Stadium For Rent: 6. Don't Build It. We Won't Come.

STADIUM FOR RENT:
Tampa Bay's Quest for Major League Baseball
By BOB ANDELMAN

6. Don't Build It. We Won't Come.

"It's supposed to be hard!
If it wasn't hard, everybody would do it."
-- Jimmy Dugan, Manager, Rockford Peaches

Somebody always wanted to use Pinellas County's resort taxes to build something. The Pinellas Resort Organization, on the other hand, only wanted the the money spent on advertising and marketing its beaches as a visitor destination. They thought that since the resort tax revenue was collected by them, it should be spent on them. A baseball stadium -- or a baseball team -- was too remote a prospect for support.

Pinellas County commissioner Chuck Rainey, on the other hand, believed the tourist development council's war chest should produce something he could put his hands on. Maybe his name, too.

"The Board of County Commissioners," he recalls, "said they would spend all the money on advertising for three years and establish name recognition for the Pinellas Suncoast. At the end of three years, we would go to concrete and mortar. Build something you could see."

St. Petersburg and Clearwater each mounted efforts to build a convention center using resort tax dollars. Each failed.

When the Pinellas Sports Authority decided to go after the resort tax money to build its stadium, Rainey initially resisted. Hard.

Then the commissioner had a change of heart.

"I guess it was the fact that all the convention center proposals were defeated," he says. "If a convention center had been approved; there would be no baseball stadium today."

Nobody -- nobody -- who ever saw Rainey operate believes it was that simple. The man known for starting a phone conversation with, "So what have you done for Chuck Rainey lately?" was not known for jumping from one political bandwagon to another on a whim.

"Arm-twisting?" he asks rhetorically. "Not in its strictest sense. I've seen people try to twist my arm. It in no way compared to the tactic [Jim] Healey and [Jack] Lake used. Both of them were very enthusiastic baseball fans. They were talking about jobs! They were talking about name recognition, about stability and entertainment! Something to rally around.

"I was coming from a different direction," Rainey says. "I was looking at something tangible we could use the TDC money for. We only had two choices. We couldn't buy a park. We spent on advertising or concrete and mortar.

"The timing on the stadium," he says, "was just right."
* * *

An unusual intergovernmental agency meeting convened on August 29, 1983. Among those present were members of the Pinellas County Commission, the Pinellas Suncoast Tourist Development Council, the Pinellas Sports Authority and the St. Petersburg City Council.

St. Petersburg wanted a face-to-face opportunity to explain its stadium plan and increase support in anticipation of the final push to approve the stadium.

Jim Healey handled the podium chores. Behind him was an odd banner. It read: "L.D.L.T.T.T.O.A."

Translation:

"Let's don't let Tampa take this one away."
* * *

A stadium management committee led by Rick Dodge and city planning director Rick Mussett met regularly with the stadium's architects, brainstorming about what the facility would be like, what it would cost -- early estimates put it at $57-million -- and how to deal with political details, such as relocating families living in the path of stadium construction.

Out of these sessions came the decision in 1984 to send Mussett, intergovernmental affairs liaison Herb Polson and two architects on the road for a month. Their mission: visit enclosed stadiums across North America and talk to the people who built and maintained them.

"We wanted to do our level best to pick these people's brains to avoid their problems," Polson says. "We bought 30-day excursion tickets on Eastern Airlines for $300 each and visited all major domed stadiums in the United States and Canada."

First stop on the magical mystery tour: Indianapolis.

"They were just laying the carpet in the Hoosierdome," Polson recalls.

"We each had tasks to do. Mine was to study operations. Mussett went as planning director -- his interest was what went on in the vicinity of the city -- infrastructure, construction and economic development. The architects took hundreds and hundreds of pictures of everything. How the stairs came down, how the rails were on the vomitory. They were looking at construction detail.

"We went to Philadelphia," he says. "We talked to the people at Spectacor. They were running the Spectrum so we looked at that facility. At the Spectrum, even the Zamboni had advertising panels on it. Everywhere there was a flat surface, there was advertising."

