{"id":320062,"date":"2026-06-25T23:50:54","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T23:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/320062\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T23:50:54","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T23:50:54","slug":"5-things-i-think-i-think-about-the-st-pete-mayors-race-now-that-debate-season-is-likely-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/320062\/","title":{"rendered":"5 things I think I think about the St. Pete Mayor’s race, now that debate season is likely over"},"content":{"rendered":"

St. Petersburg is heading into Pride Weekend<\/a> and then the Fourth of July<\/a> \u2014 two back-to-back weekends when residents will be out, socializing more than usual, drinks in hand and grills going. And if the Mayor\u2019s race comes up over one of those drinks, here\u2019s where my head is.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve now sat through three<\/a> mayoral<\/a> debates<\/a>, and they\u2019ve been relatively boring. That\u2019s not really a complaint, just an observation. They didn\u2019t 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 \u2014 more on that below \u2014 this may be just about where the race\u2019s public stage goes dark.<\/p>\n

The handshake<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been tough on Ken Welch<\/a> in this space, and I won\u2019t pretend otherwise. I\u2019ll also say this: He and I go back, and the man came to my wedding. So this isn\u2019t me just taking a swing at him.<\/p>\n

Before Thursday\u2019s debate, I went to shake his hand. He walked right past me. I turned to him anyway and said, \u201cGood luck tonight.\u201d Nothing. I\u2019ve since heard I\u2019m not special \u2014 that he doesn\u2019t shake Charlie Crist\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0hand either, or Brandi Gabbard\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\n\"\"Ken Welch is not a happy warrior.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t extend his hand to a guy wishing him luck. Hold that thought. It comes up again.<\/p>\n

With that off my chest, here\u2019s where my head actually is \u2014 five things I think I think about this race.<\/p>\n

1. Crist was built for Wednesday\u2019s debate format. Welch keeps handing him the contrast<\/p>\n

During what will be the only televised debate of the Primary campaign for St. Pete Mayor, Crist\u2019s made-for-TV persona stood out.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s for cutting property taxes<\/a>. Welch is not. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t remember one person over four years that\u2019s come in (to City Hall) and asked us to cut,\u201d Welch said.<\/p>\n

If that\u2019s true, then Welch is not talking to the residents buried under oppressive tax bills. Crist\u2019s answer regarding a statewide property tax initiative was the one people actually want to hear: \u201cIf it doesn\u2019t pass, I\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Welch also continues to live in a fantasy land where redevelopment of TROPICANA FIELD (there\u2019s no such thing as the Gas Plant District except in Ken\u2019s head) should go to a single developer before the election \u2014 the same ridiculous situation the city found itself in four years ago.<\/p>\n

And Welch is more interested in making redevelopment some sort of reparations effort: <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m 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\u2019t for baseball; that was for inclusive economic development.\u201d <\/p>\n

Crist\u2019s vision is grounded in reality \u2014 that the Tampa Bay Rays<\/a> will probably be in St. Pete a lot longer than folks realize, and that we need to start planning for it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think what we need to do is try to keep the baseball here. It\u2019s important to me, and it\u2019s important to a lot of our residents who worked very hard to get that team here in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n

2. \u201cPause\u201d is now the whole frame \u2014 and the Times just proved it<\/p>\n

At one point in the debate, Welch described some project as being \u201con pause\u201d right now \u2014 Crist\u2019s word, out of the incumbent\u2019s mouth. <\/p>\n

\u201cPause\u201d runs through Crist\u2019s whole case: that St. Pete has been stuck for four years, that nothing\u2019s moved on the Trop, that City Hall idles. He\u2019s running a TV ad about the Moffitt issue<\/a> on Bay News 9 all day Thursday before the station airs the debate. \u00a0<\/p>\n

When your opponent starts borrowing your words, the fight has already moved onto your ground.<\/p>\n

And then the Tampa Bay Times<\/a> went and poured it in concrete. Rebecca Liebson and Colleen Wright\u2019s Thursday story asks what\u2019s going on with the massive garage on Central Avenue \u2014 and the answer is that seven years after the city set out to redevelop the old police headquarters, all that\u2019s 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 \u201cliterally thought it was a construction zone of an incomplete building.\u201d <\/p>\n

