Category: Tampa Bay

Imagine, USF now has 6,300 residential students. For those of us who remember “Drive Thru U” and “(merely a) commuter school,” it’s a reminder that USF, which has long aspired to be a residential campus in a major urban market, keeps checking boxes of goals realized. Go, Bulls.

This community lost one of its natural resources with the recent passing of revered public servant Delia Sanchez, 93. She was the avatar of Head Start locally. She paid it forward for generations. R.I.P, Delia.

So, Janet Echelman, a Bay Area native, is on board with the new location for her St. Petersburg signature aerial-banner art. For $2.8 million, of course she’s on board. No matter that aerial art looks so much better from a distance–where it doesn’t seem like a marketing banner for some weekend festival. But no home-town discount?

The dominoes keep falling.

For too long, the Hillsborough River was a neglected, seemingly disdained, asset. Think barges and waterfront wharves, warehouses and surface parking lots. What minarets? In the 1980s NCNB agreed to bring its state headquarters here if it could have a riverfront parcel near the Kennedy Boulevard Bridge. Deal. Then came the Performing Arts Center—and the belated acknowledgment that if you are fortunate enough to be a city with a river running through it, you should feel compelled to take advantage of it. Hell, look what San Antonio did with a creek.

It wasn’t easy, and it isn’t finished. But a lot of attitudinal and developmental-priority dominoes were starting to tumble. Now there are water taxis, paddle boats and dinner cruises instead of industrial barges—an apt metaphor for forward movement. A high-profile Riverwalk connects the urban-vibe bookends of the Tampa History Center area and the multi-faceted, repurposed Heights development. It’s a multi-mayor vision being realized. And with Julian Lane Park, the west bank is becoming more than the University of Tampa and an aesthetics-challenged Blake High School.

Now another domino, a more contemporary one, has fallen along the waterfront: Channelside Bay Plaza. Originally heralded and marketed as within walking distance of the arena, aquarium and convention center, it struggled from the day it opened in 2001. Rearranging commercial deck chairs never helped. The orientation was off: Much of the waterfront was walled off.

Until now. Strategic Property Partners, the Jeff Vinik-Cascade Investment development company, is morphing CBP into Sparkman Wharf. Its charge: to undo what was ignored in 2001. While there will be office lofts and retail, the visitor-magnet centerpiece will be a recreational lawn with shade trees that will be literally open to the waterfront. We’re talking dining garden, biergarten and a stage and LED screen that will carry, yes, Lightning games.

But, no, you can’t go to the movies there anymore. Anymore than you can go back to a time when the Hillsborough River was an unappreciated, neglected natural asset—not an urban destination.

While we ponder the formidable variables involved in an Ybor stadium for the Rays, the ultimate reality hasn’t changed.

When you have a bay-dividing region that is absent serious mass transit, has few corporate headquarters, features roof-requiring weather, has plenty of summer diversions besides baseball and is home to lots of people with other baseball allegiances, you have quite the challenge. If your stadium location and design aren’t spot on, you have no chance of preventing a franchise relocation to another market. MLB knows it. The Rays know it. Montreal knows it. Hell, Ray Naimoli knows it.

An urban core, synergy-exuding Tampa-Ybor stadium just makes sense. Tampa is the hub of the 18^th largest metro market in the U.S. The downtown/ Water Street Tampa/Ybor City revitalization has more in store.

The facility will have to be built for more than serious baseball fans, because there aren’t enough. We’re talking millennials and families. Those who need interactive social media enclaves and kiss cams and those who need interactive entertainment for kids. Baseball in a coolly-designed, next-generation stadium is the requisite vehicle.

The facility will also have to be ready for repurposing when baseball isn’t on the calendar. It has to be a community—in the broadest sense—destination. From kitchens that offer culinary classes and a fitness center to yoga classes and Wi-Fi work spaces.

To the Rays’ credit, their plans are open to all of the above.

What they don’t include in the $892 million project, however, is how it will all be paid for. We don’t know how much—beyond $150 million—the Rays will actually ante up. We don’t know all the details about public money sources—from resort taxes to tax increment financing to a federal economic opportunity zone. And most importantly, we don’t know how the business community will do at crunch time. That includes Pinellas County—most notably Tech Data and Jabil. It also means Mosaic, WellCare and Bloomin’ Brands. That means serious season-ticket commitments and serious money for naming rights.

It would also be beyond helpful if the streetcar becomes more transit than amenity and if Jeff Vinik decides to buy in.

Some metro areas, such as New York and Los Angeles can—and have—lost professional sports franchises. They didn’t miss a beat. Tampa Bay is not New York or Los Angeles.

As St. Petersburg has evolved from parochial to hip, there has been a world-class constant: The downtown waterfront. Refreshingly, aesthetically, open and green. Natural beauty protected and preserved. It rivals the best waterfront vistas in the, yes, world.

Now the city is well on its way to putting up a massive (more than 300-feet long), $3 million art piece–a Janet Echelman net sculpture–on the St. Petersburg waterfront. Thin line between colorful, signature art and sacrilegious, tacky clutter. Very thin.

Unsolicited advice: Don’t do it. That waterfront is uniquely special. For more than a century, St. Pete has made it a sacrosanct priority–no matter how many developers salivated over it. Now snob appeal–or public art cachet–has it primed for an out of scale sculpture to highlight and help market the new Pier District.

St. Pete and Mayor Rick Kriseman: You have a priceless asset in your uncompromised, peerless waterfront. Keep it that way.

If you’re a true-blue, liberal Democrat, Mayor Bob Buckhorn is not a soul mate. If you’re a Republican, he’s on the other team,  even if he has attended some GOP-candidate fundraisers involving friends. If you’re a Tampa-first sort, Buckhorn is (with the exception of relations with Cuba) your pragmatic guy. So talk of Democrats being wary of Buckhorn’s cordial–hardly “bromantic”–relationship with Tea Party Gov. Rick Scott seems exaggerated.

Recall that Buckhorn didn’t like what Scott did with Obama Administration high-speed rail money, and he wasn’t pleased with Scott not being helpful when it came to trying to create a gun-free zone around the GOP Convention in 2012. He hasn’t forgotten, but he hasn’t lost his focus. He and his city still needed Scott’s help going forward.

Scott helped with TIA expansion. He wants to be a credit-taking catalyst in a better-late-than-never private-sector, Orlando-to-Tampa, high-speed rail scenario. He’s been involved in state money allocated for the street car system and placing that (Rays stadium-designated) Ybor site on the state’s list for a federal tax break. Sure, it’s self-serving, I-4 Corridor-anchor strategy in an senatorial election year–but it’s no less helpful to Tampa.

As usual, the sound-bite-smitten mayor had a vintage response to the “bromance” skeptics. “Ultimately, my job as the mayor is to work with everybody who is willing to work with me,” said Buckhorn. “Democratic, Republican or vegan.”