St. Petersburg’s first mayoral debate of the cycle was supposed to be Ken Welch‘s easiest room of the Summer. It wasn’t.
For more than two hours Tuesday night, before about 125 people at the President Barack Obama Main Library, the incumbent stood alone against four challengers — former Gov. Charlie Crist, City Council member Brandi Gabbard, former NAACP branch President Maria Scruggs, and former Shore Acres neighborhood association President Kevin Batdorf — at a forum hosted by the local NAACP. Former Fire Chief Jim Large was invited but didn’t show. The challengers hit Welch on the hurricane response, on transparency, and on leadership. We broke down the debate here.
To understand how it played inside the room, I called someone who was in the audience — a veteran of St. Pete politics who has had a hand in more than one city campaign, and who I agreed not to name so they could talk freely. Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
Florida Politics: What was the night’s biggest mistake?
Insider: Letting it run as long as it did. An NAACP audience should have been the friendliest crowd the Mayor sees all cycle. Once it was obvious a third of the way in that this had turned into a four-on-one, somebody should have found a way to wrap it. Instead it went past two hours, with professional cameras rolling the whole time on the incumbent getting worked over. You could read the aftermath in the room — Esther Sanni, the Mayor, and JC Pritchett huddled off to the side for a long while once it was over.
Florida Politics: Who shifted the night?
Insider: Scruggs deserves a Rays-level bonus. She took the first real swing — announcing she’s pursuing an ethics complaint against the city, which is a story by itself — and the Mayor decided to needle her, reminding everyone she’s been a squeaky wheel for years. She doubled, tripled, quadrupled down. He kept taking the bait and elevating her, and in doing that he held the door open for everybody else to take a shot.
Florida Politics: How did Welch’s own attacks on Crist land?
Insider: They didn’t. His best shots at Charlie — the Minnesota residency, “Chain Gang Charlie” — neither connected nor emerged. His answer to the charge that he left the city’s emergency operations center during the storm sounded fine in the moment, even with Batdorf backing Charlie up and calling it a mistake. But the Times reporting cuts against the Mayor’s version, and it makes him look bad.
Florida Politics: For the challengers without Crist’s money, was this a missed opportunity?
Insider: It was a free-media dream. You walk onto that stage and there are six news cameras plus St. Pete Catalyst, the Times, Power Broker magazine, and Florida Politics. If you don’t have campaign cash, that is the moment to go to full attack — you’re three or four weeks out from mail ballots shipping. Three candidates could have broken out. Scruggs answered the call. Gabbard and Batdorf largely let it pass. And understand what exists now: professional footage of four people taking turns on the Mayor. Splice that into a 30-second spot and he has a real problem.
Florida Politics: Did Welch’s campaign-finance issues come up?
Insider: No — and that’s the tell. He was so far back on his heels that nobody even got to the campaign-finance mess. There was simply too much else going wrong to bother.
Florida Politics: The Mayor raised the issue of illegal bonuses to City staff himself. Read that for me.
Insider: That was an unforced error. He scapegoated his own staff over bonuses that were ruled illegal, and he surfaced the whole episode when no one else had even mentioned it. Meanwhile Gabbard added the Mahaffey to the running list of city failures — and she’s right that they’re piling up, that it points to a leadership problem, and that it strains staff. Go down the list: the Mahaffey, Moffitt, the Municipal Services Center, the marina, the Rays, the Manhattan Casino. Take the MSC — the city’s aging 11-story downtown office building. There was a redevelopment deal on the table, a developer ready to buy it and put up a new facility near City Hall, and the administration walked away from it. Now it’s a money pit with a deferred-maintenance tab north of $54 million and city staff still working inside it. The rudderless part is that City Hall has now moved to raise the insurance on Tropicana Field after underinsuring it right before the storm.
Florida Politics: Any small moment that stuck with you?
Insider: When the automated “the library closes in 15 minutes” notice cut across the Mayor mid-answer and he asked, “Is this a recording or live?” It was tiny, but he didn’t look in command of the building he was standing in, let alone the city. He defended the Moffitt cancellation in a strange way, too — relitigating an old deal by date and a past working relationship, like he was arguing with history. Everyone was in his head, even people in the audience.
Florida Politics: Does Welch have anything to work with?
Insider: He has one real win card he didn’t play hard enough. The Rays genuinely bought into Trop redevelopment — you can see it in the fact that they surrendered redevelopment rights they were entitled to through the end of the contract, plus 50% of the proceeds. That was always their leverage, and they don’t have it anymore. His team negotiated that, and the City is in far better shape for it. He just never connected that dot for voters, which tells me he’s holding a few things back. The catch is that Ellison’s group, ARK, has said no work starts at the Trop site until 2030. So the Mayor’s “the wait must end” framing for that site isn’t really practical in the form he’s pitching.
Florida Politics: If you’re advising Welch, what now?
Insider: If I’m Ken, I don’t do another Primary debate, period. The downside is all disaster. People should have spent last night going after Charlie, and they didn’t — this was the worst-case outcome for his team. With two more debates in the next two weeks and another in July, the move is to disappear until the General if he possibly can.
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Ed. Note: Michelle Todd Schorsch is the Chair of St. Pete Shines, a political committee backing Crist for St. Petersburg Mayor. Todd Schorsch is married to Peter Schorsch, the publisher of Florida Politics.