by Steve Wilson
After a wild week with three negative votes, the Tampa Bay Rays are a team without a permanent home and may have played their last innings in St. Petersburg.
The Tampa Bay Rays said a deal to build a $1.3 billion stadium in St. Petersburg is dead after two of their partners decided to defer votes on bond issues to fund the taxpayer part of the deal, about $600 million.
The St. Petersburg City Council reversed itself by first voting to approve and then again two hours later to deny $23 million to put a new roof on the Rays’ existing domed stadium, Tropicana Field.
“I’m not quite ready to put $22 million toward something with an entity that we may never have to deal with again,” said District 2 Councilwoman Brandi Gabbard before the second vote on the stadium repairs.
A new roof is needed after Category 3 Hurricane Milton shredded 18 out of 24 roof panels and exposed the interior to the elements after making landfall near Siesta Key on Oct. 9.
City officials will examine their responsibility to maintain the stadium and within 90 days, come back to the council with a possible plan to repair the facility.
That means the team, which will be playing at George Steinbrenner Field in Tampa across the bay, will likely not have a home in 2026 if Tropicana Field isn’t repaired. City documents, according to published reports, and the team say Tropicana Field will likely not be ready then.
If the stadium is repaired, the Rays are obligated to play there three more seasons.
That makes two Major League Baseball teams, with the former Oakland Athletics being the other, playing in minor league facilities next season. The A’s will spend at least next year at Sutter Health Park in Sacramento on the way to calling Las Vegas home.
The letter distributed by the team before the county commission meeting said the body’s failure to approve the bonds at its Oct. 29 meeting “ended the ability for a 2028 delivery of the ballpark” and that the Rays can’t absorb the additional costs due to the delay.
The Rays say they have ceased work on the development.
St. Petersburg has already spent $6.5 million to clean up the remnants of the roof and other debris from the field, and sealed off parts of the stadium such as suites and offices from the weather.
The new stadium deal was approved by the Pinellas County Commission and the City Council in July and would have been the anchor of a $6.5 billion development in downtown in the Old Gas Plant District.
St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch said during the City Council meeting that he didn’t think the deal was done, something that Rays co-President Brian Auld said was the case after the Pinellas County Commission voted to defer a vote on the bonds until its next meeting on Dec. 17.
“We do believe there is a path to success and that requires that we move forward and position ourselves by fulfilling our obligations as a partner in this development,” Welch said.
He also said that if any of the three partners – the city, the Rays and the county – do not fulfill their end of the deal, the project will never come to fruition and that he wouldn’t “bring you (the council) back anything that has higher contribution from the city.”
Auld told the council that the team was willing to move forward “with some kind of arrangement and doing whatever we need to do to make that happen.”
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Steve Wilson has been an award-winning writer and editor for nearly 20 years at newspapers in Georgia, Florida and Mississippi and is a U.S. Coast Guard veteran and University of Alabama graduate. Wilson is a regional editor for The Center Square.
Photo “Tampa Bay Rays” by CityofStPete. CC BY-ND 2.0.
