The number to hold is $976 million. That is the public contribution to a $2.3 billion ballpark for the Tampa Bay Rays, and under the memorandum of understanding signed in May, it was split $796 million from Hillsborough County and $180 million from the City of Tampa. [1]
Councilman Bill Carlson says that split is now being renegotiated toward something more equal, after Rays chief executive Ken Babby met council members individually. [1]
Meeting members one at a time is a legal way to lobby a council, and it is also a structure that keeps a negotiation about nearly a billion public dollars out of any room where the public can hear all of it at once. Nothing in the reporting suggests the meetings were improper. The point is what they are for: a financing framework that changes shape between public votes, presented to the body only after the arithmetic has been agreed elsewhere.
The council has not been passive. It pulled a Community Redevelopment Agency vote on the memorandum and rejected a land-use transfer tied to the project. [1] Mayor Jane Castor's response was that those votes jeopardise the negotiations. [1]
That exchange is the whole civic argument in miniature. From the council's side, votes are the mechanism by which a public body decides whether to spend public money. From the mayor's side, the same votes are friction that endangers a deal. Both are true, and only one of them is what a council is for.
What happens next is a number moving between two governments' budgets. The Rays' contribution is not what is being renegotiated. The public's is.
