![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/vlcsnap-2026-06-03-21h23m09s129.png\")
article <\/p>\n article <\/p>\n
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – St. Petersburg<\/a> leaders broke ground on the new operations building at the Southwest Water Reclamation Facility Wednesday.<\/p>\n St. Petersburg infrastructure investment <\/p>\n The backstory:<\/p>\n It\u2019s one of the plants they had to close and evacuate the staff from during Hurricane Milton<\/a>.<\/p>\n “I didn’t want our community to ever have to face that again,” St. Pete Mayor Ken Welch said. “You might have gotten that wonderful call from me or from our comms team saying, \u2018Don’t flush your toilets. Don’t do laundry,\u2019” he said.<\/p>\n What they’re saying:<\/p>\n “Our realities have changed in the city of St. Petersburg<\/a> and if we’re going to be a resilient community, this is the kind of infrastructure investment we have to make,” Welch said.<\/p>\n The new building gives staff a safe place to stay during storms, and is elevated to 22 feet above sea level compared to the current ground level building.\u00a0<\/p>\n Critical operations <\/p>\n Dig deeper:<\/p>\n The city says it\u2019s aiming to get all of its stormwater facilities protected up to 15 feet.<\/p>\n The three-story building will also have offices, an operations control room, a laboratory, workroom, operations control room, bunk room, staff lounge, group locker rooms and an enclosed repair and maintenance garage on the ground floor. Occupied spaces will be located on the upper two floors.<\/p>\n “This new operations building is a practical, forward-looking investment in a system our community depends on every single day,” City Council Chairwoman Lisset Hanewicz said.\u00a0<\/p>\n The plant also serves the city of Gulfport<\/a>.<\/p>\n The project is part of the city’s St. Pete Agile Resilience or SPAR program, an accelerated approach to strengthening infrastructure.<\/p>\n Resilience framework funding <\/p>\n By the numbers:<\/p>\n According to Claude Tankersley, the city\u2019s public works administrator, the overall project is $22.2 million and about $18 million is for the construction of the facility. The state of Florida<\/a> provided $8.9 million in grants towards the project.<\/p>\n The Source: The information in this story is from the city of St. Pete and groundbreaking statements delivered by St. Pete Mayor Ken Welch and City Council Chairwoman Lisset Hanewicz.<\/p>\n St. Petersburg<\/a>Hurricanes<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"article ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – St. Petersburg leaders broke ground on the new operations building at the Southwest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295279,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[47,944,115,1157,202,204,203,199,201,200,628,221],"class_list":["post-295278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-fl","tag-hurricanes","tag-news","tag-pinellas","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news","tag-us","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295278","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=295278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/vlcsnap-2026-06-03-21h23m32s975.png\")
Facility designed to withstand future storms <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/vlcsnap-2026-06-03-21h23m17s497.png\")
<\/p>\n