New St. Pete mayor wants to spend $600m on a new dome where the Rays’ old dome is, calls this “innovation”

Ken Welch, who was elected mayor of St. Petersburg last November, has a long history with the Tampa Bay Rays stadium wars, having previously served on the Pinellas County Commission for 20 years. But as mayor he has a newly prominent soapbox, and he used it this weekend, telling the Tampa Bay Times’ John Romano that he has a solution to the Rays’ attendance woes at Tropicana Field, and that’s to … build a new stadium at Tropicana Field?

“A new, right-sized stadium with the right amenities connected to our downtown — I still would love it to be open-air, but apparently that’s probably not going to happen — can get us where we need to be. I don’t think we need to be a 30,000-attendance per night venue.”…

“(The Braves) have got deals with development rights and commercial space around it, I still have to dig into the details, but that’s what our consultants will do,” Welch said. “Give us the various models we can use — and I’ll just throw a number out — for us to come up with $600 million, half of a $1.2 billion facility.

“It’s more than a stadium because it will have multiple uses. How does that tie into a conference center and meeting spaces? I just think if we are creative and innovative, we’ve got so many drivers behind us, and the growth is happening, that we can be successful.”…

“There’s a point where it’s too much,” Welch conceded. “But we need first to see what the total price is and what they’ll contribute to it. I’ve always said at least 50/50. And then see what our revenue streams can produce to solve for X. Now we know if we bond a penny of (hotel) bed tax, it’s $200 to $250 million. And we know there’s other mechanisms you can use: development rights, maybe a TIF (tax increment financing), naming rights are in there. We’re solving our half of the equation, and I think we can get there.”

There’s a lot going on there:

• Welch is willing to pay for half the cost of a new stadium, apparently in exchange for nothing in added lease payments or shared stadium revenues or anything.
• “Creative”! “Innovative”! “The growth is happening”! Does this sound like leadership yet?

Now, it’s entirely possible that Welch doesn’t actually believe his own PR glurge, and that he’s just trying to talk up the Trop site to Rays owner Stuart Sternberg because it’s a site he controls so he may as well try to promote it, or because he’s hoping to jump-start talks for development of the site if and when the Rays leave, or because he took too many edibles last Wednesday and is still trying to come down. Still, tossing around numbers like $600 million when no other location is actually offering anything yet is an alarming case of bidding against yourself.

It’s also a notable example of mission drift, where the actual problem (Sternberg wants to make more money than the $30-40 million a year in profit he’s currently generating) gets converted into a subtly different one (How do we get the Rays a new stadium?) without anyone questioning whether a new, similar stadium in the exact same location would actually help Sternberg’s bottom line, especially if he had to pay $600 million toward building it. (Without even using naming rights, which Welch suggests would help pay for the city’s costs! Can you even imagine?)

No reply from Sternberg yet on this idea, and I wouldn’t expect one, because savvy negotiators, etc., and even half-baked proposals are more leverage than no proposal at all. Meanwhile, Romano, who previously suggested that Tampa Bay officials needed to spend money on a stadium, stat, because otherwise Portland or Montreal would spend big to lure the Rays away [citation needed], is happy to give Welch all the column inches he wants to pontificate on his big dreams, without asking bothersome questions like “How would this help the Rays’ bottom line?” or “Did you forget to wear a hat out in the sun today?” All is as usual, in other words, which is why this site just celebrated its 24th anniversary; hope your seat is comfortable, because we may be here for a while.