Comments on: Why is St. Petersburg bothering to placate the Rays?

By: Dbuck

Dbuck — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 11:12:46 +0000

You named it with the politics. Tampa and St. Pete do not work with each other for anything. Moving the team to Tampa proper will be viewed as a huge embarassment to St. Pete, just like a re-hash what happened when the Lightning moved.
The cities have an obvious big brother/little brother relationship, and lil brother is probably going to get pushed aside again. Not that I care. When I lived the in the area, I hated driving to the Trop after work to get to a game. What should be a 20 min drive turns into and hour and a half.

By: 44Fishy

44Fishy — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:20:04 +0000

He is doing this because he is in an elected position and someday he will want to be re-elected. If he’s known as the guy who let the Rays leave St. Pete, no one will vote for him.
Right now there are a couple very attractive locations in Tampa. But they are not so much more attractive than the places in St Pete that the mayor is suggesting. So these options keep him/St Pete in play. But if he digs his heels in and tries to force them to honor the lease at the Trop, the team will definitely leave and the mayor will definitely lose with the voters.
Bend, but don’t break…

By: JC Bradbury

JC Bradbury — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 07:33:49 +0000

Why buy season tickets, when the taxpayers can purchase you the goodwill to earn lifetime rights to the owner’s suite? It’s fun to spend other people’s money.

By: Old Gator

Old Gator — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:39:29 +0000

To be honest with you, I don’t understand why, given an opportunity to demolish one of the ugliest, most depressing stadiums not designed by a marginal Bauhaus wannabe, the mayor would even hint that he wanted the team to stay there. That’s like an over-the-hill sprinter praying that his immune system won’t finally wake up and deal with his plantar’s wart.

By: The Rabbit

The Rabbit — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 18:51:29 +0000

Your question may be rhetorical but I’ll offer an answer:
Because many local elected officials are basically stupid and have acquired their jobs by default, not by virtue of any qualification or expertise in community planning, economics, etc.
Not many people want to run for unpaid (in most communities) positions that require extensive amount of time away from work and family commitments.
If they actually read any studies in planning journals on the long term impact of offering any deals to developers and corporations, they’d find very few success stories. Almost all these deals end up negatively impacting the community residents in the form of much higher local taxes while the city builds an infrastructure to support the deal it made. I wouldn’t expect a different result with a sports team.
If a politician is aware of this and formulates a deal anyway, I’d have to suspect a kickback of some sort….but then, I’m from Jersey.