St. Pete Beach Mayor Adrian Petrilawants to toll tourists driving into St. Pete Beachto help the city pay for what he says are$200 millionin infrastructure needs.<\/p>\n
Hurricanes Milton and Helene made it clear that St. Pete Beach is lagging behind on stormwater and sewer system fixes, reclaimed water system improvements and other upgrades, Petrila said at a City Commission meeting Monday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can talk about failures and neglect of the past, and those all might be valid points, but I think it is better for us not to fixate on the past but rather to look at how we can address those problems today,\u201d Petrila said, noting the $200 million need is daunting for the small city.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor many of these things, the needs are immediate,\u201d Petrila said.<\/p>\n
An exact toll amount was not discussed, but Petrila estimated that a $1 toll on tourist drivers at all three of St. Pete Beach\u2019s access points would bring in an additional $11 million in annual revenue.<\/p>\n
The mayor said residents, business owners and employees would not be subject to the toll. But details of how that would be determined were not discussed Monday.<\/p>\n
Citing numbers from the Florida Department of Transportation, Petrila said that the access points see roughly 60,000 daily trips to a city with less than 9,000 residents.<\/p>\n
Adding a tourist toll would be a fair way for visitors to help fund the roads and other infrastructure they place a strain on, Petrila said.<\/p>\n
The mayor touted the ideaas a solution that does not raise taxes on residents, and Commissioner Lisa Robinson said a similar toll proved beneficial to her hometown of Treasure Island.<\/p>\n
But Vice Mayor Karen Marriott said sheworries the toll would hurt local businesses.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would hate to see us do something that, under the guise of not raising taxes on the residents, completely crushes our business community,\u201d Marriott said.<\/p>\n
In Sanibel Island, which Petrila cited as a possible model to follow, the toll is $6 for cars equippedwith an appropriate transponder, and $9 for those thatare not.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat puts an end to most of the businesses on St. Pete Beach,\u201d Marriottsaid. \u201cAs much our residents don\u2019t want their taxes raised, I think they also all don\u2019t want to have to drive off the island for every service.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"St. Pete Beach Mayor Adrian Petrilawants to toll tourists driving into St. Pete Beachto help the city pay…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38070,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[16826,26027,7452,202,2149,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-38069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-adrian-petrila","tag-adrian-petrilawants","tag-city-commission","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-beach","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\/38069","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=38069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}