CL Endorsement: Rick Kriseman for Mayor of St. Petersburg

Last Thursday night, close to 500 people gathered to celebrate the opening of The Warehouse Arts Xchange studio complex in South St. Pete, the fourth ribbon-cutting of the day for Mayor Rick Kriseman following events for a pizza place in Tyrone, a black-owned skincare business downtown, and a bank branch. The crowd was diverse, the mood enthusiastic and not a little awestruck that this long-dreamed-of project was finally coming to fruition.

I looked around and wondered, what’s wrong with this picture?

On Sunday morning, my husband and I tried out The Frog Pond, the new downtown branch of a popular Gulf beaches chain that saw potential in a faded shopping plaza that had not been anybody’s idea of a destination. The brunch biz was booming, the parking lot was packed, and again the crowd was diverse and enthusiastic.

Again, I looked around and wondered, what’s wrong with this picture?

Later that same day, the Open Streets event on Central Avenue brought pedestrians and bicyclists out in droves. Over the last month, murals blossomed on bland city walls, and over the next two years, three new museums will open. And earlier in the week, the Human Rights Campaign awarded St. Pete its third perfect score in a row for being a city that welcomes and supports its LGBTQ citizens. 

Again, what’s wrong with any of these pictures?

The answer: Nothing. This is the kind of city I want to live in. These and so many other positive developments in St. Pete reflect leadership that is working, that is improving the city daily.

So why would I want a new mayor?

I don’t. 

I see no credible reason to make a change from the forward-thinking, open-hearted administration of Mayor Rick Kriseman to return to the era of a former mayor who may claim to have laid the groundwork for the city’s current success, but has used his campaign to wage an increasingly desperate barrage of smear tactics and personal attacks — aided by a daily paper that parrots Baker’s talking points with such relentlessness that many voters are surmising, correctly or not, that the Tampa Bay Times’s agenda is now being driven by its financial saviors, a band of semi-secret investors who lean heavily Republican.

Just one example: Sunday’s “Loser of the week” column, in which Kriseman won the title because of “lots of unwelcome headlines” — headlines generated, mind you, by the Times. Those allegedly damning stories included the administration being “late” in informing the public about the latest sewage incident (the one that led to exactly no criminal charges); “Baker doing all he can” (with the Times’s help) to remind voters of a decades-old accusation against the mayor’s chief of staff; and the Rays’ interest in “a stadium site in Tampa” — which I guess is a bad headline if you have the quixotic notion that the Rays could be forced to stay at the Trop, but seems like a good headline if you feel the city would do better to let the team go and redevelop 66 acres of prime downtown property.

Then there was the glowingly positive blurb we discovered recently that promotes Baker’s upcoming book about Florida, Beyond the Sunshine: A Timeline of Florida’s Rich History: “We should hand this book to every new resident as they cross the state line,” wrote Tim Nickens, the editor of the Times editorial board. Questioned about it by CL’s Kate Bradshaw, Nickens said that Baker hadn’t been a candidate for mayor at the time he agreed to write the blurb (as if Baker has ever stopped being a candidate), but even so: The blurb suggests a mind already made up, a perception reinforced by the ed board’s two endorsements of Baker and Nickens’s own recent op-ed piece decrying the end of nonpartisanship (ha!) and ending with a characterization of Baker as St. Pete’s best mayor. 

And speaking of nonpartisanship, look how far I got without mentioning Trump! Just like candidate Baker! 

I know, I know, he’s not Trump, and he dares not say his name, for fear of… Well, we don’t know. The mayor, through a spokesperson, declined for a third time the “opportunity” to speak on the record with CL. 

But anyone who says this election has nothing to do with national politics is being purposely obtuse. If a Republican manages to unseat an incumbent Democrat in Florida’s I-4 corridor, particularly an incumbent who has never shied from criticizing Trump, you know the Twittermaster will be crowing loudly and boastfully that the city of St. Pete loves him after all.

And that is not the St. Pete I want to l ive in. 

Read CL's August, 2017, primary endorsement of Mayor Kriseman here.

This article appears in Nov 2-9, 2017.