A Special Call for a Blank Page

[Update - 10/29/26] Council approved a revised agreement 4-3 Thursday. The version presented that morning added a $600,000 neighborhood fund and an advisory-only committee whose council member the Rays approve.

[Update - 10/28/26] - I haven’t updated the post title or the piece because while there was a document released Monday of where they proposed to allocate funds as part of the benefit agreement, there’s nothing in the agreement that binds them to that. The project list might as well as be a blank piece of paper and it was only appropriate the original agreement was published without one. It’s only $4.2 million over five years. It can be delayed if there’s an extended impasse with the union and a lockout. It exempts the CBA from the city’s own ordinance governing CBAs. It’s all laid out in what I originally wrote.

[Editors Note] At some point on Monday 10/26/26 the city uploaded a second copy of the CBA which does contain an Exhibit A. The original copy with the blank document is still attached to the lone agenda item. Two files of the same name, one with Exhibit A, one without. Nothing else in the agreement changed. I will also note per council rules “All petitions, communications, staff reports, resolutions, ordinances, and other matters intended for the consideration of the City Council shall be filed with the Office of the City Clerk on or before 2:00 p.m. on the Thursday prior to the meeting of the City Council.” The draft agenda is generally published late on Fridays. Tampa Monitor checks nightly at 7:15pm. It’s council’s prerogative to waive (or ignore) their rules but the rule was put in place for public transparency. I and Tampa Monitor operate under the assumption the rule is followed. I will also note that the funding agreement with the Rays that was published on a Friday changed significantly when it was uploaded the Wednesday before the meeting. That’s what happens when things are being rushed.

Council wasn’t supposed to meet this week. That was the schedule, anyway, and it’s why Council Member Lynn Hurtak planned to be out of town with her mother. Council will meet this week regardless: a special call meeting Thursday, Oct. 29, at 9 a.m., one item, “to discuss and take action on the Community Benefits Agreement with the Tampa Bay Rays.”

The agreement went up Friday afternoon. Thirteen pages, counting the cover memo. The part that says what the Rays will do for the city in the first five years is Exhibit A, and Exhibit A is a heading over a blank page.

A vote before Nov. 2

The meeting exists because Council Member Luis Viera leaves office at 11:59 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 2, and he wanted this vote taken before then. Viera is on the Nov. 3 ballot for the state House, and Florida’s resign-to-run law required him to submit an irrevocable resignation to do it, so his seat is empty the night before the election whether he wins or loses.

He asked for it at 3:59 p.m. on Oct. 15, at the end of a meeting where the $80 million bond resolution had tied 3-3 and then passed 4-3 once Council Member Bill Carlson phoned in from home to break the tie.

“I’m out on November 2 at midnight. For me, getting my part of the Community Benefits Agreement is something that is very, very important to me. I’ve talked about a lot of things, worked with the team on a lot of different things, and talked to the community on a lot of things. How does council feel on a special call meeting to address the Community Benefits Agreement before November 2 at midnight?”

Hurtak asked the obvious question: “Is there really a reason that you don’t think that we would carry on your goals?” Viera: “I do trust you all on that hundred percent. I would just rather be here,” because, he said, the seat will be open for a few weeks and “you never know what’s going to happen, right?”

So that’s the reason. Without Viera the six remaining members split 3-3 on the Rays, and the seventh seat is council’s own appointment on Nov. 17, which takes four of those six votes.

Senior Assistant City Attorney Rebecca Johns told council the agreement was “almost finalized. I’m still waiting for the Rays to come back with their final proposal.” Chair Alan Clendenin moved Oct. 29. Council Member Naya Young seconded. Hurtak, who said council generally keeps that week reserved, was the only no. Carlson and Council Member Charlie Miranda were already gone for the day.

Viera, after the vote: “This is very imperfect. I’ll put it that way.”

Viera’s exit isn’t the only clock on the CBA. The funding agreement council approved Aug. 27 makes signed benefits agreements with both the city and the county a condition of the county selling its stadium bonds and funding its share. Clendenin put it this way that day: “If we don’t reach an agreement on a community benefits agreement, no money is transferred.”

What council is being asked to approve

Start with the dollars, because the dollars are the only specific thing in the document. One note on the quotes that follow: the agreement’s other party is “StadCo,” Tampa Bay Rays Stadium Company, LLC. Wherever it appears, read it as the Rays.

The funding agreement left the CBA total blank for the county to fill in, and the county set it at $60 million on Aug. 28: 65% to the county, 35% to the city, which is $21 million. The draft posted Friday adds the schedule. “Following several discussions among the City, the County, and StadCo,” 20% of the $60 million, or $12 million, “will be delivered to the City and the County together during the first five (5) years.” The city’s share of that is $4.2 million. It’s “a fixed amount and is not subject to escalation, indexing, or other adjustment.”

