According to our newsgathering partners at the Tampa Bay Times<\/a>, building the stadium would cost about $2.3 billion.<\/p>\nThat is a billion dollars more than a previous proposal for a new stadium in St. Petersburg two years ago.<\/p>\n
Tampa Councilman Charlie Miranda on Wednesday said the Rays ownership should foot the entire bill for it.<\/p>\n
“If they have the money to buy it, they should have the money to build their own house,” he said.<\/p>\n
Two weeks ago, Rays CEO Ken Babby spoke on the Hunks Talk Junk podcast about the need for a partnership.<\/p>\n
“We\u2019re going to do our part. We\u2019re going to write a big check. We already wrote one to buy the team,” Babby said at the time. “We are going to write another big one to buy the ballpark, but we need a good public-private partnership.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Next week, the Tampa Sports Authority is expected to vote on whether there first should be an economic study done for the city and the county.<\/p>\n
Miranda said he welcomes it \u2014 as long as it is by an independent group.<\/p>\n
\u201cI support any study, but it\u2019s got to be verified,\u201d Miranda said. \u201cI want it statistically from a non-committed organization \u2014 not committed to them, not committed to us. An unbiased study that\u2019s done so everybody understands where you\u2019re at, including the land that they\u2019re going to have, that they pay no tax. How would, we the city, benefit from that if they weren\u2019t here? It\u2019s got to be a two-way study, it can\u2019t just be one way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Spectrum Bay News 9 reached out to the Rays on Wednesday but didn’t hear back.<\/p>\n
Most professional stadiums have been built using public-private partnerships, but there are exceptions. Gilette Stadium, home of the NFL’s New England Patriots, recently got a $225 million renovation that was completely funded by the owner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 Leaders in Hillsborough County could soon be asked to take a deeper look at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":126322,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[274,4252,276,115,596,29208,275,135,3815,137,136,278,835],"class_list":{"0":"post-135761","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tampa","8":"tag-app-top-stories","9":"tag-dalia-dangerfield","10":"tag-hillsborough-county","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-pinellas-county","13":"tag-rays-stadium","14":"tag-spectrum-news-staff","15":"tag-tampa","16":"tag-tampa-bay-rays","17":"tag-tampa-headlines","18":"tag-tampa-news","19":"tag-top-stories","20":"tag-vod"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/126322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}