Can we afford a new stadium?

The good people of Austin saved about 75% of the cost of a new performing arts center by rebuilding their 40 year old Palmer Auditorium and recycling building materials. The new Long Center is bringing them national attention.

St. Petersburg city leaders spent a quarter of a billion dollars giving us a stadium but now tell us it's obsolete (oops!) and must be scraped down to the ground and hauled away. They say it was poorly planned from the beginning and our only option is to start over.

Ballet is not baseball but we could learn from Austin's ability to re-purpose an old structure and to do it without taxpayer money, and if we can't keep the Tampa Bay Rays perhaps we can find a new and better use for their old home.

Taxpayers were told that we need an open air stadium and that a new waterfront site a dozen blocks away was perfect. Two years later the team still wants a new stadium but now wants to leave our city. Why doesn't city council evaluate the costs and benefits of retrofitting Tropicana Field with a retractable roof?

As to a new location, we could spruce up the Martin Luther King Street Business District and turn this into a very desirable location for a fraction of the cost of moving. This entrance way to downtown suffers from decades of neglect.

The Long Center on CNN

About the Long Center

http://www.thelongcenter.org/long_center_on_cnn.aspx

Post Election Surprise: $450M taxpayer subsidized ballpark

Secret deal making behind the stadium proposal

Future restoration of Booker Creek

Booker Creek could be turned into an amenity.

Booker Creek reborn

New open space and improved drainage in the Bartlett Park neighborhood.