Sternberg talks stadium

Rays prinicpal owner Stuart Sternberg was at Tropicana Field for Saturday's game and talked a bit about the stadium situation. Here are some excerpts:

As for the new stadium issue?
"It's been touch-and-go obviously the last couple months. We continue to work really hard and probably have worked too hard on it for the last year, year-and-a-half. And it's still a work in progress.''

As for commissioner Bud Selig's comments that the Rays can't be successful at Tropicana Field?
"Bud has been extraordinarily supportive not just through the process of the stadium but everything we have been doing. He gives a lot of interviews and he speaks about a lot of things and he's been through 25 or 27 new stadium projects so specific to what we have going on here, I don't know that you want to take every word and hang on it. But we've spoken a great deal about it, he understands the situation and knows that we need to have something done within a period of time. I'm very happy with the building. The way the building is playing right now, you get 25,000, 30,000, 35,000 people in here, it's a nice place, a great facility for that. But long-term it doesn't give us the opportunity, mid-term and long-term, to sustain what it is we've begun to build here.''

So what would you do if it fails, and what is Plan B? "You don't throw good money after bad, whatever work and whatever money we've put into it to this point,  and I can sit here and tell you it's substantial, the money has been a quite a bit and most importantly, the organization and the amount of work a number of people have done, has been substantial. So you don't just keep throwing money after it, and more importantly, time and energy, just because of what you've done. As far as Plan B, you're looking at it. It always was. The nice thing is we have a Plan B. Our lease is not up, it's not raining in here. The humidity is fine. It's 72 degrees. We fortunately made the difficult decisions over the last few years to refurbish the place and put a lot of dough into it, because you always sort of need a Plan B.
But for how long? "At least five years and not 15. I'm probably down to at least four years and not 14 at this point. The building itself can't sustain the length of its lease (through 2027) just A) from an upkeep standard and B) what it would do for us to recharge the fan base in addition to what we're doing right now.''

- MARC TOPKIN

Comments

[Xenu]

Xenu needs more cowbell at the Trop.

[since1962]

So Sternberg endorses PLAN B !

WE HAVE 13 years use left in the TROP!

NOT NOW
NOT ON THE WATERFRONT
LESS TAXPAYER MONEY

ENDORSE PLAN B

STERNBERG DOES

[John]

Not on our waterfront, Stu. Sorry.

[get-smart]

Stu's Plan B is really us "anti's" Plan A. I finally got my 'U B Architect 2' software up and running.

Hey Stu, don't worry I can help. I got the software. I can do the pretty pictures too.

Cheers!

[Xenu]

Xenu endorses a "niche Plan B" stadium.
Xenu loves pretty pictures. Xenu loves cowbell in octave B.

[John]

Stu

We have plenty of room for you. But not there. And not yet. We've proven we'll come if you put a quality product on the field. Over 100,000 in the last 4 games. We've also proven the Trop "works" almost perfectly, considering our lack of transit options.

Partner with us to make the Trop (or its retractable-roof alternative you wanted in the first place) a showpiece for not only baseball, but all the other funtions we have, plus conventions, plus trade shows, plus graduations (since Bayfront Arena is gone), plus conventioneers and tourists that accompiany them.

And the business that follows.

We had the right idea the 1st time.

We WILL help you do the responsible thing, as taxpayers.

Bring downtown to the baseball team, not the other way around. Stupid.

Plan B is what you make it.

You don't even need the voters' input, as long as you don't mess with our waterfront.

[Hmmmmm]

Hmmm...

an February open-roof sellout concert of Dave Matthews Band (in the grass) at the "New Trop" with hotel space next-door. And plenty of parking for tailgating. And no "Ford Ampitheatre" noise issues. Turn it up!

A permament home for the (possible open-air?) Saturday Morning Market, which is already nationally acclaimed. And plenty of parking in place.

