- September 9, 2024
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Brian Auld stood before an audience of about 70 people on Oct. 1, 2021, to sell an idea.
As president of the Tampa Bay Rays, he had been dispatched to Oxford Exchange near downtown Tampa to present the team’s latest proposal at a community breakfast.
The plan, he told those gathered at the café and bookstore that morning, was for the Rays to divide their seasons. Half the games would be played in either Tampa or St. Petersburg. The other half in Montreal. Each community would get a new, smaller stadium. Playoff games would alternate cities each season.
It seemed hairbrained at the time, but after almost 20 years of trying and failing to secure a deal for a desperately needed new ballpark in the Tampa Bay market, that’s what the Rays were left with. Coming up which hairbrained ideas.
Well, those days are now a distant memory.
The team won final approval July 31 for the funding needed to build a new stadium in St. Petersburg and now for the first time since the early 2000s the organization’s off-the-field focus isn’t on coming up with ideas for a ballpark but on construction schedules.
“We've been on the other end of it a few times now,” says Auld. “So, I can guarantee you, this side feels better.”
Construction on the new $1.3 billion ballpark is expected to begin with a groundbreaking in January. While it’s a little later than the team originally expected when it first reached a deal with St. Petersburg, it will be complete in time for Opening Day of the 2028 season.
That date is important because the Rays’ lease on Tropicana Field where it now plays expires at the end of the 2027 season.
Auld is confident the timeline can be met, citing the architect’s experience building ballparks and “other massive stadiums.”
But, he says, “Nothing is ever guaranteed. And if we need to pivot one way or another, we'll be prepared to do that.
“But everyone in our team is focused on Plan A and making sure that we're ready to go in 2028.”
The stadium will be built just east of where Tropicana Field now sits. It is being called a “neighborhood ballpark” that will seat 30,000 for baseball games with “at least 25,000 fixed seats in a variety of options over three levels.
The pavilion design will have a fixed roof described as peaking over the playing field and sloping toward the street. Along with an array of windows to allow for natural light, the team says there will be “a welcoming porch — evoking the front porches that serve as gathering places for friends and neighbors in many St. Petersburg neighborhoods.”
Building the new ballpark, while costly and complicated, will also allow the team to settle into a new home and ease worries among fans and officials that it may not be around for the long term.
“We've got an opportunity to bring people in, in some ways for the first time again,” Auld says.
“You can imagine that someone who might have been interested in buying season tickets in 1998 hasn't had the same kind of reason to invest again because we haven't had this sort of a momentous change until now.”
The new stadium will allow the Rays to harness that interest in order to build a solid season ticket base and to also bring in more corporate sponsorships and local businesses.
Then the team needs to hold on to that once the initial novelty wears off, Auld says.
“This is a chance to make a once in a generation leap forward in terms of our revenues and then to do what we have gotten very good at doing, which is providing an outstanding fan experience and winning a whole lot of baseball games so that those people stay in the fold. Not just in that opening year of excitement, but for the entire 30-year life of the ballpark.”
The final piece of the puzzle to make the new stadium a reality came July 31 when the Pinellas County Commission agreed to dedicate $312.5 million in bed tax revenue to the construction of the new ballpark.
Along with the county, the city of St. Petersburg is contributing $287.5 million and the team will pay $700 million. It is also responsible for cost overruns and will manage, operate and maintain the stadium.
The property for the ballpark and two parking garages will be owned by the county which will lease it to the city. The city will then sublease it to the Rays for 30 years, with an option to extend beyond that.
The team also signed a non-relocation agreement committing it will stay in the city for the duration of the lease.
The stadium is just one part of a massive, $6.5 billion, 86-acre redevelopment of the Historic Gas Plant neighborhood that the Rays have agreed to build.
The project, when complete, will include an 8 million-square-foot multi-use development that is expected to deliver more than 5,400 residential units; 1,250 workforce and attainable housing units; 1.4 million square feet of office and medical space; 750,000 square feet of retail space; 750 hotel rooms; and 14 acres of parks and open space. This along with the Woodson African American Museum of Florida and an amphitheater.
As part of the agreement, the city will put in a maximum of $130 million for infrastructure work with the team and its development partner Hines putting in more than $51 million for the infrastructure, as well as covering any additional costs.
Auld says the plans are to build the first piece of the redevelopment alongside the stadium, with the goal of having both online Opening Day 2028. That first phase, which will cost about $1.5 billion, will include a hotel, retail village and some affordable housing.
While the Rays have partnered with Houston-based developer Hines on the project, Auld says the team will be actively involved in the redevelopment.
“We will be putting our fingerprints on how that works,” he says. “We think it's very important that the developments surrounding the ballpark mesh with it in a way that is as seamless as possible.”
When Auld spoke to the Business Observer about the new stadium and what comes next, the situation was vastly different from that long-ago October morning at Oxford Exchange.
The deal was done, talking was over and work was about to start.
There was still a crowd, though, and it was loud enough Auld had to step away to be heard on the phone.
“We’re having a little staff celebration over here,” he says.
“Whenever you come out victorious, so to speak, on that kind of an endeavor it feels really good.”
