What is SPAR? | Why SPAR Matters | Why Accelerate Efforts? | SPAR Projects | What SPAR Costs | FAQs
SPAR (St. Pete Agile Resilience) is the City’s framework for prioritizing and accelerating resilience work. It’s an approach to upgrade the stormwater, wastewater, and drinking water infrastructure residents, businesses, commuters, and visitors depend on every day.
Built around long-term, science-based engineering strategies, along with natural and nature-based solutions where appropriate, SPAR protects critical infrastructure, guards natural resources, and increases our ability to withstand and recover from climate impacts more quickly.
As a resilience-focused subset of the City’s Capital Improvement Program (CIP), SPAR emphasizes investments that address community impacts like flooding, sewer backups, sewer spills, and water service disruptions often resulting from aging and undersized infrastructure.
Community Engagement Opportunities
The City of St. Petersburg hosted a series of virtual community meetings, inviting residents to learn more about SPAR. These educational sessions gave residents the opportunity to hear directly from City subject matter experts, learn about the goals and progress of the SPAR initiative, and ask questions in a live virtual setting. Participants also learned how infrastructure improvements and flood mitigation projects are helping protect communities and neighborhoods while building a stronger, more resilient St. Pete.
These virtual community meetings were held from Friday, July 17 through Tuesday, July 21, 2026.
Request a SPAR Presentation
Invite a SPAR subject matter expert to speak at your meeting, event, or community gathering. SPAR presentations are available for neighborhood associations, community organizations, civic groups, schools, businesses, and other interested audiences.
SPAR Presentation Request Form
Why SPAR Matters
More Frequent and More Severe Weather Events
SPAR matters because infrastructure failures affect everyone.
Residents may not use the word resilience, but they understand the impacts SPAR is designed to reduce:
Streets that flood during heavy rain
Sewer backups during wet weather
Wastewater overflows
Water service interruptions
Boil water notices
Blocked roads and emergency access challenges
Slower recovery after storms
Flooding occurs during intense rain, tidal flooding, or groundwater rise, which is increasing over time. Overwhelmed infrastructure affects the entire St. Pete community, not just where flooding occurs. It disrupts travel, damages utility systems, affects neighborhood access, interrupts business activity, and makes community recovery from severe weather slower and more costly.
The issue is citywide. Residents, businesses, and visitors all rely on roads, drainage, utilities, and critical services when infrastructure does not perform. Advancing resilience projects more quickly helps the City avoid higher costs over time. The same exact work done years later will mean paying more for construction, materials, and labor, while also increasing the risk of property damage, service disruption, and recovery costs.
St. Pete’s 2024 Wakeup Call
2024 Hurricanes Helene and Milton highlighted infrastructure vulnerabilities and service disruptions. The storms threatened two of St. Pete’s three wastewater treatment plants with flooding, ruptured water pipes citywide, forced service shutdowns of both water and sewer, and caused sewer spills. Without immediate infrastructure upgrades, the next storm could mean more sewer spills and water or sewer service disruptions for hundreds of thousands of residents.
SPAR is not solely about catastrophic storms. Flooding in St. Pete happens after intense afternoon thunderstorms (torrential downpours), during king tides on sunny days, and whenever saturated ground can’t handle one more drop of rain. It’s nuisance flooding that happens more each year.
Why Accelerate Projects
SPAR is all about creating a city that is more livable, more reliable, and better prepared. Acceleration of resilience matters because risk is increasing while infrastructure takes years to deliver.
St. Pete is facing increasing pressure from:
More frequent heavy rainfall events
Tidal and sunny day flooding
Storm surge risk
Groundwater rise
Aging infrastructure
Repeated system strain during severe weather
It’s a disciplined approach for accelerating the most urgent resilience work already identified through years of engineering studies, community input, and master planning. SPAR concentrates on projects where resilience enhancements are most needed and most urgent. It focuses on four project categories: stormwater, wastewater, water, and flood protection.
The issue is not only what projects are planned. It is how quickly the City can deliver resilience improvements while risk continues to grow. A longer delivery timeline means the City continues to grow. A longer delivery timeline means the City continues to make progress, but some vulnerable systems remain exposed to flooding, storm surge, heavy rainfall, sewer overflows, water disruptions, and service interruptions for more years. Acceleration is about reducing the gap between rising risk and the time needed to strengthen essential infrastructure.
SPAR Projects
Neighborhood Projects | Citywide Impacts
SPAR includes resilience-focused projects that strengthen stormwater, wastewater, drinking water, and flood protection systems.
Some SPAR projects are already complete, and several more are underway or in design. Eligible and representative projects are those that enhance resilience, reliability, and recovery for essential City systems.
View Interactive Map of Projects
However, SPAR is designed to be agile. That means the City can adjust representative projects over time based on infrastructure needs, engineering feasibility, cost, funding availability, community benefit, changing conditions, and lessons learned from completed and active projects.
Agility does not mean the program lacks discipline. It means the City can avoid locking itself into projects that may become infeasible, too costly, or less effective than other available options.
Green Infrastructure in SPAR
Across all SPAR projects, the City intends to evaluate and implement context‑appropriate nature-based solutions where they work. Nature-based solutions combine natural processes with engineered designs, including green infrastructure, low-impact development, natural and nature-based features, and stormwater best management practices.