May 16, 2008

Rays present vague stadium numbers

The Tampa Bay Rays released their stadium financing plan yesterday - if a nine-page Powerpoint presentation can really be considered a financing plan. The highlights:

• The team would pay for $150 million on construction costs, likely via rent payments over the course of their lease.
• Pinellas County would put in $100 million from a hotel tax currently being used to pay off debt on Tropicana Field. (The tax would be extended by another 30 years, until as late as 2047.)
• State sales tax money, also currently going toward the Trop debt, would contribute another $75 million.
• $55 million would come from parking revenues at the new stadium, though asked about how this would work, team president Matt Silverman replied, "The short answer is we don't know."
• To replace the funds being diverted from debt service on the old stadium, the city would get $70 million from a developer who would purchase the Trop site and turn it into housing, retail, and office space.

The Rays are selling this as "no new taxes," but that's stretching things: In addition to diverting existing taxes to new uses, extending the hotel tax for 30 years would obviously be new public tax money. Rays stadium czar Michael Kalt also told the St. Petersburg city council that this would be "one of the highest percentages of non-public dollars that would go into a ballpark facility anywhere" - again, stretching things (depending on how you count, it looks like the private share would be in the 40-55% range), though given that only four baseball stadiums in recent memory (the new stadiums for the San Francisco Giants, St. Louis Cardinals, and New York Mets and Yankees) have even approached 50% private money, that's not a very high bar to set.

Other outstanding questions: Who would get any additional funds from the sale of the Trop site, and what happens if no developer is found (or any developer demands subsidies of their own)? When the Rays say they'll pay cost overruns, does that include on land on infrastructure as well, which have ended up costing other cities big-time? Would the team pay rent, and/or property taxes, at the new stadium? And while the Rays promise a windfall of new tax revenue from the development of the Trop site, would would be the new costs for schools, transit, and police and fire services for the new housing and offices that would be built there?

The Rays are hoping that the city council will place this proposal on the November ballot for voter approval - hopefully by then they'll provide more answers to these questions. The Tampa Tribune - whose managing editor, according to one former staffer, told his reporters during a debate over a Buccaneers football stadium that "our coverage of the stadium will be limited to finding solutions for it to be built" - reported that after yesterday's presentation, "city leaders were still not ready to commit to the proposal." Ungrateful bastards.