A vote scheduled this afternoon at the St. Petersburg City Council that would have given Bill Edwards control of Al Lang Stadium for the next four years in exchange for $1.5 million is apparently off the table now, though there's no clear information about why that's the case.
Blogger Peter Schorsch speculates this morning that it has something to do with political ideology, noting the obvious tension that could exist by the fact that Kriseman is a Democrat and Edwards a Republican, and makes mention of two close advisors to Kriseman - Kevin King and Ben Kirby.
"Sources close to Edwards’ camp say partisans King and Kirby have been difficult to deal with," he writes.
I'm not going to question where Schorsch is coming from on that, but that still doesn't make clear why this deal fell apart.
In any event, let's look at the facts on the ground. Al Lang Stadium is only being utilized by Edwards for his soccer team, the Tampa Bay Rowdies, in which he bought a controlling interest in last December, adding to his empire in St. Pete. If anybody was uncertain beforehand, they certainly learned at the Tiger Bay meeting on July 1 of this year
that Edwards is devoted to making the Rowdies at At Lang the next cool thing in the 'Burg, as he dedicated his entire speech to extolling the virtues of professional soccer. Undoubtedly he was vying to win over the hearts of the business and political elite who attend such gatherings to support his goal, which is to ultimately increase the size of the stadium.
"I'll keep adding more seats until somebody realizes, 'You probably need a stadium out there,'" Edwards said at that event, referring to the fact that he's already expanded Al Lang's seating by 1,000 from its original 6,500 capacity when he became managing partner of the team last December. "That's my dream, and in order to make that a reality, I have to ask everyone and anyone to listen to me, to help us become the team we want to be, the number-one team in the country for soccer."
Seriously? Does that have even a remote chance of happening?
Look, there's been concern for years in some quarters in St. Pete that Edwards has become too powerful, with his control of entities like Sundial and The Mahaffey Theater. That sentiment was going on well before Rick Kriseman was elected last November.
But no one else (that I'm aware of) has any grand plans for Al Lang, which is why this deal with the city that was going to be approved today seemed like the proverbial win-win for the community. And maybe it still can going forward...
In other news....
Hillsborough School Board candidate and fierce social conservative Terry Kemple told the Hillsborough Board of County Commission that their vote yesterday on approving a domestic partnership registry was cynical politics. Cynical is debatable, but political? Absolutely. It is an election year, so having the board revisit its disapproval of a domestic partnership registry was undoubtedly timed to put some board members on the spot. So what happened? They took a step towards approving such a registry, though they may never actually call it yet.
President Obama gave a nationally broadcasted speech from MacDill Air Force Base yesterday, where he gave his love to the troops and insisted he wouldn't put them on the ground in Iraq and Syria in the against the Islamic State, despite growing tension from his generals that they should have their boots on the ground.
Two months ago Bill Nelson held a press conference in his Tampa district office where he bemoaned the packaging of liquid nicotine bottles, saying they were designed to appeal to young children. Ideally Nelson would like to ban all e-cigarette advertising, as has been the case with regular cigarettes on the airwaves for decades. That's apparently a bridge too far in Congress, so the Senator is settling for childproofing those bottles. His colleagues on the Senate Commerce Committee approved that bill yesterday.