That\u2019s the pause, sitting right there on Central Avenue.\u00a0<\/p>\n

3. Even Welch\u2019s own supporters are writing down the problem<\/p>\n

After Wednesday\u2019s forum, one of Welch\u2019s most visible supporters \u2014 the same person who hosted the first debate<\/a> of this race \u2014 posted her handwritten \u201cdebate notes\u201d to Facebook, framed as the work of a neutral, just-the-facts voter doing her civic homework. \u201cSet aside your biases,\u201d she wrote. \u201cListen to what each candidate is saying.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fine advice. She is not, for the record, a neutral observer, and everyone knows it.<\/p>\n

But read her own notes. Under \u201cGas Plant Sale,\u201d her summary of the Mayor\u2019s answer is that Welch has been doing \u201cinclusive economic development planning for over a decade.\u201d Under \u201cCharacter, History & Charm,\u201d her note on Welch reads: \u201cDeveloped has been plans for decades.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Decades \u2014 and that\u2019s from a friendly pen. The incumbent\u2019s own booster, trying to make him look prepared, instead wrote down the exact case against him: that the Gas Plant has been \u201cplanned\u201d for decades, that he is only now beginning to work with the neighborhood associations. <\/p>\n

Nobody in St. Pete should be asked to wait decades to get this district up to par. On Welch\u2019s own telling \u2014 transcribed by his own supporter \u2014 we already have.<\/p>\n

4. Jim Large shook my hand. Then I remembered how he talks about his own scandal<\/p>\n

Yesterday was my first chance to see Jim Large<\/a> up close. Unlike Welch, he shook my hand \u2014 knowing full well what I\u2019ve written about him and the scandal that ended his Fire Department career. I\u2019ll give him that. It\u2019s more than the sitting Mayor managed.<\/p>\n

But I can\u2019t get past this. In 2023, the Tampa Bay Times\u2019<\/a> Wright reported that seven St. Petersburg firefighters described a workplace Large made hostile to women and minorities \u2014 sexist and racist remarks, a firefighter disciplined after a miscarriage, the Chief walking into women\u2019s physicals. Welch suspended him.<\/p>\n

And on the St. Pete Catalyst\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0\u201cMy Mayor\u201d podcast last week, Joe Hamilton asked every candidate the same gentle question \u2014 what\u2019s the personal cost of public life? Large used his answer to bring the whole thing up himself, and this is how he described it:<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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\u2019s 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. \u2026 We\u2019re not afraid of being accused because we know there\u2019s nothing there \u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

A miscarriage discipline and racist jokes on calls, reduced to \u201can anonymous hit job\u201d and a novelty mug. That\u2019s not a man reckoning with what his firefighters said happened on his watch. That\u2019s a man who finds it funny. I\u2019m amazed he\u2019s sloughing it off \u2014 and more amazed he thinks that\u2019s the version voters want to hear.<\/p>\n

5. And that\u2019s probably it for debate season \u2014 because I don\u2019t see the Tiger Bay forum coming off<\/p>\n

There\u2019s one debate still on the calendar: the Suncoast Tiger Bay Club<\/a> has a Mayoral Candidate Debate set for July 28 at the James Museum<\/a> \u2014 drinks, dinner, debate, all six candidates invited.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll believe it when I see it, and I\u2019ll be honest about my own glass house in saying so: the club\u2019s Executive Director, J.C. Pritchett, is to Welch roughly what I am to Crist: his No. 1 guy. I say that as Crist\u2019s, so I\u2019m not throwing stones from anywhere clean.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s exactly why I don\u2019t see how it comes off. Why would any candidate not named Welch walk into a forum run by the Mayor\u2019s most visible booster and feel like they\u2019re getting a fair shake? And even if Pritchett recuses himself entirely \u2014 hands off the questions, off the stage \u2014 who do you find to run it instead?<\/p>\n

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\u2019d know, because I\u2019m one of the people who emptied it.<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s my bet: this one either doesn\u2019t 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"St. Petersburg is heading into Pride Weekend and then the Fourth of July \u2014 two back-to-back weekends when…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320063,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[11591,3300,3347,71439,2346,202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-320062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-2026-election","tag-brandi-gabbard","tag-charlie-crist","tag-jim-large","tag-ken-welch","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\/320062","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=320062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320062\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}