The other $16.8 million comes later, in five-year periods, each with a new project list the Rays propose and council approves by amendment. How many periods there are, and so how long the Rays get to deliver the rest, isn’t in the document. The agreement runs “until the expiration of the term of the County CBA,” and there is no County CBA yet. The parties agree to fill in “an actual termination date” in a later amendment.

The first benefits year begins “on the date of the first annual installment of the City Contribution Amount.” That’s Jan. 1, 2027, under the funding agreement. So the five years in which the Rays deliver $4.2 million to the city are the same five years in which the city pays the Rays $80 million.

The projects are Exhibit A, the blank page, and the Rays bring the list Thursday. Whatever is on it is an estimate. The agreement says the values and timing in Exhibit A “are estimates only and may change…without amendment of this Agreement,” as long as $4.2 million worth shows up by the end of year five. The only fixed requirement is that each item fall under one of “the eight pillars” of the Rays’ own August plan: mobility, jobs, housing, youth, public safety, community, fan access, and “Governance, Transparency, and Accountability.”

Delivery can be cash, in-kind or programmatic, by the team, its foundation or a nonprofit partner, credited at the greater of cost or appraised value. The check on it is a once-a-year report from the Rays to the Mayor’s office, in a format the two of them agree on. The city can inspect the receipts once a year, at its own expense. If the Rays haven’t delivered the full $4.2 million after five years they get another year to catch up, two if they’re trying “in good faith.” After that the city’s only remedy is to sue for specific performance. It can’t hold back any of the $80 million. And if the city misses one of its own $80 million payments and doesn’t fix it within 60 days, the agreement ends and the Rays owe nothing more.

$4.2 million against the interest

The city intends to borrow at least the first $20 million of the $80 million, and the Rays pay none of the interest. Council Member Guido Maniscalco confirmed that on Oct. 15 with Chief Financial Officer Dennis Rogero: “if I recall it was four payments of $20 million and we paid the interest, which is basically we’re giving a zero percent, offering zero percent financing.” Rogero: “That remains correct.”

Hurtak, repeating a figure a public speaker had used that morning: “it’s really going to be about 140 million by the time interest is involved.” Rogero: “Yes, it’s very likely to be 140. It could be higher. You may enter a scenario where the interest is just as much as the principal.” He put the carrying cost at “about five, five and a half million dollars of annual debt service.”

Set the Rays’ $4.2 million over five years against that figure: the whole five-year benefit is less than one year of debt service on the $80 million. At Rogero’s numbers, it doesn’t even cover the interest on the first $20 million.^[1]

What Viera said would be in it

Viera’s Oct. 15 request was for “my part” of the agreement. His part, on the record, started May 5, when he told Rays CEO Ken Babby he wanted “not just affordable housing but workforce housing…for working class people, the welders, cops, teachers,” plus “job training, apprenticeships, talking about a joint police and fire substation…We’ve talked about that in private before.”

Babby: “all of those things are part of our plan, councilman.”

On May 21, before the council’s MOU vote, Viera listed “public safety, turning that from a promise into something binding,” Hillsborough College and affordable housing; that afternoon, sitting as a CRA board member, he added workforce housing and a CBA with “skill trade apprenticeships, that’s huge, making sure that they are state certified, real apprenticeships, local workers.”

On Aug. 27, the morning of the funding agreement vote: “I turn into a pumpkin on what is it, November 2, at midnight. That’s something that district 7 obviously needs a voice at the table for.” After the vote that evening he asked City Attorney Scott Steady whether the CBA could “come back to us for potential final resolution…prior to November of 2026.” Steady: “I’ll personally make a commitment that if people cooperate, I’ll bring it back.”

Steady brought it back. What came back is the frame, not the contents. The posted document has none of what Viera asked for. Neither police nor apprenticeship appears in it, and housing appears only as the name of a category. Nor is it tied to District 7 or any other part of the city. The only geography in the agreement is that benefits be delivered “within the City or principally for the benefit of residents, businesses, or institutions located in the City.” Some of it may be on the list the Rays bring Thursday. Whatever it is has to fit inside $4.2 million over five years, $840,000 a year, next to everything else on the list. For scale, Clendenin on Aug. 27: “I think we paid $24 million for the last fire station, right?”

What Young said would be in it

Young was more specific than anyone on the dais about what the CBA had to contain, and more explicit that it was the reason for her vote.

