St. Pete leaders: Keeping Rays at revamped Trop site makes senseAll things considered, Mayor Rick Kriseman and the city council would prefer the Tampa Bay Rays stay in St. Petersburg.
Kriseman has said so repeatedly, even as he has worked out deals with the baseball team and lobbied the council to let the Rays look for new stadium locations outside the city.
The council members, strongly divided and deadlocked over whether to let the team shop around, nonetheless have agreed unanimously and by a resolution that they want to keep the Rays in the city.
Some even say letting the Rays look around is the surest way to show the team that St. Petersburg, and the Tropicana Field site, is the best and most lucrative location in Pinellas or Hillsborough counties.
“I really believe that there are more reasons why this location makes sense than there are why it doesn’t make sense,” Kriseman said. “But they have to see that for themselves.”
Trickier, however, is how to make it work — how to make a baseball stadium attractive not only to the Rays, but to baseball fans who largely have stayed away from the Trop, where the team has finished last in attendance in 10 of its 18 years, and next-to-last in three other years.“Letting the Rays look isn’t the difficult question,” city council member Darden Rice said last week. ”The difficult question is, what if they look and they want to come back and build a new stadium at Tropicana Field?”
Or, as Rice and others said, deciding whether a baseball stadium is the best use of the 85 acres of prime real estate on the edge of the city’s booming downtown.
“That’s a question we have to look at very thoroughly,” Rice said.
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The Rays stadium issue that has festered from more than five years – should they stay or should they go? — has become more immediate since this month’s city council elections. Lisa Wheeler-Brown, who favors Kriseman’s deal that would have let the Rays look outside the city, is replacing Wengay Newton, a staunch opponent.
Wheeler-Brown takes office Jan. 2, and many people expect Kriseman will propose another deal to the council soon thereafter. The mayor, who has been meeting often with Rays President Bryan Auld, said the two met again last week.
“It was very productive,” Kriseman said. “I continue to remain encouraged about how things are going. I feel good that we have a real possibility of reaching an agreement between the team and myself that, hopefully, will be acceptable to the council.”
As added incentive, Rice noted, the Pinellas County Commission is waiting impatiently for the council to act before it decides whether to set aside up to $8 million a year in county tourist tax money that would be crucial to any stadium construction in the county.
City officials long have cited that money, plus the availability of the Tropicana Field site, as distinct advantages to keeping the team. But those factors don’t address the attendance issue. So the Rays, once free from their lease restriction that bars them from looking outside the city, are expected to begin searching in Tampa and Hillsborough County, perhaps closer to the downtown corporate center and the denser population.
Andrew Zimbalist, a longtime sports economics expert and professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, said it has been clear since the 1980s that baseball stadiums work best in downtowns, where higher concentrations of city residents and office workers can get to games easily – especially on weekday nights.
“That’s why (Rays owner Stu) Sternberg wants to be in Tampa, to be downtown,” he said.
A local study conducted in 2010 the ABC Coalition, a group of Tampa Bay area business and community leaders, concluded a new stadium should be closer to population and business centers. The Pinellas Gateway area, downtown Tampa and West Tampa met that criteria, but downtown St. Petersburg did not.
Zimbalist, who has written 24 books on sports economics and has been a professional sports consultant since the 1990s, said baseball, with 81 home games each season, is not like football, where teams play one game a week, usually on a weekend, and each game is a bigger event.
“The bulk of baseball games are during the week, and you can’t expect people on weeknights to drive to the suburbs 10 to 15 miles, to deal with traffic jams and parking, and get home late at night,” he said. “That is the circumstance with the Trop. It’s very hard to get large numbers of people to come to the games.”❖ ❖ ❖
The commuting difficulties are not lost on St. Petersburg officials.
Council member Karl Nurse said it is the first issue to address, and it starts with Interstate 275, from downtown Tampa to downtown St. Petersburg.
“If you don’t improve that corridor, I don’t think you improve attendance. I think that intimidates people – on either side” of Tampa Bay, he said. “Much of it, I think, is transportation driven.”
Nurse consistently has suggested the best locations may be at either end of the bay bridges that link the two cities. He has mentioned the Derby Lane site on the Pinellas side of the Gandy Bridge as an example.
But Kriseman argues that the Tropicana site has convenient access to I-175 and I-375, which connect to I-275, once people get there. “Getting in and out from the north, and the south and the west is pretty easy,” the mayor said.
