St. Petersburg City Council members want to pause negotiations over redeveloping Tropicana Field — expressing concerns about a lack of guidance in what they're looking for.
Some council members say they feel Mayor Ken Welch bypassed them when it comes to plans for the 84-acre Historic Gas Plant District. He's ready to choose a developer from the nine proposals that were submitted this week.
The resolution asked for a pause while an independent consultant does a comprehensive study of what the city is seeking.
Council member Gina Driscoll said there are aspects of all nine proposals that she couldn't support.
"We haven't even had discussions as a group with the administration about what we are looking for, let alone what an independent study could show us," she said.
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The non-binding proposal came from Commissioner Brandi Gabbard. She's running against Welch for mayor.
"It is my fear that without council having any sort of guidance, any sort of conversation, that a selection will be made and then we will have to just respond again to what is being brought to us," she said.
The council would have the final vote if any of the nine proposals is selected by the mayor. But they wanted an independent study done to update what the city is seeking since the Tampa Bay Rays backed out of their deal to redevelop the site.
Tropicana Field will host the Rays through at least the end of the 2028 regular season. The team is now negotiating with Hillsborough County to relocate the team to Tampa.
"There are absolute non-negotiables that I have that pretty much every proposal would be a 'no' vote from me because of that," Driscoll said. "We haven't even had discussions as a group with the administration about what we are looking for, let alone what an independent study could show us."
Council member Deborah Figgs-Sanders cast one of the two "no" votes against pausing negotiations, along with Copley Gerdes. She supports a plan to include low-income housing and services for people who were dislocated when the baseball stadium was built.
Figgs-Sanders said walking away from the proposals could mean the property gets sold one parcel at a time.
"That's gentrification by block by block to me," she said. "But again, I say, stop playing with my people. Stop playing with the history that the Gas Plant means to the city of St. Petersburg."
Figgs-Sanders said she was baptized at a church that was bulldozed to build what eventually became Tropicana Field in the 1980s.
"They didn't take it from us parcel by parcel. They've moved communities. They've moved neighborhoods. They've moved businesses. It wasn't parcel by parcel," she said. "So when I hear parcel by parcel, that really does touch me in a way that, no, I'm not going to support anything where we can have privatization come in, private sales, parcel by parcel to take away the dreams of the descendants."
But Welch has vowed to go ahead with the project, saying extensive studies have already be done. In a letter to the council, he said, "The time for action is now."
"There are some who believe we should continue to further delay this development, but I want to be clear as I reaffirm my position - we should move forward to fulfill the decades-long promise of equitable and beneficial development of the site," Welch wrote to the council.
The proposals are listed below in alphabetical order.
- Ark Ellison Horus
- Foundation Vision Partners
- Freedom Communities Company
- Logical Sites Inc
- Pinellas County Housing Authority
- Reparations Land Trust and Development Authority
- Tempo Novus
- The Burg Bid LLC
- The Tampa Bay Boom Inc.
