Tough financial choices lie ahead in building new Rays ballparkWith the Tampa Bay Rays on the way to getting new digs, local leaders are already trying to figure out how to cobble together enough public and private funds to pay for a new ballpark.
Taxpayers and elected officials alike should probably prepare for some sticker shock.
During the long-running public debate about the Rays, $500 million was often bandied about as an, er, ballpark figure for the cost of a new stadium. In more recent discussions, and usually accompanied by mention of a retractable roof, that number has hovered closer to $600 million.
The final price tag will depend on variables including cost of land, labor and construction costs, seating capacity and stadium amenities. But recent stadium projects suggest that even with a trend toward smaller, more intimate stadiums,
$600 million may not be enough if the ballpark includes a retractable roof.With industry estimates for that feature alone running as high as $150 million,
Rays officials have been exploring alternatives to get fresh air and natural light into a new stadium, said St. Petersburg City Council member Karl Nurse, who met with the Rays prior to the council’s Jan. 14 vote to let the team look for a new stadium site.
“Is there a way to achieve that goal without spending $150 million?
I think they have done some research along that line which is promising,” Nurse said.
With or without a retractable roof, a new ballpark will require significant outlay.
Marlins Park in Miami, opened in 2012, is Major League Baseball’s newest stadium. The venue ticks many of the boxes that the Rays may want for a new home. The capacity of roughly 36,500 is on the smaller side for major league venues and its retractable roof means the team can play on grass instead of turf.
The price tag: a hefty $639 million.
Or consider Major League Baseball’s next stadium, the Atlanta Braves’ SunTrust Park, set to open for the 2017 season. With a projected capacity of 41,500 seats, it’s likely larger than the Rays next home would be but wasn’t complicated by a roof. Nonetheless, the bill for the stadium is expected to run to $622 million.
“The cost has grown exponentially over the last two decades,” said Robert Bolan, director of the graduate sports management program at Ohio University and a sports management consultant.
It’s not just rising prices of land, materials and labor driving up those costs, Bolan said. Professional sports teams are building more lavish stadiums as they look to give the game day experience an excitement that fans cannot match watching the game at home.
That means more lower-tier seating so fans are closer to the action, wider concourses, higher-end concession areas and more gangways and staging areas where fans can congregate to view the action away from their seat.
That blueprint for modern ballparks came from Camden Yards, opened in 1992 as home to the Baltimore Orioles. The retro-style ballpark designed by HOK Sport, now called Populous, was hailed by former baseball Commissioner Bud Selig as the most important thing in baseball during the past quarter century.
“It was so successful that almost every team in baseball built a similar structure,” Bolan said.Since then, fans’ demand for better technology has also piled costs onto newer stadiums, with high-definition video screens, better sound systems and wi-fi access all must-haves.
And looking to entice fans away from their living room and high-definition TVs, stadium designers are looking to create a more visceral experience, said Len Moser, vice president of Sports for Barton Malow, a construction firm that has won more than $6.5 billion in sports construction contracts in the past 10 years.
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The projects include work on Joker Marchant Stadium in Lakeland and the new Orlando Major League Soccer Stadium.
One example of the change is the Boston Red Sox’s addition of new seats atop the Green Monster,
“It seems like from an overall capacity standpoint, stadiums are getting smaller, but they have more club space, open space to gather, even standing room,” Moser said. “At SunTrust Park and Marlins Park, you have the opportunity to be out in the open feeling the excitement of the space, not tucked away in your 20-seat corporate box.”
With the Rays unlikely to be ready to start construction for at least two years, industry experts said it is almost impossible to estimate how much construction costs might rise by then.
Prices for construction materials have dropped in recent months, likely the result of reduced demand from China and lower oil prices, said Chris Moeller, Barton Malow director of preconstruction.
But that decrease has been outpaced by higher costs for subcontractors, a result of the explosion of construction jobs around the state as Florida emerges from the recession.[/u]
“The heating up of the general construction market has created shortages in qualified skilled manpower for many trades,” Moeller said. “At this time, we are budgeting an escalation of 3 to 4 percent per year for general construction.”
Another cost for a new Rays stadium will likely be additional luxury and corporate suites in order to increase revenue from affluent fans and companies that want to entertain clients.
Corporate ticket sales account for two-thirds of ticket sales for most teams but only one-third for the Rays at Tropicana Field.
The stadium, which has a capacity of 31,042, has just 54 suites. Expect more in a new stadium, said Irwin Kishner, a partner with Herrick Feinstein, a New York law firm that advised on both the new Yankees Stadium and Citi Field, home to the New York Mets.
“It’s a great place to entertain and do it in a semi-private environment,” he said. “You have your own restroom facilities; it’s a much more sanitized and elegant experience.”
Whether to take on the expense of a retractable roof could be the toughest decision the Rays face once they settle on a stadium location.
The team and the Toronto Blue Jays are the only major league teams that play on artificial turf. The Jays want to convert to a grass field by 2018.
The team could continue with an indoor center, but critics of the Trop deride its sterile atmosphere. By contrast, open air stadiums have much lower operating costs and are considered essential by baseball purists.
But Florida’s brutal heat and humidity, and the storms that punctuate much of the baseball season, make an open-air stadium impractical.Marlins officials said the team was able to play only five games with the Marlins Park roof open last year and 10 games in 2014, not a great return on the cost.
Still, the roof, which takes about 13 minutes to open, enabled the team to maintain a grass playing surface by allowing sunlight in to nurture the natural turf. Marlins officials said they could not break out how much the retractable roof added to the stadium cost.
Moser, the vice president at Barton Malow, said the $100 million figure was once a rule of thumb industry figure for a retractable roof but is now out of date. Costs now likely run between $125 million and $150 million.“It’s not just the roof,” Moser said. “You have the mechanical system, the air system and other factors that affect that budget.”
Alternatives to a retractable roof could include a less complex covering that doesn’t need to move as far and uses tempered glass or some other transparent material to let in light.
The Rays in 2008 pitched the idea of a “mast and arch” retractable roof similar to a shade sail for a $450 million waterfront ballpark the team proposed on the site of Al Lang Stadium.
The team abandoned the idea but Nurse, the St. Petersburg council member, said the team is already exploring potential solutions for a new stadium.
“Can you design something to get enough natural light to grow grass? I know they are intrigued by that possibility,” Nurse said. “They’ve clearly been thinking about how you drive down initial costs and operating costs.”www.tbo.com/news/politics/tough-financial-choices-lie-ahead-in-building-new-rays-ballpark-20160131/
