DeSantis Vetoes Funding for Tampa Bay Rays Spring-Training Facility to Brace for ‘Biden-Induced Recession’

Florida governor Ron DeSantis celebrated signing a $109.9 billion budget for the state on Thursday, a budget that includes record spending on schools, affordable housing, and pay raises for teachers and first responders.

But DeSantis also issued more than $3 billion in vetoes, in part, he said, to brace the state for “what very well may be a Biden-induced recession.”

One of those planned vetoes – $35 million for a “sports training and youth tournament complex” in Pasco County, north of Tampa – is receiving additional scrutiny, with some media outlets painting it as the latest salvo in the culture wars. This time, they claim, it’s a fight over guns.

While the legislative documents don’t mention it, the primary tenant of the planned sports complex “is intended to be the Tampa Bay Rays” baseball club, which would use the facility as the club’s new spring training home, according to a Tampa Bay Times report in March. The chairwoman of the Pasco County Commission told the paper that “the whole region benefits if we’re able to keep our major league teams in the area.”

The idea that DeSantis’s veto could be political retribution against the Rays stems from last week, two days after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, when the Rays and their opponent that night, the New York Yankees, both used their Twitter feeds to spread awareness of gun violence. The Rays posted that the mass shootings in Uvalde and in Buffalo, N.Y., “have shaken us to the core.”

“This cannot become normal. We cannot become numb. We cannot look the other way. We all know, if nothing changes, nothing changes,” the Rays tweeted, adding that the organization was making a $50,000 commitment to Everytown for Gun Safety’s support fund. The nonprofit, founded by Michael Bloomberg in 2013, advocates for gun control policies, including universal background checks.

Everytown for Gun Safety spent $4.4 million ahead of the 2020 election to attack Republican candidates and try to flip state legislatures.

“Rather than our usual game coverage on social media tonight, we’ve partnered with Everytown to amplify facts about gun violence in America,” according to the Rays tweet.

That night, Gary Sheffield Jr., a reporter with Fox-affiliated sports website, Outkick, and the son of former Major League Baseball star Gary Sheffield, wrote about the Rays’ and Yankees’ decision to talk guns and accused them of “cherry-picking tragedy to apparently promote their own political talking points.”

After DeSantis’s veto, Outkick – and Fox News – published stories claiming that “DeSantis’s decision is in response to the Rays politicizing recent shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde ahead of a matchup with the Yankees in May.” During a press briefing on Friday, DeSantis addressed the veto, saying, “Companies are free to engage or not engage in whatever discourse they want, but clearly it’s inappropriate to be doing tax dollars for professional sports stadiums. It’s also inappropriate to subsidize political activism of a private corporation.”

There was pushback from conservative groups over state funding for the project. Americans for Prosperity-Florida, for instance, applauded the veto.

“Siphoning public dollars into a construction project for a professional baseball team is fiscally irresponsible and amounts to clear corporate welfare,” said the organization’s state director, Skylar Zander, in a prepared statement. “We appreciate the Governor for using his line-item veto power to put a stop to this effort and protect Floridians and their hard-earned tax dollars from a gross misuse of public funds.”

DeSantis’s spokeswoman, Christina Pushaw, has not commented specifically on the allegation that the veto was political payback for the Rays speaking out on guns. But on Friday morning, she tweeted that “principled conservatives for taxpayer subsidies of stadiums” are clowns.

The Tampa Bay Rays declined to comment on the veto.

Sports complexes weren’t the only projects that fell victim to DeSantis’s veto pen on Thursday. He vetoed funding for a variety of projects around the state, including $650 million for a new prison, $75 million for an environmental and oceanographic research and teaching facility, $20 million for a Pasco County cancer center, $8 million for a fine arts center, $6.5 million for an agricultural museum at a local college, as well as fire station and drainage projects, among others.

The questions surrounding DeSantis’s veto of the stadium funding come after the governor’s spat with Disney earlier this year. In April, the Florida Legislature, with DeSantis’s support, repealed Disney’s 50-year-old “independent special district” status after Disney leaders openly criticized the state’s new Parental Rights in Education bill, which had been denounced by opponents as the Don’t Say Gay bill. Even though the bill had nothing to do with Disney, the company’s leaders pledged to fight for its repeal.

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to include a comment from Gov. Ron DeSantis.