The conventional wisdom in St. Petersburg is that there won’t be any movement regarding the status of the Tampa Bay Rays stadium situation until after the November 3 election.
That’s because the last time the current City Council voted on a deal that would have allowed the team to explore stadium sites in Hillsborough County and guaranteed millions of dollars in payments if the Rays opt to leave, the members deadlocked 4-4, effectively quashing any such talks until the end of the baseball season.
The season ends this Sunday, as the Rays will fall short for a second consecutive year from making the playoffs. City Council Chair Charlie Gerdes says now is the time for Council to weigh in on the issue.
“I’m going to attempt one more time to bring a proposal forward that will be something a little bit different than the MOU was, and see if I can persuade anybody to change their mind,” he said on Tuesday.
The MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) was initially produced by Mayor Rick Kriseman late last year. It called for allowing Rays management to explore stadium sites in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties, but was defeated on a 5-3 vote, in part because Rays officials said they weren’t prepared to reopen the matter of who would reap the financial benefits from redeveloping Tropicana Field. The measure was later amended and brought back before board members in May, this time clarifying that the city would retain all development rights to the Trop if the team broke its lease before its scheduled expiration in 2027.
Council member Amy Foster altered her vote, agreeing to the terms to allow the Rays to roam. But that left the board divided at 4-4, maintaining the status quo.
Three of the board’s eight members’ seats are up for election this November (a fourth, Ed Montanari, has already won by not garnering an opponent in District 3). The way the math works, the assumption is that it could be decided by who wins the District 7 contest between Lisa Wheeler-Brown and Will Newton. Wheeler-Brown supports the Kriseman plan to allow the Rays to be able to talk to Hillsborough County, Newton does not.
The other two incumbents on the ballot — Charlie Gerdes in District 1 and Steve Kornell in District 5 — have been expected all year to win re-election, though intriguingly, the Tampa Bay Times on Wednesday endorsed Phillip Garrett over Kornell. The editorial said Garrett’s “willingness to break the stadium stalemate and Kornell’s failure to embrace the opportunity is the deciding factor in this race.”
Regardless of how the November vote turns out, that new council wouldn’t be in place until January, which is too long for Gerdes to contemplate.
“I didn’t want to do anything until the season was over,” he recounted about his thought process. But with the team mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, he’s ready to call the board together on a new vote, though he says he hasn’t had the time he’d like to formulate it just yet. However, he intends to present a proposal by late October or early November “that I’m going to ask my colleagues to consider.”
The issue came to the fore after the Atlanta Braves announced last week that they were interested in moving their spring training facilities from Lake Buena Vista to the Toytown area of St. Petersburg.
The Rays finish their regular season on Sunday afternoon. With five home dates to go, the team is poised to once again end the year with the worst home attendance in Major League Baseball.