From Philadelphia it was on to Detroit, Seattle and Tacoma. B.C. Place in Vancouver was brand spanking new and hosting a home show when the research team arrived. "There was nothing we observed there that was not first class," Polson says. "The place was built with an open checkbook. Everything was ornate. Just gorgeous."

Among Polson's lessons on domed stadium construction and operation:

"Several of the places we went to had solid concrete floors. When they did a trade show, they had to run wires everywhere. We decided on a $1-million electric grid so when you put a booth in at a trade show you had electricity and water. It's a revenue generator.

"Everyone said, 'You're in Florida, you'll need a dome there. And if you're going to build multipurpose, build multipurpose. Build with your prime use in mind, then make it multipurpose.'

"Are there lines? Where are the concession stands located? Where are the bathrooms? Are there enough urinals?"

"Make sure you have enough rest rooms for the females," Polson was told over and over. "You can put in troughs for the men but you have to put in water closets for the women. I don't know how many times I saw women in the men's room because the lines to the ladies' was so long.

"Concession stands were a big issue. If the concession stands weren't functional, people would not go, therefore your revenue went down. What we were told to do were functional, well-signed concession stands. And if you could work a deal with a television company, have closed-circuit TVs at each concession area and even in the rest rooms.

"We found most of the urban stadiums had no parking. Arrowhead and Royal stadiums in Kansas City had tens of thousands of parking spaces. The Metrodome had none. And there was no air conditioning at the [Minneapolis-St. Paul] Metrodome. We looked at different technologies for air conditioning, those that cost more up front and less down the road.

"We had more than a primer on scoreboards. Many caveats."

More good advice: Hire an "owner's rep," a construction-savvy person to oversee building of the stadium and protect the city's interest.

In each city, Polson and Mussett -- traveling on the city's tab -- shared a room to save costs. Their clothes were so worn out they looked like traveling salesmen who had been on the road so long they forgot the way home.

"By the time we reached our third week, I was fried," Polson says. "You're watching a basketball game, you don't know where you are, sitting in the cheap seats. And you're not sitting for long, you're working."

Two days into the trip, the handle on Polson's suitcase broke and he had to juryrig it with rope. Another time, Mussett hung some clothes in the bathroom and turned the shower on hot to get out the wrinkles. But he and Polson left the room for several hours and returned to find everything -- clothes, towels, curtains, bedding -- soaked through from the humidity.

Polson later hit the road again, this time to inspect facilities at Yankee Stadium and the Meadowlands Sports Complex in New Jersey.

Volumes of documents from each facility were sent back to St. Petersburg. It took months for the stadium management team and architects to pore over all the collected materials.

"It was money well spent," Polson says.
* * *

An unofficial stadium steering committee nicknamed "The Vault" met on an as-needed basis in Jim Healey's office at Milton Roy. Some might have called it "The Pigpen" if they knew of it, because it counted some of Pinellas County's most pigheaded/visionary leaders among its members. St. Petersburg city manager Alan Harvey, Pinellas County commissioner Chuck Rainey, St. Petersburg Times publisher Jack Lake and St. Petersburg councilmen Bill Bond and Bob Stewart all took part in the secret society.

Assistant city manager Rick Dodge says he was on hand to be "everybody's man to do what needed to be done."

"The Vault" group took its name from a bunch of Boston politicos who used to meet in a bank vault to prevent eavesdropping.

"We regularly sat down with the editorial board of the Times for update sessions on this project," Bond recalls. "I think that was the key to their continued support."

When the project would founder, the group backed up and found another road to go down.

Lake would walk into Healey's office during a meeting of the Vault -- usually when it was half over. If he heard somebody whining about a lack of support or cooperation, he'd say, "Give me the phone! I'll get it done!"

Lake lobbied hard for the stadium.

"But Jack was such a staunch supporter that he would sometimes run over people, to the point of being an irritation," Bond says. "He didn't help us with the Tampa folks because he called a spade a spade and it was a time for diplomacy."

