The Tampa Bay Rays are on track to get a long-sought new ballpark following a city council vote Thursday on a major redevelopment project that also guarantees the team will stay where it is for at least 30 years.
The ballpark is part of a broader $6.5 billion project that supporters say would transform an 86-acre (34-hectare) tract in the city’s downtown, with plans in the coming years for a Black history museum, affordable housing, a hotel, green space, entertainment venues, and office and retail space. There’s the promise of thousands of jobs as well.
The site, where the Rays’ domed, tilted Tropicana Field and its expansive parking lots now sit, was once a thriving Black community displaced by construction of the ballpark and an interstate highway. A priority for St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch is to right some of those past wrongs in what is known as the Historic Gas Plant District.