Ybor City site may no longer work for Rays stadium
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Jun 27, 2022

Tampa and Hillsborough County officials have made little progress on a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium in the six months since Major League Baseball killed the team's plan to split its season between Tampa and Montreal.

"What we really need from the Rays in very short order is some type of an idea of what they're looking for in a stadium," Mayor Jane Castor told the Tampa Bay Business Journal on Monday.

A Rays spokeswoman declined to comment Monday. The team's lease on the city-owned Tropicana Field expires in 2027, and the team has been searching for a new stadium since 2007.

Castor said the team is asking county and city officials for a stadium financing offer — though the team has not proposed even a conceptual plan for a full-season stadium. City, county and Tampa Sports Authority officials met with the Rays as recently as last week.

"Our position is we've gone as far as we can without having the specific renderings or details that they're looking for in a stadium," Castor said.

In late 2021, Tampa and Hillsborough officials were in discussions with the team that centered on the former Kforce Inc. headquarters property along Palm Avenue in Ybor City. Under the split-season plan, the team was planning an open-air stadium, which would have lowered construction costs significantly.

Once the league nixed the split-season plan, a stadium with a retractable roof was back in play because of Florida's rainy season. A roof will potentially add hundreds of millions of dollars to the stadium's price tag — and could mean that the former Kforce property is no longer an option.

Castor said that league standards require enclosed stadiums to stand approximately 25 stories tall. The Kforce site is within Ybor City's historic district boundaries, and any development proposal of that height would require approval by the city's Barrio Latino Commission.

"The location they've proposed is probably not going to be the best fit for that type of building," Eric Hart, president and CEO of the Tampa Sports Authority, told the Business Journal. "If it’s going to be a full-time stadium with a retractable roof, that location — because of the height restriction — is going to become a problem."

Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan, who has been working on a stadium deal for 12 years, said the Kforce site "provides some significant challenges," but he still thinks it could work on that property. Those issues, he said, are what's currently under discussion.

"I would have thought the team would have been a little more forthcoming on some of the specific design and programming issues, candidly," he said.

Castor declined to say whether there were alternative stadium sites she planned to present to the Rays. Hart said that to his knowledge, no other potential properties have been floated to the team by the public sector.

"It makes no sense for us to propose something when it may not be in their plans," Hart said.

Castor reiterated her support for Major League Baseball's presence in the Tampa Bay region. But she had hoped the conversations with the Rays would be "moving more quickly by now."

"We have a lot of significant issues that we have to deal with here in the city of Tampa," she said. "We have a housing crisis right now. We've got transportation issues that need resolution. It's very important to determine where the funding from a baseball stadium would come from. I am in full support of the Tampa Bay Rays staying in Tampa Bay, and I would love to have them in the city of Tampa. But, you know, that is a balancing act as well."

The public funding for a stadium on the Kforce property would rely on money from community redevelopment areas. A CRA is a state-designated area that retains all new or incremental tax money generated within their boundaries to fund future development — such as a stadium. CRA money is among the top reasons that the Rays have focused on Ybor City.

It's been almost 15 years since the Rays took their first swing at a stadium deal in the Tampa Bay area; this latest go-round is Hillsborough County's third attempt at striking a deal with the Rays. In July 2018, the Rays held a splashy news conference to unveil a futuristic, glass-domed stadium in Ybor City, but negotiations to finance that iteration of a stadium were dead by year's end.

Rays Owner Stu Sternberg pitched his idea of a split-season model in mid-2019, and discussions for a part-time stadium in Ybor continued until the league killed the idea in January 2022.