On Thursday, the St. Petersburg City Council will hold its first workshop on the Rays-Hines $6.5 billion Historic Gas Plant District development proposal. As America’s largest and oldest grassroots environmental organization with a strong presence in Tampa Bay, we at the Sierra Club feel a responsibility to add our voice regarding the proposal’s sustainability and resilience implications.

While many have already weighed in for or against the proposal, we’re waiting to see what the City Council does. There are still a lot of questions that need to be asked and answered, and amendments to be offered and adopted.

The false sense of urgency to adopt the agreement in a matter of weeks strains credulity, and we urge our elected officials to take the time they need to ensure St. Pete’s diverse stakeholders are heard. We’re very familiar with this-must-be-approved-now lobbying tactics in our advocacy work. Don’t buy it. There’s too much at stake to rush this.

There are three key areas that must be codified in the agreement before we can imagine supporting it: resilience, energy and the natural environment.

Resilience

St. Petersburg’s storm surge map is sobering, and sea levels are steadily increasing. When a major hurricane finally strikes Tampa Bay, which becomes more likely every year, much of the city will be inundated with seawater. Most of the Historic Gas Plant District is immune to flooding and will inevitably serve as a key staging area in a disaster, so we must focus on creating a safe and accessible place for both first responders and evacuees — especially vulnerable residents in adjacent neighborhoods who will be displaced. Resilience as good public policy means investing in the things that explicitly shrink the time and money required to recover from a disaster — like microgrids. Amsterdam’s pro soccer Johan Cruijff Arena and New Terminal One at JFK International Airport are just two examples that prove large projects can generate and store substantial energy with layered benefits. In this case, such a system would pay for itself in both electricity savings and grid services, while also negating the need for massive diesel generators. When disaster strikes St. Pete, this site needs to be a focal point of an equitable and speedy recovery. We insist the final agreement includes a disaster-ready microgrid and exceeds building codes to ensure a Category 5 hurricane will be weathered. This is our opportunity to avert our own Superdome-like crisis.

Energy

In 2016, St. Petersburg adopted a goal to transition 100% of citywide electricity to renewables by 2035 and reduce our carbon emissions 80% by 2050. We’re behind on meeting these targets and urge the city to focus on transparently implementing its Clean Energy Roadmap. Show us the numbers! We believe most of our city leaders are committed to these goals, which means that every project the city endorses should reduce citywide carbon emissions, not compound them. Some leaders have paid lip service to climate and energy issues, thinking nobody would notice, despite widespread support of tangible action among the public. Well, it’s time our city walks the talk. We insist that the final agreement requires the entirety of the site to produce at least as much solar energy as it consumes. Anything short of this guarantee would be a betrayal of the city’s own climate targets — a position no credible elected official in St. Pete should take. Climate change is our new reality, and we must demand our leaders and institutions effectuate a rapid energy transition that lowers energy bills.

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Natural environment

The vast asphalt parking lot and Booker Creek’s status as an impaired waterway by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection tell a story of paradise and people — paved, polluted and plundered. We urge the City Council to think beyond carefully manicured luxury landscapes and concrete-constricted water features. Let’s think big in creating green spaces that enhance both the natural environment and the public’s outdoor experience. As outlined in our recent letter to the City Council, we need pro-ecology measures like wide vegetation buffers along Booker Creek. Done right, this will meaningfully support the city’s efforts targeting floods and water quality. The pouring of concrete is outpacing the creation of our treasured green spaces, and this project needs to ensure St. Pete doesn’t become another concrete jungle. Let’s blanket the Historic Gas Plant District with native trees and vegetation with places for birds to feed and nest. We’re Florida’s first “Green City,” let’s act like it.

So there you have it, our top three recommendations every pro-environment St. Pete resident and City Council member ought to insist this deal include. In the coming weeks we will work proactively with our community and elected partners to translate these ideas into reasonable amendments and advocate for the City Council to adopt them. Without these baseline guarantees codified in the deal, we expect to oppose the agreement.

We understand that different folks want different things from this project, and we lament the deep divisions this debate has carved among many respected stakeholders. We agree with many of the things our allies are demanding to make this deal better. Equity, housing, ownership, taxes and righting the wrongs of the past are among many concerns we, too, share.

This is about so much more than keeping the Rays. The deal must address the elephant in the room: The historical injustices — such as the land that was taken from the residents of the district and the unkept promises that followed — represent a morally and legally dubious wrong that history beckons our city government to rectify. Jobs and housing are crucial, and this proposal includes meaningful measures, but the real question is about ownership and wealth creation.

Jobs will come and go, but when it’s all said and done, who will have built or rebuilt generational wealth? Those families who have and inherit wealth and property, or those from whom these were taken? The district’s living residents and their descendants deserve more than another promise of jobs. We can’t fix all the city’s woes here, but in light of the proposal’s unacceptable omission of several common-sense recommendations by the Community Benefits Agreement Advisory Council, the City Council must work creatively to do better. Trickle-down economics has always been a false promise, and St. Pete residents are right to take a trust-but-verify posture.

Finally, we urge the City Council not to approve our city’s largest project ever on a split 5-3 vote. This lack of buy-in would promise to cast a decadeslong shadow no leader should want throwing shade on their legacy. Broad public support should be obvious and inarguable, which is not the case today.

If all else fails, we don’t buy the argument that this proposal is the only path forward. Failure to approve the existing deal would be a huge disappointment for many, especially Rays fans (which we proudly are), but it wouldn’t be the calamity we’ve been warned would follow. There’s always a Plan B. Contrived urgency and pressure tactics are just that — tactics. If we do this, we owe it to the Rays and our future city to get it right.

James Scott and Erica Hall live in St. Petersburg. They both serve on the Suncoast Sierra Club’s Executive Committee, and as chairperson and vice chairperson, respectively, on the Florida Chapter Executive Committee. Hall was recently elected to the Sierra Club’s National Board of Directors.