community engagement, confirmed the Rays did not submit any last-minute documentation to move forward with the stadium or the Historic Gas Plant District redevelopment project by the end-of-Monday deadline. That means the sweeping deal promising $6.5 billion of new development is dead just eight months after it was approved and heralded by the St. Petersburg City Council and the Pinellas County Commission. Rays owner Stuart Sternberg announced March 13 that the team would not move forward with the project. Under terms of its agreement with the city, the Rays had to show that they had $700 million in hand for the stadium and also prove that they had done enough work, such as getting permits, to unlock public funding for the project. The deal remained in effect until either the Rays sent a termination letter or the March 31 deadline passed. A spokesperson for the Rays declined to comment. St. Petersburg spokesperson Samantha Bequer said in a statement that with the Rays not meeting those conditions, 'the new stadium agreements automatically terminate.' She said the city is focused on moving forward with Tropicana Field repairs according to the original 1995 agreement still in place between St. Petersburg and the Rays, which puts it on the city to 'diligently pursue' repairs after Hurricane Milton shredded the Trop's roof. The council will vote Thursday on spending $22.7 million to replace the dome covering. The council approved a dozen contracts outlining the stadium and Gas Plant terms in July. Now the accompanying sale of 65 acres of public land to the Rays and development partner Hines in exchange for a $50 million community benefits package is no longer in effect. That included jobs, opportunities for minority-owned businesses and $10 million for a new home for the Woodson African American History Museum of Florida. The team non-relocation agreement that would lock the Rays in St. Petersburg for another 30 years also is canceled. The Rays are now free to negotiate with other cities in Tampa Bay or elsewhere to play home games after 2028, or whenever the current agreement expires. The original agreement between St. Petersburg and the Rays was set to expire in 2027, but is extended one year for every year Tropicana Field can't be used. The Rays are playing this season at Steinbrenner Field in Tampa and are expected to be back in the Trop next year through the 2028 season. A change to that agreement that now says the Rays are not due any profits from redevelopment of Trop land is still in effect. St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch said his vision of rebuilding the Historic Gas Plant District will continue with or without the Rays. That includes erecting condos, affordable housing, entertainment and office space on land that was home to a segregated Black community before it became the Trop. He said his team is still working on those plans, which may not need to be restarted entirely. The city can't break ground on every parcel, as it must provide a stadium and parking to the Rays through the 2028 season. The downtown community redevelopment area, known as the Intown CRA, also is staying in place. The council voted to extend it 10 years through 2042. In a redevelopment area, increased tax dollars generated by new construction or rising values are reinvested there. Council member Richie Floyd asked on Thursday for a discussion to sunset the redevelopment area so property taxes raised there could instead go toward the city's general fund, which pays for police, fire rescue and parks. The special taxing districts are supposed to direct attention to areas deemed to be blighted, and Floyd argued that that is no longer the case for downtown. Other council members instead said they wanted to hold off discussing getting rid of the financial tool, as the Rays' stadium deal was not expired at that time. They said the city still has other projects that get money through the taxing district that could be used for Welch's new vision for the Gas Plant.
Forbes
24-03-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Rays May Cross Tampa Bay Three Times In Five Years
Tampa Bay Rays principal owner Stuart Sternberg and manager Kevin Cash watch as pitchers and ... More catchers hold their first Spring Training workout in Port Charlotte, Florida, on February 12, 2025, at Charlotte Sports Park. (Photo by Thomas O'Neill/NurPhoto via Getty Images) What timing. Less than a week before Opening Day at Steinbrenner Field the 'CBS News Sunday Morning' show ran a feature on St. Petersburg's Dali Museum. It was at the downtown waterfront location in June 2019 that Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg and others high up on the club's masthead hosted a press conference that was more community theater as a split-season plan with St. Pete and Montreal was touted. How surreal it was. It was only one year earlier, in July 2018, when the Rays released details of a $900 million stadium in the Ybor City district close to downtown Tampa. Both serve as examples of the tremendous amount of time, energy and money spent on everything from architectural renderings to press conferences and assorted dog and pony shows the past several years. The 'Here to Stay' campaign revealed in September 2023 when Sternberg, St. Pete mayor Ken Welch and assorted team, city and county officials stumbled over themselves to praise one another after agreeing to a $1.3 billion ballpark as part of the larger redevelopment of the Gas Plant District within which Tropicana Field was built in the mid-1980s? Just another chapter in a four-decade-old mess. (Speaking of stumbling, Welch approved a $250,000 bonus pool for 17 city hall staffers who helped bring the stadium deal together. The bonuses, paid in summer 2024, were rescinded when they were found to be in conflict with state law. The human resources director was suspended without pay for five days as a result of the incompetence.) With the curtain about to rise on the 2025 season, where has it all led? At least for the team, and with a huge assist from Mother Nature, it has led to Tampa and 11,000-seat Steinbrenner Field. The Rays' lease at damaged Tropicana