St. Pete City Council calls Rays bluff, rushes approval of their new stadium bonds

The Rays might still leave St. Pete, but it won’t be the City’s fault.

After a last-minute addition to the agenda for the St. Petersburg City Council meeting today, the Council approved in a 4-3 vote taking on the necessary debt to cover their $287.5 million share of the promised ~$600 million in public financing for the new Rays stadium.

This doesn’t mean that the deal isn’t dying. Instead it puts the responsibility for killing the new stadium on either the County, which has its own bond approval meeting scheduled for Dec 17, or the Rays themselves, who have repeatedly said they can no longer afford building a new baseball stadium, but have thus far refused to officially terminate the overall agreement.

The Rays reasoning for their delay is clear: they want to retain the profits from any redevelopment of land that occurs at the 86-acre Tropicana Field site. But after insisting they cannot afford the new stadium they agreed to pay for in July, it’s still unclear if the Rays will ever play baseball in Pinellas County ever again. They want to have their cake and eat it too.

The City Council was not previously expected to take up the bond issue again until January 9 — after the County had discussed bond issuance for a third time later this month — but that vote would have been after a new look City Council took office, and that would have presumably added a fourth “no” vote, deadlocking the Council 4-4. By voting today, Mayor Ken Welch was able to take advantage of an existing vacancy on the Council to get a “yes” vote in favor of public funding for a new Rays stadium.

It’s not entirely clear whether, in voting “yes”, the Council has done the Rays any favors. To be sure, the four members who voted yes have been consistent stadium supporters, and some, like Gina Driscoll, continued to talk about the importance of the Rays to the community during todays meeting. But Brandi Gabbard, who voted in favor of the bonds, also said a “yes” vote was a way to “call the Rays bluff,” suggesting a recognition that it was to the City’s advantage to have the Rays be the party that pulls the plug on the agreement.

Stadium opponent Lisett Hanewicz seemed miffed that the Rays didn’t bother to show up to the meeting, but St. Pete’s City Administrator Rob Gerdes said that, in fact, he had discouraged them from attending. This was perhaps a wise move, as Rays co-Presidents Brian Auld and Matt Silverman’s attendance and testimony at the last meeting managed to anger the Councilmembers so much that they unanimously rescinded their previous resolution to repair Tropicana Field.

Richie Floyd remained opposed to the stadium redevelopment on the grounds that it was wrong in principle to give large amounts of public money to large corporations, and argued that a greater community impact could be achieved without funding the stadium. He also lodged a complaint against the city’s financing structure, that uses tax proceeds from the Intown Community Redevelopment Area (CRA) to back the bonds, arguing that revenues from the redevelopment should benefit the entire city.

Now all eyes will be on the Pinellas County Commission, which has already seated its newly elected officials, to see if they will also put the onus on the Rays to legally end the new stadium agreement, as they’ve declared is inevitable due to a lack of financial viability.