Comm Voice
A message of resiliency and strength from Mayor Welch
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Helene and Milton, the twin post-summer hurricanes of 2024, uprooted lives, caused unprecedented property losses and heightened many of our long-feared vulnerabilities of increased storm surge, high winds and extended rainfall. The back-to-back, powerful impact of these storms demonstrate undeniable evidence of our new reality: Extreme weather and climate change will affect our quality of life and the ability to provide and maintain critical services. It’s clear that the clock on climate change and its impacts has sped up exponentially, therefore, our resiliency actions must accelerate as well.
This is not a time to panic. Instead, it is a time to focus. The key is not only to recover, but to enhance our resiliency. It is vital that we build back stronger and more resilient after every storm.
Recovery
Right now, the most powerful tool in the recovery process is information. As we recover from Helene and Milton, the City remains committed to providing residents and businesses with the information they need to understand the recovery process. Clear information on permitting, the City’s 49% Rule, available assistance, and FEMA requirements will be key for those who are rebuilding. To help answer questions, the City assembled partners from the local, state, and federal levels to host two recovery information events, one virtual and one in person. More information on these events can be found at www.StPete.org/Recovery.
As for storm debris, our teams have collected more debris – more than 800,000+ cubic yards – which is more than twice the debris collected after Hurricanes Idalia, Ian, and Irma combined. Our goal is to complete the job by January 11, 2025. This is an ambitious 90-day goal for collecting the most debris we have ever collected. More than 140 trucks are on the road every day removing debris from residential properties and we’ve opened debris management sites in the four corners of the city to expedite the process. We also created a temporary ‘Hometown Recovery Haulers’ program to provide an economic boost to local businesses and augment debris-clearing efforts. It’s clear that our combined efforts have produced extraordinary results, and we will keep working until the job is done.
Please be patient with us and separate your debris as required by FEMA. In the New Year, debris will be a memory, and we will be completely focused on the hard work of rebuilding a stronger, more resilient St. Petersburg.
Resiliency
The environmental drivers evidenced by the storms of 2024 demand that we act with increased urgency to mitigate risks, while protecting and preserving our quality of life in a more agile and sustainable way. Now is the time to have the conversations and to act on mitigation, building requirements and our willingness and ability to make new and necessary investments in our infrastructure resiliency. The City is creating a new St. Pete Agile Resiliency Plan to set the expectation for resiliency levels and to identify existing or new projects and funding that will achieve the goal of strategic, accelerated investments to meet our updated resiliency goals.
We must acknowledge our new reality. With Hurricane Milton, we were anticipating 15 feet of storm surge. Two of our three wastewater treatment plants are not designed to operate with that level of surge. For additional context, Helene brought eight feet of storm surge to the Northeast Sewer Treatment Plant. Until Helene, our sewer treatment plants had never experienced more than four feet of storm surge in the last 70 years. We currently have $70 million dedicated to upgrading these facilities to withstand 11 feet of storm surge, but Milton would have eclipsed those upgrades if it had stayed on track and speed. This is the current level of threat we must adapt our plans to meet.
The Historic Gas Plant District
We also see our new reality when we look at Tropicana Field. The image of Tropicana Field’s damaged roof is one of the most iconic images from the 2024 hurricanes. The range of possibilities – for future games at the stadium and the timing of the new stadium development – will be driven by many factors including damage assessments. We are in continuous communication with all parties and will update the community as we analyze the information and recommend a plan to resolve the Tropicana Field issue, setting a path forward for the Historic Gas Plant District development. My Administration’s focus is informed by the broad and urgent priority of Recovery and Resiliency for our residents and businesses as we embrace the emergent challenge of building a resilient St. Petersburg.
Partnerships and Progress
As we continue to rebuild, partnerships will be key. It’s important to know that we are working together at every level of government – city, local, state, and federal – to achieve the goal of mitigation, recovery, and resiliency for our community. We are working closely with FEMA on recovery efforts and on identifying key infrastructure for enhanced resilience investments.
We remain in constant collaboration with our state partners as well. State Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie attended a recent City Council meeting. President Biden was here shortly after Milton, touring St. Petersburg and Pinellas County with Congresswoman Kathy Castor and me, County Commission Chair Kathleen Peters and other elected officials. Ultimately, the City is working together with these partners to represent our community, secure resources and funding, and drive our recovery efforts forward with urgency.
Looking Ahead
I want the residents of St. Petersburg to know that the city stands with you through this recovery and the rebuilding that is to come. It will be challenging, but we are committed to building back stronger.
Informed Decision Making is one of my administration’s guiding principles. What the data is telling us and what the literal flooding in our streets is showing us, is that our infrastructure must be upgraded to match the pace of climate change and storm impacts. Delaying these actions will only hinder our ability to maintain the progress that we have made in our city over the last decade and leave us vulnerable to future storm-related impacts.