In five years, about the time the Rays could complete their search and have a new park ready, Kriseman said most of the construction on I-275 in Tampa on the way to St. Petersburg will be completed, making for an easier commute.
Another advantage to the Trop site is that with 85 acres, only about 15 of which are needed for a ballpark, there is opportunity for a large development that can bring more apartments, condominiums, offices and retail shops to attract people year-round, along with more potential ticket buyers.
“I think that’s an exciting draw,” Kriseman said.
Also, he said, downtown St. Petersburg is a very different place than it was five years ago when the Rays began asking to look outside the city. There are 12,000 more residents in apartments and condominiums. Supermarkets are being built; bars, restaurants and shops have opened; a new pier and waterfront development plan are in the works, and downtown has become a regional entertainment destination.
Downtown St. Petersburg development is spreading west and now enveloping the Trop area, Kriseman said.
“I think that is something that will be attractive to the team,” he said. “They’re definitely paying attention to what is going on in this city.”
City council Chairman Charlie Gerdes has said that the sooner the city lets the Rays look for other sites, the sooner they will decide St. Petersburg is the best location.
The Rays’ consistently-high television ratings for games show there is interest in the team, but the challenge is getting those fans to buy tickets. And a new stadium alone is not enough to persuade them. “Everywhere that does that, you get a bump in attendance. It’s not permanent,” Nurse said.
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In Miami, for instance, the Marlins opened an opulent $639 million retractable-roof ballpark in 2012. The team finished 12th out of 16 teams in the National League in attendance that year — after being last for six consecutive years. Since then, it has finished last every year and frequently closes the stadium’s upper deck.
Marlins Stadium is in city neighborhoods on the site of the former Orange Bowl, an in-town location but a challenge to reach for fans.
Kriseman said some fans will be drawn by a new stadium, “but I think what you really get from it is sustainability and longevity for the team being in the area.”
He said even more than fans, the team needs to draw more corporate support from both sides of the bay. He said Hillsborough corporations need to contribute, noting that Raymond James in Pinellas sponsors the Tampa Bay Buccaneers stadium in Tampa.
“You can’t talk about this being a regional asset if it isn’t getting regional support,” Kriseman said. “The people and businesses in Hillsborough need to not just talk the talk, but walk the walk.”
St. Petersburg would look at the complex the Atlanta Braves are building in Cobb County, 12 miles south of Atlanta but adjacent to I-75, I-285 and the Cobb Parkway. The $622 million Sun Trust Park, scheduled to open in 2017, is part of an 82-acre development with apartments, condominiums, offices, shops, a movie theater, a concert venue and an Omni Hotel. It is designed as a year-round destination.
That’s the new model, St. Petersburg officials said. The big buildings surrounded by a sea of asphalt parking, like the Trop, “is a throwback to ‘80s-style development,” Rice said.
Rice, Kriseman and others say a stadium alone is not the best use of the Trop property.
Zimbalist said the Braves project is different than other stadiums because their downtown Atlanta ball park is in a poor location and the team thinks most of its ticket buyers live in Cobb County and the suburbs.
He said mixed-use developments still don’t provide the numbers of people that densely developed downtown venues do. “It’s not all that sure the Braves thing is going to work out,” he said.
But Kriseman and council members say the redevelopment potential of the Trop site would generate money to help pay for a stadium, money the Rays would share — a financial benefit if they were to stay. In addition, the team wouldn’t have to pay for land and the county has tourist tax money to contribute to a stadium, Kriseman said.
Council member Jim Kennedy said that is an advantage.
“I really don’t think Hillsborough has the financial ability to do what Pinellas and St. Pete have the ability to do, or any piece of property that has ability to produce financial development like the Trop site,” he said.
Kennedy, who has opposed letting the team look outside the city, said if the Rays make a more permanent commitment to St. Petersburg more people will come to the games. Kennedy, a season-ticket holder, said baseball is generational, where grandparents, parents and kids follow the same team, and it needs time to take root.
“When you have a 30-year use agreement and you try to get out 10 years into it, it doesn’t lead to a whole lot of unity,” he said.
www.tbo.com/pinellas-county/st-pete-leaders-keeping-rays-at-revamped-trop-site-makes-sense-20151121/