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Renderings, traffic, and financing stadiums

The Ray’s new ownership is moving fast. As I’ve addressed multiple times, opening day 2029 is a very aggressive timeline to finish this stadium, especially when we didn’t have a location. Even now, I’m skeptical but a believer (so much so that I paid $19.98 to reserve first right of refusal to season tickets).

Now that some initial renderings have been released, I’d like to address the 4 biggest complaints I saw and discuss some stadium financing.

1. The Classic Ballpark Look

first look at what the stadium may look like

This is our first look at what the actual ballpark may look like and is the source for one of the most common criticisms I saw when I got sucked into the Facebook cesspool: “Welcome to Sofi East. Why can’t we ever get a classic ballpark look.”

Hey Einstein, let’s go through a critical thinking exercise. What classic look are we talking about? Open air, baseball diamond, etc. This stadium will obviously have bases separated by 90 feet, so you’re talking about the open air right? Dude. Are you new here? Did you attend a game at Steinbrenner Field? (My guess is no). When I went to Sunday afternoon games in August, if you sat still in the sun for 10 minutes you would be wet as if you had just jumped into the pool and lazily toweled off.

That is not an exaggeration.

Plus, Tampa averages 7.6 inches of rain and 14 days with precipitation in the months from June to September.

If you were paying attention you may recall that not a single game was “rained out” in 2025 (played outside), but you would also recall that the MLB practiced scheduling witchcraft to frontload the Ray’s schedule with home games. This allowed them to spend more time out of town during peak wet season.

I’m going to go ahead and say the roof is the reason we can’t have a classic ballpark look, dude. And, dude, I’m going to go ahead and say we need the roof.

2. “I’ll Believe it When I see it.”

This is the most common sentiment from long time Rays fans. There is lots of cynicism that this will finally get us across the “new stadium” finish line. This is super reasonable considering the Ray’s history of big talk and cool renderings not being actualized, but I think there are a few key factors that are different this time.

• New Ownership - The most obvious of these is the new ownership. Stu was famously frugal. He didn’t want to spend on the field and didn’t want to spend on the stadium. He was also sort’ve a carpetbagger, but did a lot of work to endear himself to employees and the community. His time was up. These new guys have been talking the talk and walking the walk. They spent $1.2 Billion for the team. That is a serious investment not only in the actual team, but in the future development that will be anchored by the new stadium.

• Time is ticking - All that talk about moving the team wasn’t the MLB blowing smoke. They needed someone to make this deal happen. The lease is up ahead of the start of the 2029 season. St. Pete may be willing to extend it on an annual basis, but they’re not going to do that forever. This needs to happen now, so it will.

• No one else raised their hand - My conspiracy theory was that the Hillsborough College site selection was buzz to light a fire underneath either St. Pete or Ybor City developers. For those who follow other Big 4 stadium development projects in the USA (just me huh?), you’ll remember that when Gary, Indiana indicated they were seriously competing for the new Chicago Bears stadium, the state of Illinois very quickly changed their tune about financing a Bears stadium. In Tampa that is not the case. It’s been a month and no one else had stepped up.

3. Parking

Again, super fair. I’m the first to acknowledge that Tampa has blown up since 2020. It feels like a new city’s worth of people moved there every time I go home. But again, let’s think this through.

When renderings were released there were a lot of dissenters saying things like “yep, and not a parking spot in sight. Where are the cars going to go?”

Probably where the 75,000 fans park for Buccaneers games dude! Right across the street.

“Well, what about when there is a baseball game and a football game or concert at Raymond James?”

What if the sky explodes, man?

This will be a problem at most 8 or 9 times a year. Plus, with the schedules released so far in advance, the sports schedulers will be able to minimize impact. As an added note, this is going to be the smallest permanent capacity stadium in the MLB with 31,000 seats promising the most intimate experience in baseball. That’s really not that many more people.

The other thing I think we need to consider is that parking just… isn’t sexy at all? It doesn’t seem that far out of the realm of possibility that there is going to be parking (either below visible buildings or surface level), but it just wasn’t included on renderings because of the aforementioned reason (decidedly not sexy).

4. Attendance

Another big one was the attendance concern. Obviously the New Guys are going to have to put a good product on the field (the next 3 or so years will be telling), but my larger frustration with this criticism is that it ignores all the other issues people have. Like, what’s it going to be dude? Are we going to have too many people trying to go to games or are we going to have too few. If you build it, they will come.

Plus, we’ve already decided that we one, aren’t going to keep the Trop (avg attendance 2024: 16,515 fans), and two, aren’t going to move the team. What other choice do we have brother?

Financing

I will be honest guys, I have no idea how this is going to get done. I’ve mentioned before that both Raymond James and Benchmark International Arena are in line for improvements. Those are going to be expensive.

I don’t have an answer, but I wanted to share some frustrations I had in reading about the conversation at the County Comission’s meeting last week. A little history. Hillsborough County has a 0.5% sales tax called the Community Improvement Tax (CIT). This money could be used to partially fund this project, if ownership of the stadium is transferred to the county after it’s completed. The only problem is that in 2023 the Board of County Commissioners promised not to use the funding for a stadium during a discussion that went like this:

BoCC: “We need to change the language of this ballot to exclude stadiums from public funding. Our constituents don’t want to pay for a stadium.”

Attorney: “Hey, so, it’s going to be sort’ve hard for us to to change the ballot language :/. Can we just agree to not fund a stadium?”

BoCC: “Okay sounds good :).”

The only problem is that now you can just use the money to fund a stadium! It just seems lazy. If you really didn’t want to fund a stadium you should’ve amended the tax. Straight up. Now you gotta face the music here. This is on the table and it’s going to be a discussion.

At least one Commissioner seems to think the project doesn’t happen without CIT funding. We’ll see. Ownership is indicating they will pay for half of the stadium. We will see where the rest of the money comes from. I do have some reservations about transferring ownership to the County. If the County owns the stadium my understanding is that this exempts the owners from paying property taxes. I generally tend to fall in the Strong Towns camp of “property taxes are a key revenue generator for governments,” so it makes me a bit nervous to give that up. The average sports venue gets about $171 million in property tax breaks over its lifetime. That is a legitimate cost to county services that nobody talks about. In general it feels like these large redevelopment projects run against the “incrementalism” approach that Strong Towns advocates for, but I’m going to write them an email and see what they have to say about it.

In a light reading of some recent MLB stadium projects, some municipalities have used a bed tax in hotels/motels to partially pay for stadiums, or a rental car tax. These could be options to explore. Hillsborough County could also fight for a more equitable partnership with the New Guys. This could look like an equity stake in development revenue, a more traditional revenue sharing partnership, or mandating third-party development of the surrounding area (more to come on this stuff maybe).

I got pretty seriously rage-baited by the Facebook comment section, but in general I am very excited for this project, from both a fan perspective and policy hobbyist. The Rays and County have less than 6 months to come to an agreement. It should be a fun 3 years.

MUSICAL CODA