About a week out from the revelation that a 2014 consultant report suggested that closing a wastewater facility near Albert Whitted Airport before an expansion at another plant was finished was a bad idea, St. Pete City Council voted to hire an outside auditor to find out how the study was never passed on to the mayor and council.
The Albert Whitted plant closed in the spring of 2015, but had the mayor and council known about the study, that might not have happened.
Staff within the water department apparently did know about the report, which led Mayor Rick Kriseman to place two mid-level employees on unpaid administrative leave Wednesday. About a year ago, the city's then-public works director, Mike Connors, resigned in the wake of a previous sewage dump, and Kriseman said much of the secrecy stemmed from leadership within the public works and water departments.
So the city wants to figure out who else knew about it, how high up the chain of command it goes, why it wasn't shared and whether there's any other crucial information being hidden.
“Undoubtedly there was a pattern there and a culture of not sharing things with council,” said St. Pete Councilman Steve Kornell.
The spilling of tens of millions of gallons of partially treated sewage into the bay as a result of Hurricane Hermine (and a couple of times before that, though to a lesser degree) has become something of a political albatross for Kriseman, even if the multiple factors that led to it were out of anyone's control.
The council grilled Kriseman and Public Works director Claude Tankersley, largely over inadequate communication with residents near areas where sewage spills took place.
Kriseman, a Democrat, is also being hounded by GOP officials, namely state lawmakers from Pinellas and U.S. Congressman David Jolly, who offered water department employees whistleblower protection and has asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to investigate. Governor Rick Scott has also directed the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to investigate.
The sewage dumps are an apparent godsend to the local GOP; a popular Democratic mayor is now on edge and potentially vulnerable to a GOP mayoral aspirant (or re-aspirant, which is probably more appropriate here).
Early on in Thursday's council meeting, Kriseman said he's no less outraged than anyone else.
"Nobody, and I mean nobody is more angry or frustrated than I am about our inadequate infrastructure, about discharges into the bay, about overflows and about the inability to communicate some of these issues, both simple and complex," he said.
But he also expressed optimism and pledged to hold a series of community meetings and hire a full-time communications professional to help communicate with the public on everything from water use education to warnings when there is a spill.
This article appears in Sep 22-29, 2016.