The political committee supporting Charlie Crist for St. Petersburg Mayor is out with its latest ad, this one directly attacking incumbent Mayor Ken Welch over his decision not to move forward early in his tenure with a Moffitt Cancer Center-related development.
The St. Pete Shines ad features Crist, a former Florida Governor and former U.S. Representative representing parts of St. Pete, describing the drive from St. Pete to Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa.
“Twenty-three miles, 45 minutes of traffic right here,” Crist says to open the ad as a rendering of a world class Moffitt Cancer Center appears on screen, only to disappear again. “This is where Moffitt was going to build a cancer center until Ken Welch’s fight.”
In his first year in office, Welch axed a project that would have created a Moffitt Cancer Center campus in downtown. At the time, he said the proposal didn’t include enough affordable housing. Under that rejected plan, the city would have sold land to the Moffitt team, including development partner TPA, at a significant discount.
The Moffitt proposal was subject to review under the Community Benefits Advisory Council (CBAC) as part of the city’s then-version of the Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) process, which has since changed.
At the time, Welch lamented that the Moffitt proposal began with just 10% affordable housing as part of its total project. Through negotiations, that number rose to 15% and later to 17.5%, though Welch was still not satisfied.
Crist has directly rejected Welch’s reasoning, leaning into a missed opportunity to give those who live in St. Pete and surrounding areas a closer option for cancer-related care. It was a primary talking point last week at the first debate of the mayoral election cycle.
“It’s the Moffitt Cancer Center. Their main purpose and goal — they’re not contractors, not developers, they’re not home builders — their purpose is to cure cancer. And we turned them down because they wouldn’t build more housing units? What’s going on? To me, that defies common sense,” Crist said at the debate.
He went on to describe the issue as personal, noting that everyone has “had somebody we’ve lost to cancer.” The ad struck a similar tone.
“I know what it’s like to watch someone battle cancer firsthand. It happened in my family,” Crist narrates as the ad shows an image of his late sister, Margaret Crist Wood, who died of cancer in 2015.
“The last thing families need on the way to treatment is to have to fight traffic on the Howard Frankland, but Ken Welch didn’t care about that.”
The ad ends on a final zinger, adding in another loss under Welch’s tenure as Mayor.
“He doesn’t have the executive leadership to close the deal — not with Moffitt, not with the Rays, not for our city. St. Pete has been on pause. It’s time to move forward,” Crist says to close the 30-second spot.
That dig, of course, references the deal with the Tampa Bay Rays to build a new stadium near downtown St. Pete that fell through after Hurricane Milton. The Rays are now in talks with the city of Tampa and Hillsborough County to build a new stadium on that side of Tampa Bay.
The digital ad began running Monday on YouTube, promoted on Facebook and other social media channels.
___
Ed. Note: Michelle Todd Schorsch is the Chair of St. Pete Shines, a political committee expected to back Crist for St. Petersburg Mayor. Todd Schorsch is married to Peter Schorsch, the publisher of Florida Politics.