Thursday was a bad day in the press for St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch, though his name was never even mentioned.

Reports in two different local media outlets — the Tampa Bay Times and the Tampa Bay Business Journal — likely landed with a thud at City Hall, portraying the current administration as bad fiscal stewards of taxpayer money and inadequate in partnering with one of the region’s most powerful players.

Welch’s small-but-mighty team of defenders has repeatedly stomped their feet in protest over critics saying the current Mayor lost the Tampa Bay Rays and botched the 2024 hurricane response. It’s unfair criticism, they protest. The Mayor can’t control the weather.

They’re right on just one thing: He can’t control the weather. But he can, and does, control decision-making on city projects. And on that, Welch has a robust résumé of failures ranging from rejecting the Moffitt development because there wasn’t enough affordable housing only to see market-rate housing go up instead, to bungling plans for the city’s municipal services center.

Now, there’s the Deuces Rising housing project. Tampa Bay Times Viewpoints Editor Graham Brink penned a damning column Thursday criticizing the project as a financial boondoggle.

Brink wrote that it didn’t make financial sense on first glance. Worse, he said it didn’t make sense on second or third glance either, because “making the numbers work took the kind of math that would make a hedge fund manager flinch.”

The project includes 24 “affordable” townhomes, half earmarked for working families earning at or below 80% of area median income, or AMI, ($92,000) and the other half for those earning up to 120% AMI ($138,000). Nearing completion, the project is getting close to move-in-ready, but the math behind its completion is anything but straightforward.

The city under Welch’s watch approved a subsidy of $500,000 for EACH townhome, for a total of $12 million. The cost to build each unit is estimated at $800,000, meaning the city is subsidizing more than half the cost. But that’s not even where this gets super janky.

A nearby townhome project by Habitat for Humanity clocks in at $400,000 per unit. It’s not exactly apples to apples, as Brink pointed out. But the bottom line is, the per-square-foot price to build the Habitat homes is half as much as the Deuces Rising project.

The $500,000 per-unit subsidy is also more than the median home sale price in St. Pete, which is $450,000.

What’s worse, Brink used Realtor.com and Zillow data to look at real estate nearby, finding a total of 48 homes that, combined, would cost the same as the city’s total Deuces Rising subsidy. That means the city could have outright purchased twice as many homes, given them to residents in need and still owned the Deuces Rising land.

And before anyone assumes that some or even all of those 48 properties are not livable, Brink addresses that. They are.

There’s another thing; we’re not really sure for whom these homes are affordable.

Originally, the townhomes were expected to cost between $223,000 and $317,000, but City Council Member Corey Givens Jr. recently posted on Facebook that the homes would cost as much as $400,000, prompting residents to comment en masse wondering who considered that affordable.

Considering the 50/50 split between availability at 80% and 120% AMI, let’s look at those numbers. At 120% AMI, household income would be at $11,500 per month. Applying the widely recommended limit on how much people should spend on rent or a mortgage at 30%, those people could pay up to $3,450 per month and still land within that recommendation. That number is tough, but doable depending on whether a person has a down payment.

But at 80% AMI, monthly household income would be less than $8,000 per month, and the maximum housing cost under the recommended 30% threshold would be about $2,300 per month. Unless someone had a huge down payment to offer — unlikely at that income level — there’s no way their housing costs would meet general household budgeting guidelines, even at the bottom threshold of Givens’ estimate.

I asked a friend who bought a home at 4% interest on a 30-year fixed loan — average rates are now close to 7% — for $300,000 about their housing expenses. Their mortgage payment, including taxes and insurance, is about $2,600 per month.

So how, pray tell, can someone comfortably live in a home that costs more than $300,000, especially when borrowing rates are so high? This is not affordable housing; it’s a subsidy for the sake of a ribbon cutting that does little to move the actual needle on the affordability crisis.

What’s potentially the most egregious here is simple: Affordable housing is supposed to be Welch’s top priority, yet he led a plan that provides questionable affordability with a staggering city subsidy.

And today’s bad news doesn’t stop there. The Tampa Bay Business Journal also reported that the Welch administration did not consider a pitch from the Tampa Bay Lightning parent company, Vinik Sports Group, to manage the city of St. Petersburg’s Mahaffey Theater. The city has been managing the property itself since the contract with its previous operator, Big 3 Entertainment, expired in May.

The city previously rejected a bid to manage the theater from St. Petersburg Arts Partners. The city cited a lack of formal agreements with major partners, including, wait for it, Vinik Sports Group.

So let’s get this straight. The city rejected a bid to manage the property because its primary vendor, Vinik Sports Group, hadn’t entered into an official agreement. Then, Vinik Sports Group pitches its own management deal — which, it’s worth noting, is far more lucrative than the city’s current arrangement — and the city (Welch) can’t be bothered to even consider it.

That’s even worse when you consider who was behind the first pitch from St. Petersburg Arts Partners. That would be none other than Joe Hamilton, publisher of the St. Pete Catalyst and co-founder of the group currently revitalizing the city’s long-shuttered Science Center. Welch had originally rejected the group’s plan and only accepted it after public pressure and a public rebuke from the City Council.

What’s more, guess who was also involved in the Science Center project, including raising funds for it. That’s right, Charlie Crist. At the time Welch was trying to reject the publicly popular plan, Crist was already rumored to be seriously considering a bid for Mayor.

And it doesn’t stop there. Former City Council Member Robert Blackmon was also part of Hamilton’s team. Blackmon was Welch’s opponent in the 2021 Mayor’s race. I previously speculated whether Welch’s attempt to reject the Science Center was sour grapes over a political foe.

It just keeps piling up for this Mayor.

Even if voters accept Welch at his word on hurricane response — that it was done as quickly as possible and that complaints are unreasonable — and on losing the Rays — that it was because Hurricane Milton blew the roof off and he doesn’t control the weather — there is still a laundry list of things to point to as governmental malpractice.

And on top of that, it doesn’t even seem like Welch is trying all that hard to improve his fortunes when he doesn’t adequately communicate with an entity run by one of the region’s top political donors — Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik.

According to the Business Journal’s reporting on the issue, Welch never spoke to someone from Vinik Sports Group, and those who did speak with the group didn’t bother to follow up.

It is a city administration’s prerogative to accept or reject proposals to build or manage things. But it is foolhardy to ignore regional powerbrokers. It’s especially ill-advised to make decisions whose optics are likely to scream “I have an ax to grind.”

Welch initially rejected the Science Center project upon which his political adversary was a major booster. Then, he ignored a pitch from a group that had been a vendor in a previous pitch from the person leading the Science Center project.

It’s not hard to connect the dots. There is no smoking gun to prove Welch was being vindictive. But optics don’t need proof. And Welch would be wise to understand that.