Healey analyzed the financial structure of the proposed stadium. Rainey and Bond would be quizzed about contributions from the county and city, respectively. The group discussed everything from chasing state financing to presenting a unified spin in dealing with the media.

"This committee breathed life into the project many times [during] these periods of malaise," Dodge says. "The group saw their mission as putting everything in play to get the thing built."

Cecil Englebert, despite his position as a chairman of the Pinellas Sports Authority, knew he was pretty far out of the loop on what was going on. He didn't mind.

"Healey did most of the behind-the-scenes work and arm-twisting," Englebert says. "They told me what I needed to know. I knew the importance of the negotiating team. This is why Lake and Healey not telling me things didn't bother me. I was the PSA spokesman; I'm the guy who met the press. So they only told me what they had to.

"Once you realize what guys like that do, you can't get upset," he says. "Take advantage of it. Let them do what they do."

After the county and city committed to the stadium in 1986, The Vault gathered only twice more, once at the groundbreaking on Nov. 22, 1986, and, for the last time, inside the finished Florida Suncoast Dome for a group snapshot.
* * *

From 1982 through 1986, more than a few people called for a countywide referendum on the stadium. Taxpayers were angry. They preferred the way the Tampa Bay Baseball Group planned to proceed in Tampa: get a chicken, then build a coop. The risk of building first, then hoping for the best, offended much of the community at large.

But elected officials knew a referendum would never pass. That's why it was never offered.

"The criticism that was launched then and now was, 'Why didn't you have a referendum?' " St. Petersburg councilman Bob Stewart says. "In part, the answer is, we weren't required to have one by the way we were financing the stadium. We weren't using ad valorem taxes."

And because a referendum would never succeed?

"That's true," Stewart says. "In Seattle we asked, 'How in the world did you get a referendum passed?' They said, 'Well, the first time we did a referendum, it failed. The second time, it failed. The third time, we said, "What do the people want?" They wanted improved drainage, improved streets. So we did a referendum that improved streets, drainage and built a stadium. It was all or nothing. And the public supported it.' "

PSA member Cecil Englebert says that when the Florida Legislature created the Pinellas Sports Authority, it gave the PSA bonding power. "Once the legislature gives you this, you don't go back to the public and say, 'Can we do this?' " Englebert says.

"If you're going to have government by referendum, you don't need elected officials," Pinellas County commissioner Chuck Rainey says. "There are always going to be positions and decisions that are not going to be popular with the public. Indigent care is not popular with the public until somebody needs it."

WTVT-Channel 13 demanded a referendum in an editorial one night. An angry Rainey called the station's editorial director. "When was the referendum held on Tampa Stadium?" the commissioner asked sarcastically, knowing the home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers was also engineered behind the scenes. "[Tampa Stadium] was approved by a group of strong-willed legislators who said, 'Here's what you're going to do,' " Rainey says.

That was the way Rainey felt about pushing the stadium through. But if it failed, he made it plain -- the responsibility would not be his.

"I put a provision in that said the board of county commissioners would have no involvement in the stadium. We make no policy decisions, no input on employment or how it runs. It was the sole responsibility of the City of St. Petersburg," he says.

Why would the man who pushed every political button in his reach step back from an $85-million construction project?

"You already had the city and the Pinellas Sports Authority involved," he says. "You didn't need to compound it with the board of county commissioners. The city wanted it. The city lobbied very hard for it. It was part of their redevelopment, their downtown improvement. It was vital to them."

Rainey supported the stadium, as his participation in "The Vault" group demonstrated, but he didn't want to tie the county to more bond indebtedness. He was delighted when the city took on that responsibility.

"Chuck [Rainey] was smart enough to realize it would not work with two governmental entities running the facility," former St. Petersburg councilman Bill Bond says. "He was quick to get the county out and turn over responsibility to the city. That was a pretty smart move as I look at it. It's been an issue ever since for the city, but not for the county."
* * *

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