Tampa Bay Rays say ballpark deal near collapse as Pinellas delays vote again

The Tampa Bay Rays’ much-talked about deal to bring a new stadium to downtown St. Petersburg is in serious jeopardy after the team sent a letter to Pinellas County officials Tuesday saying it had halted all work on the project.

The letter was sent hours before the Pinellas County Commission voted to again delay a decision on issuing bonds to help fund the construction of a new ballpark for the team. The letter also triggered several commissioners to accuse the team of looking to renegotiate what was recently celebrated as a landmark deal. 

The motion to delay the vote until the commission's Dec. 17 meeting passed 6-to-1. René Flowers, who represents District 7, was the lone dissenter.

She says the reason for voting against the delay was because it was unlikely to change the dynamic with the majority seeming to oppose the bonds unswayed.

“We were expected to make a decision to vote yay or nay,” she says, adding, “I don't want to keep belaboring the point. If we're going to do it, we're going to do it. If we're not, we're not. Let's move on."

While the Rays have said publicly that the county failed to live up to its obligation by not approving the issuance of bonds at an Oct. 29 meeting, county commissioners say there is plenty of time for it to act and for the team to move forward.

The big questions now: Can the Rays walk away if the county winds up approving the bonds or providing the money some other way? Or what is the legal liability for the county if it fails to approve the bonds as agreed to in July?

Only time — or possibly a judge and jury — will be able to answer those.

Two strikes

For now, though, it seems as if the sides are, even in the rosiest of estimations, at an impasse.

The letter, signed by team presidents Brian Auld and Matt Silverman, blames its stopping work on the stadium on the county commission’s decision to delay the vote on the bonds that many at the time saw as a formality.

The team argues that the decision, or lack of one, pushed back the timeline for construction of the new ballpark to open in time for the 2028 season as originally planned. A “2029 ballpark delivery,” the team, which is responsible for all cost overruns, says in the letter, “would result in significantly higher costs that we are not able to absorb alone.”

“The Rays organization is saddened and stunned by this unfortunate turn of events,” the team writes. “We have put in decades of work and spent more than $50 million to bring this historic project to reality — a project that had been approved by the City of St. Petersburg and Pinellas County.

“Now, that enormous investment of human and financial capital has been jeopardized by the county’s failure to live up to its July agreement.”

According to the team, because of the delay dozens of people who were relocating to St. Petersburg to work on the project have been told the project has been halted. And it’s not just the ballpark. The letter says it has “suspended work on the entire project,” which includes the redevelopment of the massive Historic Gas Plant District.

Deal or no deal

Commissioners, however, argued that a delay was necessary just weeks after the area suffered back-to-back hurricanes causing significant damage to people and property. Commissioners accused the team — particularly team owner Stuart Sternberg — of using the delay as a reason to renegotiate a done deal.

“I don't care about the owners. I just don't care. I don't think they play well in the sandbox. I think they are not great partners,” says Commission Chair Kathleen Peters.

“They're demonstrating that (with) that letter. I think they want to take their toys and go back home and start over and renegotiate.”

Clouding the issue, and possibly causing much of the trouble, is an estimated $55.7 million in damage to the Ray’s current ballpark Tropicana Field.

The damage has forced the team to play its home games at the Spring Training home of the New York Yankees in Tampa next season.

That the team was leaving the county to play games was a public point of contention among commissioners prior to the meeting.

The team, in the letter, says it considered BayCare Ballpark, the Clearwater field where the Philadelphia Phillies hold Spring Training, but it wouldn’t have been able to get it into a condition to host major league games in time.

And that all may have been well and good, but Sternberg made comments in an interview with the Tampa Bay Times last week that clearly rankled the commissioners, several of who referred to it from the dais.

In the interview Sternberg says the Oct. 29 delay “sent a clear message that we had lost the county as a partner” and that the “future of baseball in Tampa Bay became less certain after that vote.”

He then added that “without the minds here coming together, (relocation) is not an unlikely conclusion.”

If his interview was meant as a strategic attempt to force a vote or stir up the masses, it backfired.

Following that with the letter and the team’s decision not to make someone from the organization available at the Tuesday commission meeting to answer questions only made matters worse.

Even the proponents of the deal in July and of the bond issue took Sternberg to task.

“To be clear, we did not vote to kill the deal. Nor should a three-week delay in a 30-plus year commitment be a deal killer to begin with. So that's just a totally ridiculous statement,” says Brian Scott, who represents District 2.

Adding a minute later: “At this point, you can only conclude one of a couple of things. Either Sternberg wants out of the deal or he wants to renegotiate the deal. And he wants to hang the failure on the county commission.”