Our recovery and resiliency planning, investment, and implementation must be agile, innovative and up to the challenge. Working together with the community, we will conquer this challenge.
Kenneth T. Welch is Mayor of the City of St. Petersburg.
SB
November 28, 2024at2:21 pm
Mayor Welch and the $500 Taxpayer Surprise—Now with Extra Boondoggle Sauce!
Let’s give a standing ovation to Mayor Welch and his brain trust for their latest masterstroke in fiscal genius: slashing insurance coverage on the TROP from $75 million to $25 million to save $275,000. That’s right—$275,000! That’s barely enough to cover a few months of avocado toast for the city staff. Meanwhile, taxpayers are now staring down the barrel of potentially $50 million in uninsured losses when—oops—natural cost overruns happen.
What does that mean for you, dear taxpayer? A lovely little bill of at least $500 per person. That’s not just a hurricane deductible; that’s a category five wallet storm. And this all happened in the same year the Gulf water temps decided to be hotter than Satan’s Jacuzzi. Bravo!
But it doesn’t stop there, folks. This is the very administration now pushing for a $1.5 billion boondoggle of a new stadium. Let me get this straight: if they can’t even handle a basic insurance policy without detonating the city’s finances, you really think they’re going to stick the landing on $1.5 billion? That’s like handing your toddler a chainsaw and asking them to sculpt a masterpiece.
And here’s the kicker: remember when the original TROP was built? I’m sure back then, they promised it would be a fabulous win for taxpayers and the community. How’d that work out? If memory serves, it took eight years to even get a team to play there. EIGHT YEARS. That’s like buying a racehorse, only to find out it’s a cow and needs a decade of training before it can run—badly.
And did the current TROP, now a glorified hurricane wreck, ever deliver on those pie-in-the-sky promises? Zero chance. Sure, we got the Rays—but has the stadium truly paid back taxpayers in any meaningful way? Doubtful. Instead, it’s been more like a very expensive lemonade stand that forgot to sell lemonade.
So now, here we are, staring at $50 million in uninsured risks, a $1.5 billion stadium on the horizon, and promises that feel eerily familiar. If this administration’s track record is anything to go by, the only thing fabulous about this new stadium will be the size of the bill taxpayers get stuck with. But hey, at least the nachos will still be overpriced!
Steve D
November 13, 2024at9:31 pm
Of course, a fluff piece. However, to the point. You can’t sacrifice future prosperity by chasing away everything that draws outsiders to this beautiful community. Reject those who are lobbying to do that.
William Garth
November 13, 2024at6:33 pm
Well. Here’s my take away. You can’t flush toilets during a hurricane because the sewage system is antiquated. You will be out of power for a week each time a predictable storm hits the city. Trash from flooding will fill the sidewalks along streets for two to four months.
And this wasn’t even a direct hits.
The people we elect to run our city have failed in the seventeen years we have lived here to take infrastructure seriously. The sewage plants need to be raised and operational during hurricanes. The electric grid needs to have duplicating backups. The flooding needs to be addressed with dams and pumps.
Stop patting yourself on the back and get down to the engineering and financing to make St Petersburg a livable city in ten years. It hasn’t happened so far. Maybe it’s time to start.
As Jack Kennedy said a generation ago, success has many fathers and failure is an orphan.
Mayor, you are in charge. Take the reins and make us a better place than you found it. I don’t mean a stadium. I mean a livable city. For every one.
Bill Garth
870 Sand Pine Drive NE
St Petersburg, FL 33703
S. Rose Smith-Hayes
November 13, 2024at10:45 am
Clean up Tropicana and find ways to have games there for the next 3 years. Other Parks are not covered and the games go on. It will be cost effective to do this. If the Rays do Not play in Pinellas county for the next 3 years, scrap the deal for a new stadium.
Mike
November 13, 2024at7:47 am
I dislike you mayor welch and i dislike the job youre doing.
HAL FREEDMAN
November 13, 2024at1:05 am
As the Mayor suggests, we need to invest City resources, including borrowing/bonding capability, in ways to “act on mitigation, building requirements and our willingness and ability to make new and necessary investments in our infrastructure resiliency.” To do this, we should immediately scrap the Gas Plant “deal” and concentrate on more important needs that involve more of our citizens. This also suggests not wasting many millions on repairing the Trop, which will have a 2-year functional life…at best!
Janice Buchanan Swartz
November 12, 2024at7:38 pm
Thank you! Thank you!! Thank you!!! to all persons in the City of St Petersburg (including Mayor Welch, City Council and each employee/worker) and Pinellas County for doing your best to keep us safe during these frighteningly serious storms. Truly heartfelt sympathy is extended to our fellow citizens whose families lost loved ones. We move forward with new knowledge and determined hope as we face our future together in this remarkable part of God’s wondrous world.