St. Petersburg is heading into Pride Weekend and then the Fourth of July — two back-to-back weekends when residents will be out, socializing more than usual, drinks in hand and grills going. And if the Mayor’s race comes up over one of those drinks, here’s where my head is.

We’ve now sat through three mayoral debates, and they’ve been relatively boring. That’s not really a complaint, just an observation. They didn’t change anything. What they accomplished was taking the impressions most voters already had about each of these candidates and sharpening them into focus. I doubt many walked in undecided and walked out converted. And with the only debate still on the calendar looking shaky — more on that below — this may be just about where the race’s public stage goes dark.

The handshake

I’ve been tough on Ken Welch in this space, and I won’t pretend otherwise. I’ll also say this: He and I go back, and the man came to my wedding. So this isn’t me just taking a swing at him.

Before Thursday’s debate, I went to shake his hand. He walked right past me. I turned to him anyway and said, “Good luck tonight.” Nothing. I’ve since heard I’m not special — that he doesn’t shake Charlie Crist’s hand either, or Brandi Gabbard’s.


Ken Welch is not a happy warrior.

I keep coming back to it because of how small it is, and how much it tells you. This is a man asking an entire city to give him four more years, and he can’t extend his hand to a guy wishing him luck. Hold that thought. It comes up again.

With that off my chest, here’s where my head actually is — five things I think I think about this race.

1. Crist was built for Wednesday’s debate format. Welch keeps handing him the contrast

During what will be the only televised debate of the Primary campaign for St. Pete Mayor, Crist’s made-for-TV persona stood out.

He’s for cutting property taxes. Welch is not.

“I can’t remember one person over four years that’s come in (to City Hall) and asked us to cut,” Welch said.

If that’s true, then Welch is not talking to the residents buried under oppressive tax bills. Crist’s answer regarding a statewide property tax initiative was the one people actually want to hear: “If it doesn’t pass, I’ve already proposed that what we should do is reduce your property taxes anyway by 0.4 millage. What does that mean to you in terms of dollars? About $15 million a year back to you, the residents of St. Petersburg.”

Welch also continues to live in a fantasy land where redevelopment of TROPICANA FIELD (there’s no such thing as the Gas Plant District except in Ken’s head) should go to a single developer before the election — the same ridiculous situation the city found itself in four years ago.

And Welch is more interested in making redevelopment some sort of reparations effort:

“I’m a descendant as well. I know the promises that were made to the community when churches and businesses and homeowners were asked to move in the name of progress. It wasn’t for baseball; that was for inclusive economic development.”

Crist’s vision is grounded in reality — that the Tampa Bay Rays will probably be in St. Pete a lot longer than folks realize, and that we need to start planning for it.

“I think what we need to do is try to keep the baseball here. It’s important to me, and it’s important to a lot of our residents who worked very hard to get that team here in the first place.”

2. “Pause” is now the whole frame — and the Times just proved it

At one point in the debate, Welch described some project as being “on pause” right now — Crist’s word, out of the incumbent’s mouth.

“Pause” runs through Crist’s whole case: that St. Pete has been stuck for four years, that nothing’s moved on the Trop, that City Hall idles. He’s running a TV ad about the Moffitt issue on Bay News 9 all day Thursday before the station airs the debate.  

When your opponent starts borrowing your words, the fight has already moved onto your ground.

And then the Tampa Bay Times went and poured it in concrete. Rebecca Liebson and Colleen Wright’s Thursday story asks what’s going on with the massive garage on Central Avenue — and the answer is that seven years after the city set out to redevelop the old police headquarters, all that’s been built is a 540-space parking garage on a dusty patch of dirt. One bar patron looking for a spot before a Rays game said he “literally thought it was a construction zone of an incomplete building.”

That’s the pause, sitting right there on Central Avenue. 

