A Times Editorial

Stadium deal has major flaw

© St. Petersburg Times, published March 1, 2001

The latest draft of an agreement between the city of Clearwater and the Philadelphia Phillies for development of a new spring training stadium is a better document than the one criticized here almost three weeks ago.

The complex agreement -- more than 100 pages long -- establishes more reasonable deadlines, tones down or eliminates language that had layered on legal protections for the Phillies, clears up ambiguities and inequities in the funding formula and lengthens the time the city has to review construction-related documents submitted by the Phillies.

But it still has one major flaw from a public perspective: The Phillies get the right to approve not only the stadium design but also the public infrastructure projects the city will build to support the stadium complex.

The City Commission needs to be very sure it wants to hand over approval of public projects to a private business. This approach may be standard operating procedure in the sports biz these days, but it is not typical in Clearwater.

The stadium agreement is among a number of important items the City Commission expects to vote on in a marathon meeting tonight. The meeting begins at 6 p.m. in City Hall and will be broadcast on cable channel 15. This is the last regularly scheduled meeting for the current commission. Three new commissioners will be elected March 13.

The commission spent most of 2000 working on the stadium issue and wants to approve the agreement before the election. Negotiations between the Phillies and the city have been intense in recent weeks, and copy machines at City Hall have been spitting out new drafts of the proposal almost daily for the last week as legal language was improved and sticking points between the two sides resolved.

What has not been resolved -- what city administrator Keith Ashby called "the fork in the road that we were trying to avoid reaching" -- is the issue of approval.

The agreement as currently drafted allows the Phillies to select the stadium architect and approve the design for the stadium. The city, which will own the stadium and lease it to the Phillies, merely gets to review and comment on conceptual drawings of the stadium. The Phillies are under no obligation to change the plans to suit the city. And if the team agrees to changes that cause the cost of the project to go up, the city has to pay the difference.

The city, as expected, will plan, design and build the improvements to streets, drainage systems and sidewalks required to accommodate the new stadium. But in the draft agreement, the Phillies get to review and approve the plans and specifications for those public improvements as well as the schedule of work.

The Phillies intend to hire architects experienced in stadium design; they know what they want in a stadium, and they don't want the facility designed by committee. That's understandable.

So perhaps the Phillies will understand if the officials and residents of Clearwater don't want a publicly owned stadium that will be used by many other entities, and even public streets and sidewalks, designed by a committee that includes a baseball club.

Unless city commissioners have had time to examine every page of the final draft of this agreement, and unless they believe there is no alternative to giving the Phillies such control, they should delay their vote and go back to the negotiating table.

Related coverage

Clearwater needs to read fine print on stadium deal (February 11, 2001)

Stadium report reveals risks (February 2, 2001)

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