Woman behind stadium site had eye on another location

The woman proposing a baseball stadium for downtown Tampa's Channel District shopped around the same idea for the Tampa Heights area.

About 18 months ago, Claire Clements showed a detailed artist's rendering of a stadium to The Beck Group, a large development firm that is building a regional headquarters building in Tampa Heights, said Mark House, a regional executive with Beck. The property in question was around 50 acres along the Hillsborough River north of the University of Tampa.

Clements acknowledged she looked at Tampa Heights as a potential stadium location more than a year ago, but said it now is a dead issue.

"I'm not doing anything with the Heights," she said Wednesday.

When asked if she's trying to line up other parcels around the Tampa Bay area for a stadium, she declined to comment.

Clements, 53, has been in the news lately for trying to secure the rights to land in downtown Tampa's Channel District for a Major League Baseball stadium. The Channel District land sits just north of the Forum, bounded by Channelside Drive to the south and between Meridian and Nebraska avenues.

Head of a real estate firm called Land & Sand, Clements has steadfastly declined to reveal whether she's working alone to line up options on the Channel District land or working on behalf of someone else.

"The only thing I know about her plans is what's been reported in the press," Michael Kalt, the Tampa Bay Rays executive in charge of the stadium issue, said of Clements.

The team is under contract to play at Tropicana Field in downtown St. Petersburg until 2027, but the Rays have said they can't continue to play there until then. Meantime, local politicians say there is no funding for any publicly-financed stadium, and it's not clear when there will be.

Even if the Tampa Heights proposal is dead, it suggests that Clements wasn't married to the Channel District land, and instead, was looking around for various potential sites. She acknowledged looking throughout Hillsborough and Pinellas counties.

"My only goal would be to keep baseball in the region," she said.

The Heights of Tampa LLC owns the riverfront property and has proposed a $500 million office and residential development. The first office building is expected to open there in April, housing The Beck Group's regional office and other companies.

Darren Booth, development manager for the Heights project, said he can't say whether he spoke with Clements about a stadium at the Tampa Heights property because of a confidentiality agreement. But he insisted nothing is in the works.

"I'm not working on any stadium here in the Heights," he said.