A carved axe-handle; a southside wood yard; churches of fellowship; businesses of fellowship; a promise to a thriving, Black community; the Historic Gas Plant District. Of this list, only the axe handle remains.<\/p>\n
St. Pete Mayor Kenneth Welch keeps that axe handle in his study \u2013 a reminder of the wood yard he worked as a boy under the watchful eye of his grandfather, Flagmon Welch. The wood yard, along with the churches, businesses and homes of the Gas Plant District, were relinquished on the grounds that a promise would be kept.<\/p>\n
The promise: jobs, opportunities and development for the displaced Black community.<\/p>\n
So far, those promises haven\u2019t been realized by previous administrations, and, ironically, Welch\u2019s first mayoral campaign was to make good on the very promise that was made to him. As of Thursday, the city has officially narrowed the Historic Gas Plant redevelopment proposals, recommended by city staff, down to four: ARK Ellison Horus, Blake Investment Partners, Foundation Vision Partners and the Pinellas County Housing Authority.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt comes down to JHOP principles,\u201d Welch said, referring to Jobs, Housing, Opportunities and Promises. \u201cI said I would bring together partners at county, city, faith-based and business levels \u2013 you name it \u2013 and that we were going to give that our best effort in honoring a bid aligned with JHOP principles.\u201d<\/p>\n
The decision to raze the Gas Plant District during Welch\u2019s youth, however, had a different purpose than JHOP: eminent domain for I-75, the dozing of the Historic Gas Plant, the flat, black tar pooling around what is now called Tropicana Field, for cars to tuck in next to each other. That\u2019s how St. Pete became major league, though not immediately.<\/p>\n
The then-dubbed Tampa Bay Devil Rays, now simply the Rays, occupied the former Historic Gas Plant District\u2019s slant-roofed dome in 1998, nearly a decade after residents living in the Historic Gas Plant were displaced in the mid \u201980s.<\/p>\n
\u201cLooking at that axe handle I keep, I remember that time in life,\u201d Welch told the Catalyst. \u201cI remember those promises.\u201d<\/p>\n
Taking agency to fulfill that promise himself, rather than it be given to him from those who promised it in the first place, was an unexpected journey. While his grandfather owned a wood yard, his father was the second African American on St. Pete City Council, elected in 1981, during Welch\u2019s senior year of high school, at a time when he was determined not to follow in his dad\u2019s footsteps.<\/p>\n
Though an incident at church prompted him to push back against narratives. His pastor said something Welch did not find aligned with scripture, and, with the encouragement of his mother, Alletha Welch, he penned a refutational letter. His first, but not his last. Many more followed for the op-ed section, \u201cMy View,\u201d of the Tampa Bay Times.<\/p>\n
Writing op-eds graduated him to the School Board, then later the Pinellas County Commission, a seat he held for nearly 20 years before becoming mayor. As a commissioner, he devised the Homeless Leadership Board.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was the first chairman,\u201d said Welch. \u201cI created the first housing trust fund for the county.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those early efforts on the commission echo today.<\/p>\n
\u201cOut of the Homeless Leadership Board came a financial source which has funded affordable housing all over the county,\u201d Welch said. \u201cIt went on to fund Pinellas Hope and other sites that are still active. Penny for Pinellas for affordable housing is also still using some of those dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBiggest lesson I learned from Dad was it isn\u2019t about your name on a plaque. People don\u2019t remember who was mayor, but they do know if there\u2019s affordable housing, projects for the homeless. It\u2019s always about impact.\u201d<\/p>\n
Welch\u2019s mayoral tenure, though, was quickly complicated by circumstance: he was sworn into office remotely during the Covid pandemic, responded to unprecedented consequences following major hurricanes, and received significant public backlash for his handling of debris, disparagingly called \u201cWelch piles.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was an unprecedented set of challenges. Some criticism was about debris removal, but we removed more debris in 90 days than has ever been removed before. We moved over 2 million cubic yards of debris after (Hurricane) Helene.\u201d<\/p>\n
The debris removal was the largest in the city\u2019s history, five times the total from previously combined storms, before Hurricane Milton swiftly followed Helene.<\/p>\n
Those storms also forced a recalibration of city priorities, as the damage exposed major infrastructure flaws. Two of the city\u2019s three sewer plants, for instance, needed to go offline due to storm surge.<\/p>\n
Quoting what the owner of Naked Farmer, a St. Pete restaurant, said during a public feedback session, Welch reframed the situation: \u201cThe obstacle is the way forward,\u201d adding that \u201cwe see the work we need to be a resilient community.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Gas Plant, a long simmer in Welch\u2019s life from youth to adulthood, has similarly been criticized. After the collapse of the Rays and Hines deal following damage to Tropicana Field\u2019s roof, a roughly $60 million repair, development rights returned to the city.<\/p>\n
That has made the Historic Gas Plant District redevelopment politically central to the upcoming election cycle.<\/p>\n
When asked how he helps today\u2019s community understand the significance of the site, Welch said: \u201cIt\u2019s a great example of equity as we implement it. Equity is equal opportunity informed by history.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of folks who don\u2019t have that history,\u201d he added. \u201cThat\u2019s why we renamed the effort from Tropicana Field redevelopment to what it was before baseball, and that is the Historic Gas Plant.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite criticism that he lost the Rays and mishandled the redevelopment, Welch argues, \u201cI kept my promise, but the Rays didn\u2019t honor theirs.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A carved axe-handle; a southside wood yard; churches of fellowship; businesses of fellowship; a promise to a thriving,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217895,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":{"0":"post-217894","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-st-petersburg","8":"tag-st-pete","9":"tag-st-pete-headlines","10":"tag-st-pete-news","11":"tag-st-petersburg","12":"tag-st-petersburg-headlines","13":"tag-st-petersburg-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}