On May 5 she asked Babby about “the process or selection process for having that community benefits advisory committee.” Babby: “We will have a robust community benefits agreement process that will include a committee.” And: “The committee will be assembled including elected officials, leaders in the community, and will go through a full robust community benefits agreement process that, of course, would ultimately be approved by this body.” And: “we’ll be the largest, as we’ve said, in the city of Tampa’s history.”

On May 21 she read a prepared statement into the record before voting for the MOU. “While this proposal may be nonbinding,” she said, “I want to be very clear that my expectations moving forward are not.” She listed them: housing for people at 80 percent of area median income and below, living-wage jobs for residents, youth and returning citizens, opportunities for small, local and minority-owned businesses, and youth sports, “little league fields and programs, softball opportunities for our young women, mentoring opportunities, and apprenticeships opportunities.” Then she said what the promises had to look like to count: “Promises to upgrade parks, housing and community investment must be backed by enforceable commitments and timelines. Genuine accountability and strong protections must be built in. Just saying we’ll take care of it is not good enough. We need concrete commitments.”

On Aug. 27, voting for the funding agreement, she said the Rays had “listened and heard me,” and named what she expected in return: attention for the Belmont Heights Little League and the Yellow Jackets, hiring in Sulphur Springs and East Tampa, “quality careers, not just in concessions,” housing at 80 and 60 percent of area median income across the city including those same neighborhoods, and prime and subcontracts for women- and minority-owned businesses. Then the line that explained her vote:

“I see community input and accountability with the community benefits advisory committee to check that report card, to make sure that these community benefits are going to be delivered to the community, and that’s why I’ve been supportive of this…All the things that I have asked for and have extensively expressed to the Rays need to be a part of this agreement and needs to go to the community.”

Hurtak had put it to her minutes earlier, when the funding agreement still had a blank where the CBA went: “Did something make you change your mind or do you suddenly trust a billion dollar company to do things voluntarily that have no profit motive?” When Hurtak started to ask again after the statement, Young cut her off: “I said what I said.”

The CBA is in writing now, most of it. The question hasn’t changed.

The committee Young was counting on is close to what the city’s own rules already require. Council created the Community Benefit Program in 2023 for projects that get city money. At its top tier, for projects receiving $30 million or more, it requires two public meetings in the affected neighborhood, a community impact report, a seven-member advisory council with four members who live within half a mile of the project, a 15% minimum for small and minority-owned businesses, a state-registered apprenticeship or training program, and a benefit “commensurate with the City’s contribution to the project.” The Rays agreement declares the city has found “an alternative benefit exists that is of substantially similar value” and exempts the project from that program. The exemption is in the title of the resolution council will vote on. No community benefits committee appears anywhere in the agreement, and no list the Rays bring Thursday will add one.

The agreement’s own account of public input is four community sessions in March and April, a neighborhood association meeting on March 30, the May 5 council workshop, and what it calls “a Drew Park Community Redevelopment Agency Board meeting on June 10, 2026.” Council, which is the CRA board, met June 11. June 10 was the Drew Park citizens advisory committee’s meeting with Babby. I attended it, and there was no concrete discussion of community benefits beyond the eight pillars the Rays have been presenting since spring. At the time, the Drew Park CRA was part of the deal, set to lend the Rays $100 million. Since then, the stadium district has been carved out of the CRA, and the CRA out of the deal. The agreement still counts that meeting as public input.

The report card is the Rays’ own annual report, in a form the Rays and the Mayor’s office agree on. The list of what the $4.2 million buys, where Belmont Heights or Sulphur Springs would have to appear, is the blank page until Thursday morning. Maybe they’re on it. If they are, they share $840,000 a year with everything Viera asked for and everything in the Rays’ own plan, and one little league complex or housing project could take the whole five years’ worth.

Young has not spoken about the CBA on the record since Aug. 27. On Oct. 15 her questions on the bond were about the court validation process. She voted yes both times and seconded the Oct. 29 motion.

The Tampa Monitor emailed Young on Saturday asking how her Aug. 27 statement squares with the posted agreement, how the public is meant to weigh in on a list it will first see Thursday morning, and about the $4.2 million against the interest. She had not responded by publication. This post will be updated if she does.

Thursday

The special call is at 9 a.m. in council chambers, 315 E. Kennedy Blvd. The Rays will present Exhibit A. Public comment comes before the vote, for anyone who can be downtown at 9 on a weekday.

For the record, I endorsed Young in last year’s special election, and wrote then that the job requires council members who “do the homework.” The homework this week is thirteen pages, one of them blank, and the blank one arrives the morning of the vote.