Budget-conscious convention planners deciding between an employee having to blow a grand or more, to entertain their family @ Disney while they attend a convention, or the same family spending a substantive less but still worthy dollar on downtown St. Pete, and on our completely free beaches. Most every one of them, buying hotel rooms (bed tax?) to stay downtown or the beaches for "said event". They eat here. They drink here. All for a comparable-or-better convention experience than Orlando? And plenty of parking.

LEED certified Trop retactable solar-paneled roof that offsets many of the "green" disadvantages of the Trop (a/c, a necassary evil here).

That's 3 acres of sun drenched orange roof we could be sucking power from.

Hmmmmm

[since1962]

John
While I agree with MOST of your post, I disagree that politicans AND the VOTERS who elect them will NOT be VERY involved in ANY solution NOW that the Rays have divided the community this way.

[get-smart]

I checked out the LEED concept in my new 'U B Architect 2' software.

I asked it, "what is LEED?

It said,"LEED is a third-party certification program and the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings. LEED gives building owners and operators the tools they need to have an immediate and measurable impact on their buildings’ performance. LEED promotes a whole-building approach to sustainability by recognizing performance in five key areas of human and environmental health: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality."

To my thinking, by destroying a perfectly functional building, such as the Trop, the energy and pollution expended in that endeavor would soak-up fifty years of any new stadium LEED savings. In fifty years they would want the taxpayers to buy them a new stadium anyway.

My solution for ML Baseball is to build ten stadiums in one location called 'Baseball City.' All the teams are there and all the games are played there. All games are televised. If you are a fan and want to see a game, you go to Baseball City.

In Baseball City, if the owners want a new stadium, they will build it themselves.

Instead of the greedy team owners shaking down and blackmailing the cities (ie Yankees), they will have to market themselves just like Disney does.

- The Waterfront is Off Limits -

[Bill]

I get a real chuckle that the "waterfront is off limits". Like its been "Central Park in NY or Lincoln Park in Chicago". Folks, it has been a baseball stadium for 80 years. IT ALREADY IS A BASEBALL STADIUM.

Lets build the stadium on the waterfront! It will be a wonderful thing for our city for the next 50+ years. Plus, we get to re-develop Tropicana Field, getting all the benefit from that project.

Thank you Stu for your vision.

[atrulyconcernedcitizen]

Bill,

If it's already a baseball stadium and outdoors and on the waterfront..why don't they simply play their games there.
As obvious as the answer may seem, it should be just as obvious that replacing a small, very low profile, 7,000 seat facility, with a huge 34,000 seat stadium with a 350' mast to hold a monstrous sail, is akin to someone who wishes to avoid code considerations on their new 20 story condo stating..but there is already a duplex there. They're both multifamily but hardly comparable!

[Don Mott]

Hi RRRRick

[since1962]

Al Lang WAS a baseball tradition long BEFORE the RAYS moved training in an attempt to steal the profits from the Trop sale AND the waterfront land.(a bit of the bay too).
Now they'll have to settle for LESS than what would have been negotiated originally.
Remember, this city wanted MLB so badly that it built a stadium BEFORE it had a team!

[Xenu]

Bill- Xenu too, like you, appreciates Linkin Park. Xenu loves their music also. Reading your post reminds Xenu of lyrics of theirs. Xenu wants you to sing it with Xenu-
"Shut up when I'm talking to you, shut, up, shut up, shut up, SSSSHHHUUUTTT UUUPP, when I'm talking to you. Everything you say to me, takes me one step closer to the edge and I'm about to break. I need a little room to breathe, cause I'm one step closer to the edge, and I'm about to.......Break."
Xenu could hear the cowbell in the background.

[atrulyconcernedcitizen]

Bill,

Just to add to your chuckle about the "waterfront is off limits". Like its been "Central Park in NY. There is actually a connection between our waterfront and Central Park.

John Nolan was the first city planner ever hired by this city. He came to us from New York and it was his vision that helped others like Snell and Straub realize that a public park system was not something at which to chuckle.

