Group: New Rays' stadium should go outside downtown St. Pete

A committee studying the Tampa Bay Rays' stadium options seemed unanimous Thursday that the team needs a new stadium and that it should be outside of downtown St. Petersburg.

Now comes the tough work of selling that idea to the public.

The ABC Coalition, a committee of business leaders created by St. Petersburg, met Thursday in Clearwater to cement members' ideas on the stadium issue. The coalition has been meeting for nearly a year to debate whether to renovate Tropicana Field, build a new stadium in downtown St. Petersburg or elsewhere, how to build fan and corporate support and other issues.

The coalition will use its conclusions to make recommendations to St. Petersburg, which has a stadium agreement with the Rays through 2027. If people were expecting debate Thursday over some of the coalition's thornier issues - such as whether the Rays even need a new stadium - they wouldn't get any. The coalition appeared in uniformity over most issues.

Among their conclusions:

- A new stadium is required. Renovating Tropicana Field so that it is acceptable by modern standards would cost $200 million to $475 million. Even if those improvements were made, it still wouldn't be on a par with newly constructed facilities, the group has determined.

- Downtown St. Petersburg is probably not the right location for a new stadium. The ABC Coalition studied five potential stadium sites - downtown St. Petersburg, the Mid-Pinellas area just over the Howard Frankland Bridge, Tampa's West Shore area, downtown Tampa and the Florida State Fairgrounds.

- Downtown St. Petersburg and the fairgrounds are at a significant disadvantage in demographics, it found. For example, both areas lag behind in average household income and in number of business employees and level of business revenues. Those two areas would probably work only if any new stadium were "iconic" enough to overcome the problems with demographics, the coalition said.

- Any new stadium would likely involve significant costs to the public. Recent history with stadiums suggests professional teams put up about 20 to 30 percent of the stadium costs themselves, with the rest from public sources.

Taxpayers currently pay about $12 million per year paying off the bonds issued to build Tropicana Field. Any future stadium would require annual payments "significantly higher" than $12 million, but the coalition fretted over putting a figure on it.

In fact, much of Thursday's discussion concerned how the coalition could issue recommendations and still make them palatable to the public. Craig Sher, a local shopping center developer and member of the coalition, urged the coalition to include the word "St. Petersburg" in any mention of the potential Mid-Pinellas stadium site. He seemed resolute that people realize that Mid-Pinellas is technically inside of St. Petersburg - a nod to the controversy over potentially moving the stadium out of that city.

Another lengthy discussion concerned how to address the touchy subject of the Rays' own contribution to a new stadium.

The ABC Coalition considered including in its recommendations that the Rays should be expected to pay 20 to 30 percent of a new stadium's cost, in line with other teams. However, coalition member Alan Bomstein worried about adding such a definitive figure. In reality the Rays' contribution could vary greatly from that, he said.

After the meeting, Jeff Lyash, a Progress Energy executive and chairman of the coalition, acknowledged the difficulty of selling some of the coalition's recommendations to the public, including that the public will need to put up at least some of the stadium's costs.

"The public may think that if there's going to be a stadium that the Rays should pay for it," Lyash said after the meeting. "But that's never going to happen. It hasn't happened anywhere."