Hillsborough County<\/a> commissioners remain divided over the county\u2019s share of the proposal, with the Rays requesting $750 million in taxpayer funding.<\/p>\nDig deeper<\/p>\n
Commissioner Joshua Wostal raised concerns over 3,100 emails sent to every single county commissioner before an April workshop.<\/p>\n
Wostal alleges the Rays used automated “bot” emails and paid online advertising to artificially inflate public support for the stadium deal. According to Wostal, Hillsborough County staff traced back the spam emails to an IP address located in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
“They essentially just started pounding our email servers leading up to the workshop,” Wostal said. “Making it look like there was a large swell of local support.”<\/p>\n
No official vote was taken during Tuesday\u2019s workshop. The Rays are facing a June 1 deadline to finalize the agreement.<\/p>\n
![\"<div>Courtesy:](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/7c8da3cc413fdb1cf4a94f12258fec8f.png\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Babby said the project would help create economic activity and bring the community together.<\/p>\n
“No sport like baseball gets the opportunity with more than 81 games a year to bring [the] community together and generate economic impact,” Babby said.<\/p>\n
What’s next<\/p>\n
Tampa City Council plans to vote on the ballpark deal after the Hillsborough County Commission takes action. However, no vote on the proposal is currently scheduled for the county commission\u2019s meeting on May 20.<\/p>\n
FOX 13 reached out to the Rays about the spam email allegations, and we have not heard back from them.<\/p>\n
The Source<\/p>\n
Information for this story came from statements from the Tampa Bay Rays, interviews with Tampa City Council members, an interview with a Hillsborough County commissioner and previous reporting on FOX 13 News.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Brief Tampa City Council spent hours debating the Rays’ $2.3 billion ballpark during a public workshop on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260383,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[28772,832,11284,10234,276,112578,23181,66013,135,610,137,136,48412],"class_list":["post-260382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-alan-clendenin","tag-city-council","tag-city-of-tampa","tag-commissioner","tag-hillsborough-county","tag-public-support","tag-rays","tag-stadium-deal","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-city-council","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news","tag-the-rays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260382","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=260382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260382\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"<div>Courtesy:](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/b31b360cdecdb261a7cae155a55e155c.png\"\/)
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/c75e312a9e510ed61c02b73c2573d763.png\"\/)
<\/p>\n