John Nolan originally worked in New York as a disciple of Frederick Law Olmstead...who of course was the man responsible for Central Park.

So your comparison is correct, your conclusion about chuckling may be a bit off however. While Mr. Kalt has demonstrated his skill for taking public parks snatching the popular Macombs Dam and Mullaly parks for his new Yankee stadium..even Mr. Kalt wouldn't haven't gotten away with grabbing some of Central Park...just as he won't get away with grabbing some of our precious waterfront!

[Clear Direction]

Bill,

Years of Vision 20/20 input,
Years of new LDR visioning
City sponsored Visioning sessions at the Mahaffy.

All have told the city that the voters want the Al Lang site preserved as open parkland!

The Voters of St. Pete have NEVER approved a single referrendum to authorize ANY development on city owned waterfront land!

70% voted to keep Albert Whitted.
68% are against this proposal(according to the St. Pete Times/Baynews 9 poll)

Bill do you really think things have changed so much that NOW the voters will embrace this plan?

[Clear Direction]

All,

Herb Polson & Bob Stewart will be speaking about the Ray's proposal today At 11:00 AM on Baynews 9 today.

[Jon McPhee]

Just a thought:

Many of us keep looking for what's promised in the header to this blog:

"the latest from the ongoing debate, focusing on the impact to taxpayers, the evolution of the Rays’ proposal and the politics unfolding behind the scenes."

Other than the overwhelming stink from the pissing contests that have come to dominate discussions, and I use that noun very loosely, there is so very little about what Ed Armstrong and Mayor Rick and Stu and little Mikey are up to that one has to wonder what the "November surprise" is going to look like.

Lots of people object to the waterfront location part of the subsidy grab. But a lot of folks who are drowning in our wonderful "floats all boats, trickle down" economy are put off that the public cost of just the stadium part of this thing would cost every man, woman and child someting between $300 and $3,000 a person. (Say, almost a million of us Pinellans, into either $350 million, or if it goes like the Trop, [$323 million/$90 million actual to claimed cost = 3600% jump], gives you about $1.2 billion, or $1,300 per each and every person at least, not counting debt service, infrastructure etc.)

And we have practically no way of even guessing at the cost of supporting all or some portion of the "paired development" (is this like some Siamese twin, sever the two and both may die?), since everything is still up in the air as far as the public is concerned. We don't even have a fair idea of the value of the public Trop land that would apparently be short-sold to Archstone to maybe start "Phase 1" on.

Any reason we can't have a little Excel spreadsheet work that would give us a running tally of costs of the various parts of all this, reduced to a figure everyone can understand: How much would my personal share of the public cost of all this be?

I know, Ricky, you are sure that there will be "billions and billions in tax revenues and sales," from somewhere. Argue rationally for inclusion of those credit-side numbers too.

The discussion over what inputs, formulae and values ought to go into the model might sharpen the acuity with which we all get to see what's going on and who wins.

There is a large random element in all of this, of course, and as the Archstone folks have made clear there are endless contingencies and branches to the decision/development tree. But does that mean that the voters (who only get to "vote" on a little piece of the puzzle anyway) should be left in ignorance? I know, Ray, you think that's how we all vote anyway.

You know that the Rays owners have far more sophisticated financial tools in use already -- after all, they're the smart guys who created the whole fanciful set of derivative debt repackaging based on sub-prime mortgages that has a lot to do with all the drowning people in the first instance. Have the City or County governments made even tentative steps to even enumerate, evaluate and value all the pieces of this, in a context other than whether they can figure out how to sell bond counsel and bond markets on the viability of the area's taxable future?

Of course, "winning" is the Franchise owners' goal, and for politicians and the subsidy seekers alike, it seems like the more that this all happens in the dark corners, the better for the players, and I don't mean the ones on the field. Plausible deniability, deflection of blame, bullet-ducking at election time, and all that.

