There’s a new entry in the St. Pete mayoral air war, and it’s built around a single statistic that has dogged St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch since 2022: 34%.
The new spot from the political committee St. Pete Shines resurfaces a Tampa Bay Times report finding Welch swiped his keycard into City Hall just 34% of workdays during his first eight months in office. The ad turns the figure into a gut-punch. Real-sounding residents recoil at the idea of missing a third of work days.
“I’d be fired before the end of the week,” one person in the artificial intelligence-created ad laments.
The ad also ominously includes a “MISSING” poster bearing the Mayor’s face flapping on a light pole, and “34%” gets sculpted into hedges, beer foam and bread, each tagged with “the Tampa Bay Times has the receipts.” The Times report from 2022 also notes that Welch, during Hurricane Ian that year, left the city’s Emergency Operations Center to be at home with his family, even as other top city staffers left theirs to stay at the EOC overnight.
The ad ends on a kicker.
“Fire Ken Welch,” a narrator intones as an image of Welch is shown carrying a box out of City Hall.
The ad draws on an important question. Would the average Joe keep his job showing up just a third of the time? The question lands because the absences track a record of things that never got done on Welch’s watch.
The signature Historic Gas Plant District redevelopment is years behind, with the old police-HQ site at The Central yielding little more than a parking garage and deadlines slipping to 2030.
The Moffitt cancer campus that could have anchored thousands of jobs collapsed.
And when residents got hammered by runaway water bills, the Mayor declined to answer questions on camera.
For the first time, St. Petersburg’s mayoral contest is running on the Midterm calendar, with the Primary set for Aug. 18 and a far larger, more partisan electorate than the off-year races that have historically decided City Hall.
Welch, seeking a second term, faces a crowded field that includes former Gov. Charlie Crist, and St. Pete Shines has emerged as one of the more aggressive outside players shaping the air war.
Whether voters see a no-show or a man who simply isn’t getting it done, the committee has accomplished the hard part: it made Welch’s absenteeism impossible to forget, and gave every other grievance a number to hang on.
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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.
Ed. note: This story was drafted with assistance from AI. Editorial judgment, sourcing, and final review were performed by Peter Schorsch and the Florida Politics editorial team.