Sunday, March 27, 2016

Four Takeaways from This Weekend's Stadium Saga News

  1. It was good to see the Tampa Bay Times pen an editorial echoing my post from last week on publicly vetting the majority of Tampa stadium talks. This is an important topic that appears to need a lot more attention.
  2. St. Petersburg is keeping it's stadium campaign public, vetting 15 proposals from well-known companies to redevelop Tropicana Field - with or without a baseball stadium. One team I'm keeping an eye on - Stantec, one of Jeff Vinik's big Channelside developers, who listed the Tampa Bay Lightning's Rob Canton as a project consultant for the potential Trop job.
  3. A Trib editorial made some nice points about Spring Training's economic impact by drawing out-of-state tourists, especially compared to the much higher costs of a full MLB stadium, which tend to target locals.
  4. But it's also worth mentioning that same Trib editorial dismisses "academics" who don't believe in MLB teams' economic impact claims, calling their warnings "nonsense." Too bad they didn't read the embarrassing Rays spring training economic impact report from 2014. Or the report from Tampa's 2012 Republican National Convention.  Sadly, what's really "nonsense" is the fuzzy math the Trib editorial writers use without economic justification.  But who needs economics when you're cheerleading for new stadiums?






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