If the MLB franchise owners and politicians had produced even as much transparency in the lead-in to all this as a McDonalds franchise owner has to provide for zoning and land use purposes, we would all be in a very different space right now. Pretty pictures will not do it.

How 'bout it, Aaron or Howard? Or maybe some of the smart people at POWW or Lorraine or Don or somebody could take a run at a framework?

[Rick K]

You ANTI's are truly hilarious.

[Jon McPhee]

Hey, Rrricky "not not a politician," "the goal is not to produce the best stadium for the team," here's another laugh for you. Hope you get outside and enjoy the sunshine on our lovely beaches this weekend and don't spend the entire day at your diligent keyboard.

To the Editors of the Times:

You sly dogs!

I just finished Sunday's editorial on "Baseball chief needs to butt out."

Most of us could not agree more, that this buccaneer owner of the Brewers, who has ripped off Wisconsin, and helped other teams to rip off the public in other places, has no place in our little private subsidy war.

But you folks apparently have studied at the Gingrich-Rove School of Staying On Message. What's this little sentence that sneaks into today's fourth paragraph from the Fourth Estate? "Pinellas County commissioners, St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker and City Council members are perfectly capable of creating a viable financing plan for a downtown waterfront stadium, even in these tough economic times."

"Dwontown waterfront stadium?" "Viable financing plan?" Whoa up there, Hoss! I guess that stakes out pretty clearly for all to see the depth to which you have committed your editorial objectivity to pushing the subsidy grab by the franchise owners. And yes, even in these "tough economic times," when huge commitments of present and future public resources ought to be given a very careful public examination and not left to the unbridled and unseen discretion of our elected representatives.

Then you toss in this bit about "the stadium issue mak[ing] it to the November ballot." You know darn well that IF an Al Lang issue gets balloted, the only "stadium issue" it will cover is one little bit of the Al Lang public property's future.

C'mon, be honest at least -- the voters of the Pinellas peninsula simply do not have any opportunity to say yea or nay on the "downtown waterfront stadium." We are supposed to trust our "betters," with their simply stellar track record of pushing past the public many other albatross-around-our-necks projects, up to and including the "was only $86 million, now special priced at $323 million" Trop itself.

You tell Selig, the Captain Hook of MLB, to "[l]et this community wrestle with the issue..." From the little bit the public can see of how this "issue" is being "wrestled," the contest looks more like a Hulk Hogan WWF pre-scripted steroid-enhanced bit of gymnastics, to dazzle and razzle the rest of us before common sense and the public welfare get one-two-three PINNED.

When I lived in Seattle and went to Mariners games in the Dome out there, the good play by the team produced generally huge turnouts and a decibel level of crowd noise that intimidated enemy teams so badly that sports enthusiasts and the team called it "the tenth man on the field." The Trop dome, with its acoustics and now a winning team, is not even amortized yet. Let's recall the relative positions of the parties before knuckling under to the people who brought NY the Yankee mess.

Have you read about that? Does the stuff in this link look awfully familiar? I'm sure your researchers, if the tough economic times have left you any, can turn up lots of other stuff on how "good" these stadium subsidies are or are not.

http://www.goodjobsny.org/lootfinal3.pdf

You can only drain just so much blood out of a person's body before they fall into irreversible shock and die. You folks seem happily poised to help insert the catheters into the community's veins.

[atrulyconcernedcitizen]

Rick K,

You're back. We're still waiting on that top ten list of SPECIFIC lies you have found on the POWW website. Remember a simple difference of opinion with Rick K is not a lie...simply a subject for debate. I am looking for the SPECIFIC list of LIES that back up all of your ad hominem attacks.

[Tom]

The Rays will be gone for good if St Pete does not get a new stadium. Stu admits to not being there in what could be as soon the next 4 years.

Your vote counts, vote YES for a new, beautiful waterfront ballpark. We'll have an All Star Game and a much needed shopping area.

YES to new stadium!

