This initiative supports Mayor Welch’s Pillar for Progress: Environment, Infrastructure, and Resilience. Learn more about Mayor Welch’s five Pillars for Progress and six Principles for Accountable and Responsive Government at stpete.org/Vision.
SPAR is the City’s framework for prioritizing and accelerating resilience work to help St. Petersburg address flooding, at-risk infrastructure, and long-term community impacts.
St. Petersburg faces growing challenges tied to sea level rise, tidal flooding, heavy rainfall, and severe weather. SPAR helps the City take a more coordinated approach to resilience by identifying needs, setting priorities, and moving important work forward.
Understanding SPAR
What is SPAR?
SPAR stands for St. Pete Agile Resilience. It is the City’s framework for organizing resilience work so projects can be prioritized more clearly and delivered more quickly.
A key idea behind SPAR is agility. That means improving our ability to adapt to changing conditions, sequence work more effectively, and advance resilience-enhanced projects faster than would otherwise be possible. SPAR is not a single project or a single neighborhood initiative. It is a broader approach to helping St. Petersburg move resilience work forward faster, more strategically, and with greater flexibility over time.
Why did the City create SPAR?
SPAR builds on years of planning, assessment, and community input focused on the City’s infrastructure and resilience needs.
That foundation includes the St. Pete Water Plan, Water Reclamation Facilities assessments, the Stormwater Master Plan, the Citywide Vulnerability Assessment, the Integrated Sustainability Action Plan, and neighborhood engagement through listening sessions, walking tours, and workshops. SPAR was created to turn that body of work into a clearer framework for action. It helps connect what the City has learned with how resilience work can be prioritized and advanced.
Why does SPAR matter to the whole city?
Flooding and overwhelmed infrastructure don’t just impact the neighborhood where they occur. They affect the entire St. Pete community. They can disrupt travel, damage utility systems, affect neighborhood access, interrupt business activity, and make community recovery from severe weather slower and more costly.
That is why resilience work matters citywide. Residents, businesses, and visitors all rely on roads, drainage, utilities, and public facilities that can be affected when infrastructure is under pressure. Advancing resilience projects more quickly can also help the City avoid higher costs over time. Doing the same work years later may mean paying more for construction, materials, and labor, while also increasing the risk of property damage, service disruption, and recovery costs in the meantime.
Moving resilience work faster can help reduce future costs and disruption.
What is SPAR designed to achieve?
SPAR is intended to help the City make progress in several important ways:
Prioritize resilience needs
Identify and organize resilience work based on need, risk, and long-term public benefit.
Accelerate important work
Move key projects forward faster as conditions, priorities, and risks evolve.
Reduce disruption
Improve reliability, access, and daily function across the city.
Strengthen long-term resilience
Improve the City’s ability to prepare for, withstand, and recover from major weather impacts.
How does SPAR fit with other City efforts?
SPAR is the citywide resilience framework, but the resilience-enhanced projects associated with SPAR are a subset of the Capital Improvement Plan. The Capital Improvement Plan is the City’s broader multi-year financial and scheduling plan for the full range of planned infrastructure work. It includes resilience-enhanced projects as well as infrastructure projects that extend the life of assets that do not require resilience enhancements.
In other words, CIP covers the full infrastructure portfolio. SPAR helps identify and advance the resilience-focused subset of that work across stormwater, potable water, wastewater, flood protection, and related needs.
SPAR = the resilience framework
SPAR projects = a subset of CIP projects
CIP = the broader plan for all infrastructure projects, including both resilience-enhanced work and other asset-improvement projects.
Work SPAR Helps Advance
SPAR supports resilience work across multiple systems. That includes efforts to reduce flood risk, improve stormwater conveyance, increase runoff storage and outfall capacity, strengthen performance in tidally-influenced areas, improve drinking water reliability, and reduce sewer backups and overflows during severe weather.
Examples include drainage improvements, culverts, pipelines, pump stations, flood protection features, hardened utility equipment, improved interconnections, and storage or treatment upgrades that help systems perform better during and after major storms.
This work is not limited to one type of flooding or one area of the city. It is about strengthening the systems that support daily life across St. Petersburg.
Current SPAR Projects
The following projects are approved and in motion. Project status is updated as work progresses.