The city succeeds in spite of its elected officials, not because of them. Rick Baker and Rick Kriseman each had genuinely good stretches across their two terms, but St. Pete mostly lurches forward on a bipolar mix of Sunshine City optimism and the nagging suspicion that we could be doing better.<\/p>\n
Which is exactly where Ken Welch finds himself, seeking a second term in front of an electorate that likes its city a good deal more than it likes its Mayor.<\/p>\n
Going into the first mayoral debate<\/a>, which I watched at 1 a.m. from Rome, this was always going to break one of two ways. Welch could make himself first among equals \u2014 concede that the last two years have been brutal, decline to take the blame for the weather, tick off what he\u2019s done, and humbly ask for the chance to right the ship. Lock down his base and quietly dare White Democrats to unseat the city\u2019s first Black Mayor. Or he could fail to find that pivot and become the target of everyone else on the stage.<\/p>\n The second thing is what happened.<\/p>\n Charlie Crist went straight at the storm response and the empty chair at the emergency operations center.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt looks like we were not prepared for a few of these hurricanes recently, and that\u2019s a problem,\u201d Crist said, before, later in the debate, landing the line that doubled as the night\u2019s thesis: that he was disappointed in the mayor and the city needs a change \u2014 and so, he noted, does everyone else at the table, or they wouldn\u2019t be running. When Crist turned and told Welch he was disappointed in him, it landed like an entire city clearing its throat.<\/p>\n Maria Scruggs came out swinging on transparency, handing the administration a failing grade on procurement: \u201cIf I were to grade the City of St. Pete in the areas of transparency and when it comes to procurement, I would give them an F.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Kevin Batdorf, the former Shore Acres neighborhood association president, doesn\u2019t really sound like a man running for Mayor so much as one carrying the fury of a flooded neighborhood in his fist \u2014 his whole campaign is the claim that Shore Acres was punished for his criticism. \u201cShore Acres suffered because I was very critical of the process,\u201d he said. That\u2019s the kind of oppo-file material political consultants dream of \u2014 it\u2019ll be on at least two mailers to every voter in the city\u2019s largest neighborhood before this is through, whatever the merits.\u00a0<\/p>\n And Brandi Gabbard, who spent the last several years mostly voting in lockstep with Welch, told the room the 2024 storms changed her mind and that the City needs to \u201cget back on track\u201d \u2014 even as she swatted away a Batdorf jab over a \u201csecret\u201d post-storm meeting in her district.<\/p>\n Welch\u2019s answer to all of it was that everyone was talking the city down. \u201cI\u2019m really going to push back on folks talking our City down,\u201d he said. \u201cOur city is doing well two years after the most devastating storms that we have ever faced.\u201d On the recovery itself, the pitch was patience: \u201cJust be patient. We will get it all done in 90 days. More debris than we\u2019ve ever moved.\u201d It\u2019s not a bad argument. It\u2019s also only half-right \u2014 and \u201cbe patient, look how much debris\u201d is exactly the note that lands badly in a neighborhood still drying out.\u00a0<\/p>\n Welch suggested that, but for the Rays deal collapsing<\/a>, he wouldn\u2019t be facing this much company on a debate stage, which is how you know how badly he\u2019s misread his own predicament. The Rays deal didn\u2019t sink him. His preparation and response to the hurricanes did; the stadium fell apart in the rubble that followed.<\/p>\n To his credit, Welch gave the only honest answer when candidates were asked to name a mistake: the $250,000 in bonuses<\/a> he handed 17 top officials for the Rays deal, money later ruled illegal and clawed back. \u201cI should have waited until that was executed and the dirt was turned,\u201d he said. \u201cI didn\u2019t do that.\u201d Everyone else dodged.<\/p>\n A few other things I think I think about Tuesday\u2019s debate:<\/p>\n \u2014Scruggs is almost certainly not winning a citywide race, but she was the most compelling presence in the room \u2014 you never knew what was coming next, whether an old grievance with Welch over term limits or a genuinely felt lament about the neglected neighborhoods of south St. Pete. She also complicates life for Welch in a specific way: a former NAACP branch president running against him guts the ugly surrogate argument, pushed by JC Pritchett<\/a>, that Crist is out to erase Black representation at City Hall. (I\u2019ll have more to say about Pritchett another day.)<\/p>\n As an aside about what a disappointment Tuesday\u2019s event was: for an NAACP-hosted debate, the room skewed strikingly White, and it took more than an hour before anyone said the word \u201cMidtown.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014Batdorf was a wonderful neighborhood association president and is plainly not ready, right now, to run the state\u2019s fifth-largest city; his answers to anything not named \u201cthe storm\u201d showed it. Gabbard, the self-styled \u201cDump Duke\u201d candidate, demonstrated why in almost any other cycle she\u2019d make a run-off \u2014 and why, boxed in politically, nights like this will be her high-water mark.<\/p>\n \u2014The real winner didn\u2019t show. Jim Large, the embattled former Fire Chief \u2014 accused in 2023 of racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks, then reinstated after a review \u2014 skipped the debate and presumably got a good night\u2019s sleep. He says he\u2019ll turn up at later forums, the next being the June 18 League of Women Voters debate at St. Petersburg College, and when he does, he\u2019ll be aiming a fire hose of criticism at his old boss.<\/p>\n Mostly, though, nothing changed on the stage \u2014 and the night\u2019s most consequential news broke off it. Welch\u2019s base was supposed to fill that auditorium; instead his chief surrogates, Rene Flowers and Terri Lipsey Scott, stood up front at the open like ma\u00eetre d\u2019s.<\/p>\n The real development came the same day, away from the library: Crist reported a $1.6 million<\/a> haul \u2014 more than $330,000 of it raised across April and May \u2014 and rolled out a six-figure vote-by-mail push to rebuild the mail-ballot requests that collapsed after a 2021 law required voters to renew them every cycle. In a Pinellas electorate that votes by mail more than any in the state, that\u2019s close to the whole ballgame. Crist closed the last period with $1.1 million on hand; Welch had less than $193,000, and his campaign has been fending off questions about money since his kickoff<\/a>. About 125 people sat in the Obama Main Library on debate night. Crist can talk to the entire city by mail, again and again \u2014 and Welch, without the cash to change the narrative, can mostly sit back and take it.<\/p>\n For an incumbent, \u201cnothing changed\u201d is the diagnosis, not the reprieve. Three-quarters of this city isn\u2019t sold on a second Welch term, and the calendar to the Aug. 18 Primary is long.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s going to be a long summer for KT.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n Ed. Note: Michelle Todd Schorsch is the Chair of St. Pete Shines, a political committee backing Crist for St. Petersburg Mayor. Todd Schorsch is married to Peter Schorsch, the publisher of Florida Politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"St. Petersburg is, for all its sunshine and geography-is-destiny optimism, a city of discontent. That\u2019s not the worst…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-302395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302395","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=302395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/728x90-2-scaled-e1770825250237.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/UBER_DUIprevention_728X90_04292026.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n