Tampa\u2019s Community Redevelopment Agency is again delaying a vote on allowing negotiations to begin on its portion of a financing package to build a new stadium for the Tampa Bay Rays.<\/p>\n
The CRA\u2019s board, made up of city council members, voted 4-2 Thursday morning to push discussions and a vote on negotiating on a non-binding memorandum of understanding until it\u2019s Aug. 23 meeting.<\/p>\n
A previous motion to delay it until the July meeting failed and a conversation about completely shelving the discussion for the time being went nowhere.<\/p>\n
Council members Charlie Miranda and Lynn Hurtak voted against moving the item to August. Both argued that the matter should be taken off the agenda, with Miranda saying the board and the city should pause discussions until after November\u2019s statewide vote on a constitutional amendment to cut property taxes.<\/p>\n
Speaking from the dais, Miranda says the potential budgetary hit the city could take if voters approve the amendment \u201cI guarantee is going to be over $35 (million), $40 million the first year.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s my calculation,” he says. \u201cI\u2019m not a math genius. I just know it better than most. Remember what I said.\u201d<\/p>\n
How the decision to delay the vote will affect the timeline to begin construction on a new $2.3 billion ballpark on the site of Hillsborough College\u2019s Dale Mabry campus is unclear.<\/p>\n
The city and Hillsborough County have both approved negotiations<\/a> to begin on details for the public funding portion for the proposed stadium based off of the memorandum of understanding<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Rays did not immediately comment Thursday morning on how \u2014 or if \u2014 the delay will affect negotiations.<\/p>\n A spokesperson for Tampa Mayor Jane Castor says in an email that \u201cshe has no comment on the CRA\u2019s scheduling vote, which shouldn\u2019t hamper ongoing efforts to keep the Rays in Tampa Bay.\u201d<\/p>\n The nonbinding agreement between the Rays, the county, the city of Tampa, the Tampa Sports Authority and the Tampa CRA calls for the team to pay about 57.5% of the cost for the ballpark that would be built on the site of Hillsborough College.<\/p>\n According to a breakdown of the financing, the team will pay about $1.32 billion for the cost of a new 31,000 seat ballpark. Hillsborough will put in approximately $796 million with the city pitching in about $80 million and the CRA about $100 million.<\/p>\n The team will be responsible for all cost overruns and will pay for the development of a mixed-use project to be built around the stadium.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tampa\u2019s Community Redevelopment Agency is again delaying a vote on allowing negotiations to begin on its portion of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304096,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[135,137,136],"class_list":["post-304095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304095","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=304095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304095\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}