3. Even Welch’s own supporters are writing down the problem

After Wednesday’s forum, one of Welch’s most visible supporters — the same person who hosted the first debate of this race — posted her handwritten “debate notes” to Facebook, framed as the work of a neutral, just-the-facts voter doing her civic homework. “Set aside your biases,” she wrote. “Listen to what each candidate is saying.”

Fine advice. She is not, for the record, a neutral observer, and everyone knows it.

But read her own notes. Under “Gas Plant Sale,” her summary of the Mayor’s answer is that Welch has been doing “inclusive economic development planning for over a decade.” Under “Character, History & Charm,” her note on Welch reads: “Developed has been plans for decades.”

Decades — and that’s from a friendly pen. The incumbent’s own booster, trying to make him look prepared, instead wrote down the exact case against him: that the Gas Plant has been “planned” for decades, that he is only now beginning to work with the neighborhood associations.

Nobody in St. Pete should be asked to wait decades to get this district up to par. On Welch’s own telling — transcribed by his own supporter — we already have.

4. Jim Large shook my hand. Then I remembered how he talks about his own scandal

Yesterday was my first chance to see Jim Large up close. Unlike Welch, he shook my hand — knowing full well what I’ve written about him and the scandal that ended his Fire Department career. I’ll give him that. It’s more than the sitting Mayor managed.

But I can’t get past this. In 2023, the Tampa Bay Times’ Wright reported that seven St. Petersburg firefighters described a workplace Large made hostile to women and minorities — sexist and racist remarks, a firefighter disciplined after a miscarriage, the Chief walking into women’s physicals. Welch suspended him.

And on the St. Pete Catalyst’s “My Mayor” podcast last week, Joe Hamilton asked every candidate the same gentle question — what’s the personal cost of public life? Large used his answer to bring the whole thing up himself, and this is how he described it:

“I was accused of some things to an anonymous survey and I was ultimately investigated and cleared and reinstated and all that. They were proven false. That’s not the issue. So fast forward to Christmas, my wife made a decision to buy me a coffee mug that said, go ahead and call HR as a gag gift. … We’re not afraid of being accused because we know there’s nothing there … there were some people that were from the anonymous hit job that decided to stalk her story on Christmas morning, screenshot the photo and then circulate it with their own narrative.”

A miscarriage discipline and racist jokes on calls, reduced to “an anonymous hit job” and a novelty mug. That’s not a man reckoning with what his firefighters said happened on his watch. That’s a man who finds it funny. I’m amazed he’s sloughing it off — and more amazed he thinks that’s the version voters want to hear.

5. And that’s probably it for debate season — because I don’t see the Tiger Bay forum coming off

There’s one debate still on the calendar: the Suncoast Tiger Bay Club has a Mayoral Candidate Debate set for July 28 at the James Museum — drinks, dinner, debate, all six candidates invited.

I’ll believe it when I see it, and I’ll be honest about my own glass house in saying so: the club’s Executive Director, J.C. Pritchett, is to Welch roughly what I am to Crist: his No. 1 guy. I say that as Crist’s, so I’m not throwing stones from anywhere clean.

But that’s exactly why I don’t see how it comes off. Why would any candidate not named Welch walk into a forum run by the Mayor’s most visible booster and feel like they’re getting a fair shake? And even if Pritchett recuses himself entirely — hands off the questions, off the stage — who do you find to run it instead?

This is St. Pete. Everyone with the standing to moderate a mayoral debate is aligned with somebody. The pool of genuinely neutral parties in this race is just about empty, and I’d know, because I’m one of the people who emptied it.

So here’s my bet: this one either doesn’t happen, or it happens with two or three candidates on a half-empty stage while the rest take a pass. Either way, the debates that were going to move this race have already come and gone — and as I said up top, all they did was sharpen what we already knew. Debate season is over. Now we find out who can actually run a campaign.

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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. Michelle Todd Schorsch is the Chair of St. Pete Shines, a political committee backing Crist for St. Petersburg Mayor. Todd Schorsch is married to Schorsch, the publisher of Florida Politics.