A New Stadium for the Rays ???

The St. Petersburg City Council is having a hearing on the proposed new waterfront stadium being proposed for the Rays baseball team.

I for one am totally against building a new stadium in the downtown waterfront area for the following reasons.

Cost Issues
The ballpark is estimated to cost half a billion dollars and the rays only want to put up 150 million. Services are being cut fire and police etc so How exactly do the Rays intend to pay for the ballpark? How much will taxpayers be asked to kick in? The Rays will pump millions of $ for ads to support the stadium!!!!

Will the voters get to decide the issue?


Traffic Problems -- 80 days a year parking problems and traffic gridlock!!


Huge environmental impact...

What happens to marine life if part of Tampa Bay is filled in?

To fit the giant stadium where Al Lang is now, the Rays plan to dredge and fill the Bay to make more room. They plan to dump the equivalent of 1 foot concrete blocks stacked over 25 miles high into the Bay right near a freshwater spring that supports federally endangered manatee and seagrass beds. This will take several acres of the Bay and turn it into land. Because the Basin is too shallow for the thousands of cubic yards of dirt to be barged in, expect to see hundreds of dump trucks driving through our downtown City streets for months.

Bad for Business

They say the stadium is good for business but what is likely is that all the other people (you know, the tens of thousands who aren't going to the game) will stay away from our downtown area on game days because they won't want to deal with all the traffic, let alone looking for a place to park. The result? A sharp decline in business. Couple that with the increased competition from all the NEW businesses at the redeveloped Trop site and you can see why this would really hurt current downtown business owners.

Secrecy and Fairness Concerns.

The city knew about this plan for over a year even during the last elections. Yet the public was kept in the dark until late November (and even then only after the story was leaked to the St. Pete Times). What’s more, the bidding process has proceeded in a way that is only fair to one developer: Hines.

Better Alternatives

Tropicana Field is downtown already!! Why not redevelop the existing site?
Another, simpler, alternative would be to build structured parking to the West of the Dome and develop everything East of Booker Creek, without building a replacement stadium. The existing stadium could be updated to some extent.

I like having the Rays in St. Petersburg. What I don’t like is this issue being railroaded down on the people of St. Petersburg. There are better alternatives than a waterfront ballpark so let’s tell the City of St. Petersburg to come up with another plan that will not cut services and harm the environment or our existing businesses.

Peace and Liberty through intelligence, strength, and integrity.