St. Petersburg mayoral forum Thursday in St. Pete Beach

A head's up. St. Petersburg's mayoral candidates will discuss county tourism issues Thursday starting at 9 a.m. at the Tradewinds Resort in St. Pete Beach. It stands to reason that someone will ask about using county tourism tax dollars to fund a new ballpark.

We'll be blogging the event live at our sister blog, Bay Buzz, so you can see what the candidate's are saying.

Aaron Sharockman, Times Staff Writer

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Comments

[Scaramouche]

Next time you freeloaders out there tell us the rest of us have to take on a boatload of municipal bond debt to buy you "a pleasant place to spend an evening, where you can go to 'be seen'" you might read this little article from The Economist, and follow the Google-trail to see what municipal debt is going to cost in the future. Courtesy of the kinds of Funny Munny Derivative Swap dealings that the Rays Franchise Owners helped to define and spread, that have finally added too many stories to the House of Cards we called the “US Consumer Economy.”

http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13497040&source=hptextfeature

Still think a billion-dollar stadium is a "wise public investment?" Then send your own public check for $12,000 or $15,000 to

The Tampa Bay Rays
Attn: Stu
1 Tropicana Dr
Saint Petersburg, FL 33705

Go Rays! Oh, and there's recent research, relating to the "compensation" (also known as "highway robbery") paid to Wall Streeters for decades now, showing that beyond a certain fairly moderate amount of pay, extra income, especially huge income, is a disincentive to productivity or even competence. I hope that the Rays players' paychecks don't break that magical barrier.

[Ken]

Uh, scaramouche, that article doesn't say what you say it says. Though, at this point, we shouldn't expect anything different from you. Like the $400 million stadium proposal which you misrepresent as the "billion dollar stadium." Maybe you're just really bad at math and reading. More likely: you're a liar.

[Scaramouche]

Gee, Ken, I am so chastened by your critique.

From the article I cited, there's this little snippet:

"For many municipalities, however, the future looks unsettling. What was a homogenous lump of a market, with lower-quality issuers lifted to the same level as highly rated ones by bond insurance, is fragmenting. For the first time in decades, investors have had to start doing their own homework on borrowers’ underlying credit risk. Most do not have the wit or will to analyse the thousands of smaller issuers, such as hospitals and school districts. These are having to offer much higher rates than big-name borrowers. “It is the smaller and lower-rated issuers that are most impacted by the loss of bond insurance,” says Jerry Rizzieri of Barclays Capital."

As you ought to know, my point is that for a muni like St. PEte or Pinellas County to borrow money in future, the interest rate is going up and number of issuers is going down. Which part is the Lie, again?

But then, "we" know where you are coming from, n'est-ce pas?

Maybe some of the people who are obviously smarter than I am and better at math would like to opine about what your stadium is likely to cost. Rrrick could no doubt "prove" that it would not only not cost anything to anyone, but would produce billions and billions of dollars of benefits to Pinellas County and St. Pete. And of course $400 million would NEVER grow to a much larger number, would it? That is completely at odds with the experience at every publicly funded stadium for the last 40 or 50 years, including our own (hated by you) Trop.

And of course we need to get ourselves on the hook for this major public debt before the crap really hits the fan and the public treasury on our side of the Bay is under-tax-funded and over-encumbered by silly stuff like police and fire and schools and streets and sewers and garbage collection and our Mayor's staff. Right, Ken?

Where did you say you live, again?