With a deadline just 24 hours away, the St. Petersburg City Council spent over three hours on Thursday morning hearing from the public and discussing whether to put a referendum on this November's ballot asking this question about the Pier: "Shall the City of St. Petersburg, Florida preserve and refurbish the existing iconic inverted pyramid structure?"
Ultimately they voted 6-2 against any such referendum, disappointing the more than 20,000 citizens who had signed a petition requesting one.
One citizen who didn't sign the petition but said that he thinks there still ought to be one was St. Petersburg Mayor Bill Foster. He said he didn't believe the question that was before the Council was the correct one, and thought that the citizens who worked hard to indicate their opposition to the new design, which was approved in February after 13 months of public hearings, still deserved a vote of some sort.
"There should be the reward in really going and getting the signatures," Foster said after all of the Council members had indicated how they were going to vote but had not officially done so.
The 6-2 vote was surprising in that it came three days after the Council had voted 5-3 in the opposite direction to support having a referendum on this November's ballot.
This article appears in Aug 2-8, 2012.