PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. — St. Petersburg city leaders are set to discuss the Rays stadium deal once again during Thursday's city council meeting.
Several agreements need to be approved for the deal to move forward. On Thursday, three agreements will go ahead of the council for the first reading.
The meeting is being met with pushback.
“We want to slow down this process because we feel like this is a 30-year infrastructure process, and we want to make sure this gets done right," Michael McGrath with the Sierra Club said.
The Sierra Club is one of several groups pushing city leaders to pump the brakes on this deal.
One agreement relates to rezoning, and another is an amendment to the In Town CRA.
City council will discuss increasing the redevelopment program budget from about $232 million to around $574 million. Officials plan to use $287 million to help pay for the stadium to be rebuilt.
They will also discuss a vesting agreement, which involves examining how the project aligns with the city's comprehensive goals.
Timeline of Rays Stadium Development
McGrath said his group wants the deal to be climate resilient and reflect clean energy goals.
“I think it would be very reasonable to ask for this facility to be a location where people can evacuate to locally seek shelter from a storm,” he said.
McGrath explained in order to do that, the building would need to be Red Cross-certified to withstand a Category 5 hurricane.
“We also feel it should have a solar power microgrid. When power goes out on regular grid, they should be able to power the facility and nearby community to give power back to folks,” McGrath said.
Dan Huber with the Suncoast Sierra Club, along with other organizations and residents, rallied outside St. Pete City Hall on Thursday afternoon.
"We absolutely don't want to kill this deal," said Huber. "The Rays are a very important member of this community, but there's a lot of reasons why the deal needs to be fixed."
Huber said over the past couple of months, it seems city leaders have woken up to the extent to which some people are unhappy with this deal.
Faith in Florida members also attended the rally. Dylan Dames, an organizer with the group, weighed in on if he felt their concerns were being heard.
"The city's listening, what we say is being documented and these meetings being presented to city council. The mayor himself has published a report of his tours where he asks people what they want to see at the Gas Plant, but none of those concerns have actually made it into the development agreement," said Dames. "So it’s not a question about whether or not we’re being heard, it’s about how seriously the city is taking those demands in the redevelopment of the site itself.”
For Faith in Florida, a focus has been on affordable housing, calling for bold, non-market affordable housing solutions.
"We really want housing that's made affordable for people making $20 an hour or less," said Dames. "Almost half of St. Pete is rent burdened, so these are our teachers, artists, service industry workers. We need real, perpetual, truly affordable housing for people that make the kind of wages that we do."
Meanwhile, earlier this week, the Taxpayer Protection Agency sent the city of St. Pete a letter that read,
This proposal is a bad deal for St. Petersburg taxpayers and would divert economic resources away from other parts of the area. Subsidies for wealthy private sports teams are antithetical to proper stewardship of taxpayer dollars.
Another big concern with the redevelopment is the amount of parking. Renderings from the St. Pete City Council meeting show only two parking garages with about 1,200 total combined spaces.
Earlier today, ABC Action News spoke with St. Pete Council Member Richie Floyd, who has been vocal about this issue.
"My main concern right now is, we obviously need places for people to park there. We do have, you know, the best transit in the area connected to the site in the SunRunner bus line, but we're going to need places for people to park whenever they get to the park. And right now, the stadium agreement only includes 1,200 parking spaces and two parking garages, when there's 6,000 spaces out there already. And so my concern that I've been bringing up is, we're not planning on just putting a bunch of surface parking the same as we did before. There's going to be other parking garages, park 'n' rides, stuff like that. Things that can get people to the stadium. I just want to make sure there's not a ton of surface parking. So we don't go redevelop this site and end up with a bunch of parking lots the same as we have," said Council Member Floyd.
Floyd said the concern is not just about the aesthetics of the new development but also about the functionality of the land.
"A parking lot that sits empty, most of the time, is not good land use, especially in our city where we're surrounded by water and running short on land. And so I think that's really the bigger concern is, are we going to get like bang for our buck on this property," Floyd said.
What solutions are possible to fix the parking lot problem? How can the city and developers make sure they provide adequate parking and transportation options while making the best use of the land? Council Member Floyd said it's all in the fine print.
"So in the agreement, the developer has to provide certain things and can't do other things. And that's what I'm looking for here is some sort of limits to how much surface parking can be placed on site. So that way, over the long term, we replace surface parking lots. Yeah, sure. Maybe we have park 'n' garages, maybe we have parking rides, but we replaced them with land that's being used all the time instead of just sitting there empty a lot of time."
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