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PHOENIX — Pima County residents won't get to vote on a tax to pay for spring-training baseball in Southern Arizona.

The effort to mandate the county hold such an election died in the Legislature on Friday night, leaving its backers few options to preserve major-league baseball in the Tucson area.

The proposal was introduced in response to what supporters said would be Southern Arizona's last chance to try to stop teams from relocating their spring-training facilities to cities that are offering more lavish stadiums.

But the proposal faced ongoing changes and questions about how the election would be funded, and it was introduced late in the legislative session. Opposition galvanized when the proposal veered from its original concept of taxing tourism-related industries to pay for the parks and extended the increase to all taxable purchases.

With the issue of amending the state constitution to define marriage dragging on the state Senate's business Friday evening, the bill never even went up for a final vote in that body — a blow to businesspeople who had pushed the idea.

"The crater that we were left with after the politics of the marriage debate didn't leave us much to work with," said the lobbyist for the issue, Kevin DeMenna.

The bill called for a countywide vote. If the plan had been approved by voters, sales taxes on hotels, restaurants, bars, "amusements" — such as movies, museums and concerts — and retail outlets would have increased to pay for the construction and improvement of spring-training ballparks.

The Tucson group pushing the measure, the Arizona Cactus League, had said it was trying to keep the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Colorado Rockies from moving their spring training elsewhere, as the Chicago White Sox already have decided to do.