In 2022, Gov. Ron DeSantis was blunt and concise about using tax dollars for professional sports.
“I don’t support giving taxpayer dollars to sports stadiums, period,” he said to enthusiastic applause at a news conference in Orlando.
DeSantis had been asked about his veto of a $35 million appropriation by the Florida legislature for a Tampa Bay Rays spring training and youth sports facility in Pasco County.
Three years later, DeSantis was almost as emphatic discussing a new Rays stadium in the Tampa Bay area.
“We are not taking your tax dollars to do any stadium at the state level. It’s just not going to happen,” he said at a 2025 news conference.
Today, with the Rays under new ownership led by a major DeSantis and Republican donor, the governor sounds different – in a way that even some of his Republican supporters are calling a flip-flop.
“Baseball belongs in Tampa Bay … The state is going to be supporting this proposal to use this Hillsborough College location to be the site of the new stadium,” he said in a Feb. 3 news conference at the college on a Rays proposal for a stadium on the campus.
He effusively praised the new ownership group, headed by Patrick Zalupski, a Jacksonville home building executive.
The owners have “a compelling vision” and “have really thought hard about what you need to succeed in this day and age,” the Governor said. “I was very impressed to see how they’re thinking about that.”
DeSantis’s office didn’t respond to inquiries about whether he has changed his position on subsidies for pro sports stadiums or why.
A few weeks after his Feb. 3 comments, DeSantis led a move by the state Cabinet to give Hillsborough College 22 acres of state-owned land next to the campus so it can be included in the Rays package.
During the Cabinet meeting, DeSantis said the land wasn’t worth much, calling it “an underutilized area – not the best area.”
“Honestly I don’t know that it’s worth very much outside of this proposal.”
Attorney General James Uthmeier, also a Zalupski contribution recipient, echoed that.
The documents published in connection with the Cabinet’s consideration of the land transfer didn’t include an appraisal of its value.
According to the Hillsborough County Property Appraiser’s Office, the 22 acres, though not taxed, is assessed at $21 million, and includes buildings and improvements valued at $26.5 million.
The buildings include a Hillsborough tax collector’s office, which Tax Collector Nancy Millan said in a letter to the county commissioners is the busiest of her office’s eight locations, serving 900 visitors a day with a wide variety of government services in an underserved area.
Replacing it with comparable square footage, parking and public access would be “a complex undertaking” she estimated would cost $16-20 million.
She asked that the commissioners “leave the existing Drew Park Tax Collector's Office untouched and unaffected” by a Rays deal.
The total package of land contemplated in the Rays’ proposal, including the land given by the Cabinet to the college, is about 135 acres bounded by Dale Mabry Highway, Tampa Bay Boulevard and Dr. Martin Luther King and Lois avenues.
Under the Rays’ proposal, a portion of that land would be retained by the school for a new campus, and the rest leased to the Rays for a new stadium and residential/commercial complex. No details were released.
With DeSantis’ support, the state Senate has included $50 million in its fiscal year 2026-27 budget proposal to replace college facilities that would be destroyed in building the Rays complex.
But the state House, which has clashed with DeSantis recently on several issues, doesn’t include the money in its budget proposal, and the two chambers haven’t yet finalized the budget.
The appraiser’s office assesses the total land package at $49 million, with $112.2 million worth of buildings and improvements – mostly campus facilities.
But on the open market, the land could be worth several times that, said county Commissioner Josh Wostal, who suggested the land transaction could be “a crazy giveaway.”
Since 2016, Zalupski’s company, Dream Finders, has given slightly more than $2.1 million to Florida political committees and candidates, the vast majority to Republicans and GOP-oriented committees.
That includes $325,477 since 2022 to the state Republican Party; $285,000 to Republican legislative leadership committees; and $53,000 to Uthmeier.
In 2023, DeSantis appointed Zalupski, who is reportedly a billionaire, to the University of Florida Board of Trustees. A few months later, Zalupski gave $250,000 to DeSantis’s Never Back Down PAC.
DeSantis did not have such a cozy political relationship with the Rays’ former ownership group headed by Stuart Sternberg, who sold the team to the Zalupski group last year after a deal for a new stadium in St. Petersburg fell through.
The Rays under Sternberg did contribute heavily to the Florida Republican Party but also gave to some Democratic-oriented committees and candidates.
Sternberg himself has given heavily to Democrats including U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, Charlie Crist, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. In 2018, Sternberg gave $3,000 to Andrew Gillum, then running against DeSantis for governor.
But when DeSantis vetoed the Rays spring training project in Pasco in 2022, he cited a different donation in addition to his philosophical opposition.
Days after the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, the Rays gave $50,000 to Everytown for Gun Safety, a newly formed gun safety advocacy group, and tweeted, “This cannot become the new normal … The Rays organization stands committed to actionable change.” In his news conference, after saying he doesn’t “support giving taxpayer dollars to professional sports stadiums, period,” DeSantis added, “Clearly, it’s inappropriate to be doing taxpayer dollars for professional sports stadiums. It’s also inappropriate to subsidize political activism of a private corporation.”
The Rays proposal has divided Republicans, including exacerbating DeSantis’ antagonism with the state House leadership over issues including property tax reform and the investigation of First Lady Casey DeSantis’ Hope Florida charity.
“Make no mistake: This deal will land squarely on taxpayers’ shoulders,” wrote two Hillsborough Republican state House members, Mike Owen and Danny Alvarez, in a recent opinion column.
“Residents have been told there isn’t enough money for roads, stormwater systems, water and sewer upgrades, or public safety, like the growing needs for more fire stations. But there’s plenty for a stadium? That contradiction … is indefensible.”
In an interview with the Florida Trident, Owen said he won’t vote against the state budget over the issue and wants the deal to go forward to keep the Rays – “But I’m not a big fan of funding any stadium out of taxpayer commitment.”
He said DeSantis’s position “sounds like a change in policy. I agree with the original stance.”
Among the Republican Hillsborough County commissioners, Wostal and Chris Boles have expressed skepticism or outright opposition to a key part of the deal – using $467 million from the county’s Community Investment Tax to help pay for the $2.3 billion stadium.
Wostal said DeSantis hasn’t called him about the issue, but that he’s heard the governor is calling other Republican commissioners to urge support for the deal.
“I have a deep respect for the governor and I will continue to support him after this, but I will be acting to protect my constituents and our local revenues on this issue,” he told the Trident. But Republican Commissioner Ken Hagan has said the deal can’t go forward without the CIT money.
Republican Commissioner Christine Miller, appointed to the post by Desantis, is said by some insiders to favor the deal but she and Republican Commissioner Donna Cameron Cepeda haven’t staked out a public position and neither responded to messages for comment.
Local conservative political activist Sam Rashid, who’s active in county elections, said he’s an ardent DeSantis backer but will fight the governor on this issue.
“It is an absolute flip-flop by Gov. DeSantis,” he said. “I’ll fight it where we can at the local level.”
The public is also skeptical about the deal.
A recent poll by a respected, Republican-oriented polling firm, commissioned by Tampa Sports Authority member Andy Scaglione, found substantial majorities of likely Hillsborough voters favor a Rays stadium in Tampa, but oppose using CIT money for the project by a similar substantial margin.
This article first appeared on Florida Trident and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
