After an expected, roughly two-month lull, St. Pete city officials are set to take up the first batch of decisions on the city's favorite first-world problem, the newly approved Pier Park design slated to crown the downtown waterfront.
On Thursday morning, the St. Pete City Council will discuss about $5.2 million in contracts, including, reports the Tampa Bay Times, architectural and engineering services with the design team the Pier Selection Committee chose back in April, one with the project's construction manager and another to spell doom for the 1973 inverted pyramid structure loved (but not visited very much) by many.
This could be another one of those meetings that lasts a good nine hours, most of it public comment, so if you plan on going, we recommend leaving a cooler full of sandwiches and boxed wine in your car.
There are already signs of organized opposition.
"We're actively moving forward to get the required number of petitions to give voters a say on any demolition or construction upon the downtown waterfront," Safety Harbor Florida man Tom Lambdon, who founded Vote on the Pier, told the Times.
It was the work of Lambdon's group and another, Concerned Citizens of St. Petersburg, that helped topple the Lens design concept in 2013 after a petition effort led by the former garnered 20,000 signatures put it on the city ballot.
He could be at it again, but at this point he has been notably quiet since the council opted to go ahead with Pier Park.
"When you are at war with someone, you don't show them your cards," he told the Times.
Ben Kirby, a spokesman for Mayor Rick Kriseman, took issue with Lambdon's choice of words.
"Mr. Lambdon's comments are unfortunate and do a disservice to the men and women who have fought and died in real wars so that we might live in a free society with liberty to voice our support — or lack thereof — for things like, say, iconic public works projects," Kirby wrote in a Facebook post. "Citizens don't 'go to war' with one another in the Sunshine City…or with our friends in Safety Harbor, as the case may be."
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2015.