Field was extended one year through 2028 when it became clear they would not occupy the venue this season. The team has since proposed a stadium renovation with a 10-year lease extension through 2038. With respect to the current lease agreement with the city of St. Petersburg, the Rays could return to a repaired Trop in time for 2026 home opener, or at some point next season if indeed repairs are completed. (Venue repairs initially had a price tag of $55 million, or half of what it cost to build Camden Yards in Baltimore in the early 1990s.) Couple the above with the Rays announcing earlier this month that they will not move forward on the aforementioned $1.3 billion stadium as part of a $6.5 billion redevelopment of the 86-acre Tropicana Field site, it is entirely possible they could cross the bay a third time ahead of the 2029 season to play at a new stadium in Tampa. True, including the Ybor City proposal, Tampa has previously been brought up in relocation discussions. That's nothing new. Often, it has been done out of mere convenience due to proximity than any potential marriage between city and team. That said, everything would seem to be on the table at this rate, including Orlando where a group has secured $1 billion in funding. Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg, left, talks to St. Petersburg mayor Ken Welch as the baseball ... More team announced plans for a new stadium during a news conference Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2023, in St. Petersburg, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara) Of course, there is no telling the number of twists and turns this hideous soap opera will take even by, say, the middle of this summer let alone next year and beyond. If it is up to Welch, moving ahead with the grand plan, or perhaps any plan with the Sternberg-owned Rays, is no longer an option. 'I have no interest in working with this ownership group,' said the mayor, who is up for reelection in 2026. 'That bridge has been burned.' The Rays maintain they want to remain in the region, a desire that Major League Baseball has expressed on multiple occasions. 'This doesn't change our devotion to the Tampa Bay area and our desire to figure something out,' team president Matt Silverman said on Tampa Bay's sports radio, WDAE. 'We are going to build a stadium in Tampa Bay and we are going to figure this out.' Given recent developments, or lack thereof, one might wonder if Hurricane Milton tore apart more than the Trop's roof. One has to wonder if the club turned an act of Mother Nature into a convenient escape hatch. 'It was a stretch to make this work, but we felt like we had the wind at our back and felt like we had great partnerships with the city and county,' said Silverman, in an awkward choice of words given the storm's devastation. 'We all worked so hard on this project and it's tough to walk away. But for this thing to work and for us to have the conviction in it, we have to believe it is going to lead us to be able to have great attendance and the necessary resources to increase our payroll. As we looked at it today, we didn't have the belief it would do those things and accomplish those goals for our organization and put us in the right position for the next 30 years.' It all flies in the face of the aforementioned 'Here to Stay" giddiness as well as last summer when the Pinellas County board of commissioners approved $313 million toward construction. So the uncertainty regarding a team sporting the fifth best winning percentage in MLB the past decade continues.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
What killed the Rays stadium deal? Here were the biggest risks for the team
For the past several months, The Tampa Bay Rays' future in St. Petersburg has been a near-constant topic of discussion among residents, a question almost as ubiquitous as 'How about this weather we're having?' Rays owner Stuart Sternberg provided some clarity last week when he announced the team would not move forward with building a new stadium. Government officials, business leaders and opinionated neighbors have now turned their attention toward searching for the straw that broke the camel's back. Some have theorized that the financial risks the team faced were too much to stomach. Under the deal, the Rays would no longer have the city as their landlord. That means it would have been up to the team to pay for insurance and upkeep on the stadium. The Rays also would have been responsible for cost overruns in a time of rising construction prices and labor shortages. Was it that added risk that caused the team to back out? Conversations between the Rays and local government officials began to deteriorate after hurricanes Helene and Milton caused serious damage to the roof of Tropicana Field, ultimately forcing the team to play the 2025 MLB season at Steinbrenner Field in Tampa. The future use of the Trop, at least in the short term, is still in flux. Jason Spears, vice president of Peninsular Mechanical Contractors, said this hurricane season set off a chain reaction no one could have predicted. 'It was already a thin deal to begin with and the numbers just stopped making sense,' said Spears, who also sits on the board of the Associated Builders and Contractors of Florida Gulf Coast chapter, a construction industry group that advocated to keep the Rays in St. Pete. Under the now-defunct deal, the team would have gotten almost $600 million from the City of St. Petersburg and Pinellas County to offset the cost of their $1.3 billion stadium. The city also pledged to pitch in another $142 million for infrastructure costs and sell the land to the team at a steep discount. Those terms are in line with other publicly funded stadium deals that have been cut in recent years, said Victor Matheson, a professor at the College of Holy Cross in Massachusetts who specializes in sports economics. 