Amid fresh turmoil, will St. Petersburg approve Rays stadium financing?

Months ago, when St. Petersburg and Pinellas County officials voted to approve deals with the Tampa Bay Rays for a new downtown ballpark and surrounding redevelopment, the message was triumphant: The team was “here to stay,” and remaining approvals on how the city and county would finance their portions were little more than formalities.

In reality, the path between the done deal and breaking ground has been far more troubled — unsettled by Hurricane Milton’s devastation of Tropicana Field, the Rays’ decision to play next season in Tampa, an election and spats between the team and public officials.

On Tuesday, ahead of a planned County Commission vote on financing, the team said it was no longer on track to finish a stadium for the 2028 season and could not afford to move ahead with the plan. It blamed commissioners for postponing the vote, which had originally been set for October. A few hours later, commissioners voted to delay it again, to Dec. 17.

Now it’s the City Council’s turn. Its members voted 5-3 to approve the deal in July. On Thursday afternoon, they’re scheduled to vote on finalizing their own bonds to pay for the city’s share of the stadium and construction, as well as for roads and sewers in the surrounding Historic Gas Plant District redevelopment. In a separate vote, they’ll be asked to approve tens of millions of dollars in spending on Tropicana Field repairs.

Compared to the county, there’s less strife at the city level. City and Rays leaders haven’t openly taken shots at each other in recent weeks. As with the County Commission, voters elected two new City Council members — one a stadium skeptic, the other supported by a stadium-opposition group — earlier this month. Unlike the commission, where new members have already started their jobs, the council doesn’t swear in its newcomers until January. It is down one member, as former District 3 member Ed Montanari — a supporter — resigned earlier this month as part of his candidacy for a state House seat.

Otherwise, Thursday’s decision-makers will be the same officials who made the decision in July, and who signaled where they stood on the deal early and often. Here’s a reminder of where they’ve landed:

Copley Gerdes

Gerdes has been a staunch supporter of the stadium project from the beginning and voted “yes” in July. He’s also the nephew of City Administrator Rob Gerdes, who led the city’s end of the negotiations.

Brandi Gabbard

Gabbard voted “yes” on the deal in July. Though she occasionally criticized details of the deal and pushed for changes — such as guarantees for a childcare facility and grocery store in the Historic Gas Plant District — she also has consistently backed the project and voted against slowing down the approval process leading up to this summer’s vote.

Last month, as the cost of repairing Tropicana Field came into focus, Gabbard expressed some hesitancy about spending money to fix a stadium meant to be torn down in a few years. But she was clear that her feelings on the Trop have nothing to do with where she stands on the new stadium.

Lisset Hanewicz

Hanewicz has long been one of the stadium project’s most vocal critics, and she voted against it. A former federal prosecutor, she repeatedly said she was worried that loopholes in the deal would allow the Rays to benefit from the deal and leave the city high and dry; leading up to this summer’s vote, she wrote that the “legal terms of the agreement leave the city unprotected.”

That subject could be back on the table now: On Tuesday, Rob Gerdes told county commissioners that the city has “a concern about the team leaving and the redevelopment remaining in their hands.”

Deborah Figgs-Sanders

Figgs-Sanders, the council’s chairperson during its year of Rays debates, has consistently backed the new stadium and surrounding redevelopment. During Tuesday’s County Commission meeting, outgoing commission chairperson Kathleen Peters referred to Figgs-Sanders as the face of the deal.

She was involved in the vetting of the Rays’ promised community benefits — a crucial element of the deal, with the redevelopment meant to pay homage to and make amends for the Black community razed for what’s now Tropicana Field. A political action committee funded by the Rays supported her recent reelection campaign, which she won by nearly 30 points.

Gina Driscoll

Driscoll at one point positioned herself as a swing vote, saying that the deal didn’t go far enough on the Rays’ affordable housing commitments or the penalties the team would face if it failed to deliver on its promises. She also criticized the pace of council meetings leading up to the vote, which she said was rushed. But she was happy with the deal as a whole and voted “yes” in July, and she hasn’t publicly signaled any discontent since then.

John Muhammad

Muhammad — who served a partial term after his predecessor stepped down and opted not to run for election this year — voted against the deal. He opposed the sale of the 65 acres of public land surrounding the stadium site, which the Rays are set to develop as the Historic Gas Plant District, and he said he feared the city’s contributions to the project would ultimately weigh too heavily on taxpayers.

It wasn’t clear Wednesday whether Muhammad planned on attending Thursday’s meeting: He was scheduled to speak at the opening of a new food bank in Jordan Park at the same time Thursday afternoon, according to an event announcement. He didn’t immediately return a phone call and text message seeking comment Wednesday.

Richie Floyd

Floyd was the third vote against the deal, a position he signaled early: He declined to attend an event celebrating the preliminary agreement in September 2023 because of his opposition to public subsidies for private corporations. He criticized the scope of the Rays’ affordable housing commitments and the use of tax dollars in the deal, and recently he’s opposed publicly funding repairs to the Trop as the fate of baseball in St. Petersburg looks uncertain.

Floyd was also skeptical that the Rays’ commitment to covering cost overruns would hold up — a prediction that resonated Tuesday as the Rays called for a new deal amid the team’s professed inability to afford the current commitment.

Staff writer Colleen Wright contributed to this report.