[Howard Fan]

This had better be a really good deal for Trop site

By Howard Troxler, Times Columnist
In print: Sunday, June 22, 2008

http://www.tampabay.com/news/localgovernment/article637394.ece

-----------------------------------------------------

Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.

— Joaquin Setanti

(I dunno, some guy)

Between now and early August, St. Petersburg, the Tampa Bay Rays and the city's newly chosen developer for Tropicana Field need to make a really good deal, if the Rays are going to get a new baseball stadium on their first try.

The only things that matter now are the contracts.

This is not about whether St. Petersburg "wants to be a big-league city" or whether poopy old "naysayers" are in the way of "progress" or any other such rhetoric.

If the deal gets better, the idea still has a chance with the voters in November. Otherwise, it is no wonder some people already are talking about Plan B down the road.

At this moment, the city's dealings with the proposed buyer-developer of the Tropicana site, Archstone-Madison, consist of:

(1) Pretty drawings with no guarantees of anything yet.

(2) An offered price that doesn't even pay off the existing Tropicana debt.

Besides these issues, there are a couple of others that bear mentioning. The first of these is liability for tearing down Tropicana Field.

Again, we should not care that the city is "comfortable" that it will cost less than $5-million, which is all the developer will pay. What happens otherwise?

Secondly, despite the city's confident claim that any remaining environmental problems on the Trop site can be fixed for less than $100,000, that has to be nailed down too.

What will the contract say about future problems on the Tropicana site? Most of the site was not tested in the original dome construction in the 1980s, despite its past use for many industrial purposes. Who would pay for testing, cleanup and liability?

Let's say that all of this is routine contract stuff and no problem. We still have other sticking points.

The city ought to hold the Rays to their original rhetoric — that the public's share of the stadium debt will be covered by the new taxes that come from all the neat stuff to be built on the Tropicana site.

Why, then, shouldn't we write that into the contracts, with the other parties guaranteeing any shortfall?

It shouldn't cost them that much, if anything — we can call the difference "rent" — and it might be the magic bullet. The parties could then campaign on the idea that the new stadium will be, in essence, "free" to taxpayers.

Free! We make more than we spend! Now, that is a deal.

That is the big enchilada. After the Rays and/or developer make that major concession, they can then twist Mayor Rick Baker's arm on his demand for more parking, and he can go, ow, ow, okay, uncle.

Then the Rays give Baker some kind of concession on the team name. Not "St. Petersburg Rays," which is too parochial. Maybe "Florida Rays at St. Petersburg," once that team in Miami changes its name. Or something.

An ironclad deal. Guarantees from the developer. Guarantees the public's debt will be covered. Every contingency covered. All tied up with a nice bow.

It might still work.

But anything less, any open-ended risk to the taxpayers, is probably enough to kill a proposal that is already unpopular with most voters.

Good luck negotiating, y'all.

[since1962]

Sternberg endorses PLAN B

NOT NOW

" ...13 yrs useable life left in TROP"

NOT ON THE WATERFRONT

LESS TAXPAYER MONEY/RISK

less TROP debt in 13 years
better market conditions for condos/retail

SUPPORT PLAN B
STERNBERG DOES

[J]

For those proposing development around the Plan B Trop and transforming the the walmart style parking lot into garages and retail/hotel, where will you build the Trop when they do finally have to replace it? The standard practice is to build on the parking lot and then tear the old stadium down to put in new parking. This is what the Bucs did.

It seems very little development if any can occur in this proposal.

Sternberg says the trop is viable for 4-5 years. Thats a short time before we're having this conversation again.

In a interview Silverman responded to a question by Al Ruechel about Stu's statement that they would only do this proposal one time. Silverman responded that when this issue comes up again they will not expend the time and money to be the lead again.

With the risk of the same outcome I wouldn't either. The county or city would have to take up that torch and the negotiation stances will be flipped in favor of the Rays. Just some food for thought.