The nuts, bolts of stadium finances for Rays

By Howard Troxler, Times Columnist
In print: Thursday, April 17, 2008

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Let's talk about the baseball stadium in St. Petersburg, and what that financial deal needs to look like as it gets hammered out over the coming critical weeks and months.

The Tampa Bay Rays have proposed a $450-million stadium on the city's downtown waterfront.

The Rays say they will put up $150-million, and that they will cover any cost overruns.

That leaves $300-million or so. The city's starting (and final) conditions for taking part in this deal ought to be:

(1) Not a penny of tax money is diverted from any existing use.

(2) There's no additional risk to the taxpayers.

So, then, how do we pay for it? In theory, the money is supposed to come from selling and redeveloping the 86-acre site of Tropicana Field.

Remember that the city already has taken bids from three developers for the Trop and is weighing them.

Still, how exactly is this supposed to work? Here's one way that it might be pitched:

Step A: Sell the Trop to the developer for cash. Use that cash to pay off the debt on the Trop so we are scot-free.

Step B: Keep making the payments that the city and county are making now — around $11-million a year — to cover the debt on the new stadium.

(Even this is not guaranteed to cover all the cost, but it gets us close enough to do business.)

Now, the first time I heard this, I thought: "Wait a minute! We'd be paying off our old mortgage, but then continuing to make the same payments?

"What happened to the claim that the Tropicana project will pay for it?"

The answers:

(1) We'd be paying exactly what we're paying now anyway, and what we will be paying through 2015 regardless.

(2) After that, the developer of the Tropicana site should be deep into that project, adding hundreds of millions of dollars to the tax rolls — and generating taxes that would cover the cost of the debt.

Honestly, I don't know yet what to think of this.

In the strictest sense, asking Pinellas County to extend its share of the annual payment — which comes from a hotel tax — and asking the city to re-commit its sales tax revenue would involve "new" dollars.

On the other hand, we would be making the same payments through 2015 anyway, and after that, the claim is, the Tropicana project will cover it.

Even if you buy into all this, the fundamental question remains — what if the Tropicana redevelopment doesn't work? What guarantees will the city get in its contract with the developer?

The city has to be careful about its exposure to other obligations as well. For example, at least one of the three bidders wants the taxpayers to pay for tearing down the Trop.

There also is at least some environmental risk in cleaning up the old site, now covered by a parking lot. I hear high and low claims, but the bottom line either way is that the city has to be sure to cap its liability.

This is only the minimum, the entry point for discussion. Then the voters, who get the final say, will still have to consider the other issues — the city's character, the use of the waterfront, the parking and environmental impacts, and all the other things people are debating.

But none of that matters if the business deal doesn't work up front. If it doesn't, the council should kill the deal before it reaches the voters.