'It's tempting to say, 'these poor team owners had all this money at risk,' but guess what? Every major business deal is like that,' he said. As the Rays landlord, the city must now foot the nearly $55 million bill for hurricane-related repairs to the Trop. The city will also have to pay for insurance on the ballpark until it is demolished or the team's lease runs out. City officials reduced insurance coverage on the Trop just months before hurricane winds tore the roof off. Under the current policy, the most the city could receive from insurance is $22 million, and that's after paying a $22.5 million deductible. In an interview last week on the sports talk radio station WDAE, Rays President Matt Silverman said the high cost of insurance was one factor that caused the team to back out of the deal. The Rays would have been responsible insuring, maintaining and repairing their new stadium. After this year's ultra destructive hurricane season, everyone is likely to see their insurance premiums go up because providers have been bombarded with so many claims, said Dustin Applebaum, president of the Clearwater insurance brokerage Element22 Insurance Services. Insuring a new stadium might have been slightly more expensive, but only because the property would have been worth more, he said. In all likelihood, the Rays would have paid a lower rate than whatever the city is paying now. 'Just like with a home, if you have a brand-new home, your insurance is going to be much less than your neighbor who has a 1970s home,' Applebaum said. If insurance really was a chief concern for the team, building a new stadium in Florida probably doesn't make much sense, since the risk is inherently higher than other locations that don't face frequent hurricanes. Rising construction costs were also a point of contention for the Rays. The team started to falter on the deal in November after Pinellas County delayed voting on a bond needed for the deal to move forward. 'As a result, the cost of the project has increased significantly, and we cannot absorb this increase alone,' Silverman said at the time. A series of new tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, including a 25% tax on all steel and aluminum imports, have created uncertainty for builders, with the cost of materials fluctuating on a daily basis, Spears said. Finding and paying for skilled laborers could have posed an even greater challenge. The Rays would have had to compete for talent against other massive developments including the Tampa International Airport expansion, the Gas Worx mixed-use district in Tampa and the new stadium project at the University of South Florida. 'In construction in particular, everything is so time-sensitive,' Spears said. 'The longer you wait for everything, you're just burning costs.' With any major development project, there are there's always going to be unanticipated costs, Matheson said. But the fact that the Rays had access to millions in public subsidies means they were less exposed to risk than a typical developer would be. 'The only thing really stopping this deal from being done is not anything that (St. Pete) did, it's that these owners feel entitled to taxpayer money,' he said.
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Team forced to abandon $1.3 billion stadium deal after major roadblocks: 'A series of events … no one could have anticipated'
The Tampa Bay Rays threw the city of St. Petersburg, Florida, a curveball by withdrawing plans to build a new $1.3 billion stadium that had already received city council approval. In an official statement posted Thursday on X, formerly known as Twitter, Rays principal owner Stuart Sternberg announced that this "difficult decision" was prompted by "a series of events beginning in October that no one could have anticipated." "After careful deliberation, we have concluded we cannot move forward with the new ballpark and development project at this moment," he said, alluding to a delayed timeline, a ballooning budget, and the devastation following Hurricane Milton. Do you think America is in a housing crisis? Definitely Not sure No way Only in some cities Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. The blueprint for the 30,000-seat ballpark in downtown St. Petersburg began gaining traction last May, just five months before the tropical cyclone made landfall in the state and caused $34.3 billion in damages throughout the region. Hurricane Milton tore through the fabric roof of Tropicana Field, the organization's existing home stadium, rendering it unplayable for the upcoming season. While the Rays will play their home games this year at nearby Steinbrenner Field, the New York Yankees' spring training home, they hope to fix the current dome in time for the 2026 season. While Florida is no stranger to hurricanes and other extreme weather events, they played a crucial role in the club's decision. Assessments of Tropicana Field found that it would cost nearly $56 million to repair, and it would have been demolished once the new stadium was constructed. The situation also underscores another example of communities of color disproportionately shouldering the burden of environmental catastrophes and their fallouts. The new ballpark, which was expected to open in 2028, was the highlight of the city's $6.5 billion, 20-year plan to revitalize the Historic Gas Plant District, a predominantly Black neighborhood. Additional features include a Black history museum, affordable housing, entertainment venues, and equitable business opportunities to help boost the local economy. Now, the future of the team and the redevelopment project is uncertain after the front office scrapped the proposed stadium. All this points back to the increasing severity of extreme weather events caused by rising global temperatures. Though natural catastrophes will continue to wreak havoc, they've only grown more disruptive as we pollute our atmosphere with planet-warming gases. Some professional sports teams have taken action to help reduce their reliance on dirty energy sources. Franchises like the NFL's Atlanta Falcons and Arsenal of the Premier League have adopted sustainable practices and environmentally conscious policies. Meanwhile, you at home can step up to the plate by learning more about critical climate issues, ditching single-use products, and taking eco-friendly modes of transportation. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
