St. Petersburg Approves $6.5M Plan to Clean Up Rays’ Tropicana Field After Hurricane

The city of St. Petersburg City Council voted on Thursday to approve a pair of clean-up and restoration projects for the Tampa Bay Rays’ Tropicana Field in the wake of the damage suffered during Hurricane Milton, according to the Associated Press.

Those contracts will cost the city around $6.5 million.

“We need to act quickly to protect the building from further damage,” Rob Gerdes, the city’s administrator, said on Thursday.

One of the contracts was awarded to BMS CAT to the tune of $3.9 million, and the other to Hennessy Construction Services Corp. for $2.5 million.

The contracts were somewhat controversial, as the city already has plans in place for a $1.3 billion ballpark to be constructed by 2028, with some council members unconvinced that this current clean-up plan made sense on a building that will only be utilized for another three years.

But Major League Baseball is hoping to have a 2025 plan in place for the Rays by Christmas, with a number of minor league facilities or the ballpark at Disney’s ESPN Wide World of Sports in Orlando also a possibility.

“I don’t have a sense yet but diligence—formal and informal—is still being done on the ballpark itself,” MLBPA executive director Tony Clark told reporters earlier in the week. “The determination is going to have to made as to whether or not adjustments to that ballpark can be made either into 2025, 2026 or later. In the near term, we have to ensure that if the facility the major league players aren’t going to be playing in for 2025 isn’t a major-league ballpark, it is of major-league quality at the time the players step onto the field. All of that is in process.”

The St. Petersburg City Council ultimately decided that approving the costs for Tropicana Field now made the most sense, as opposed to potential expenditures in the future.

“This is about stopping the bleeding,” council member Gina Driscoll noted. “It sounds like pay now or pay later, and pay more later.”