Mayor Ken Welch has been up against it during his nearly five years at city hall.
Two hurricanes took an unprecedented toll on city services.
The roof blew off the Trop in the midst of negotiations with the Rays, and the team decided to leave St. Pete for Tampa.
A governor and state legislature wrested control from Florida’s cities, bulldozed (or should I say bull-DOGEd) their budgets, and sent all DEI initiatives to die.
Republicans in Washington D.C., dedicated only to their supreme leader and his fellow billionaires, helped create an affordability crisis driven by their own selfish policies and undeclared wars.
Could Mayor Welch have stopped these winds from blowing?
No. Yet his opponent, Charlie Crist, suggests that Welch coulda, woulda, shoulda done a lot more.
And that he, Good Time Charlie, coulda, woulda, shoulda done better.
Maybe he coulda. If he’d been here.
But he wasn’t. He was here intermittently in the city he loves to say he loves, mostly to deal with family issues here and in Minneapolis.
And now he’s back, doing what he does so well: campaign.
Crist is an excellent runner for things, no doubt. His soothing manner suggests he could make a mint doing ASMR videos. His varsity jacket reminds us he used to play high school ball. His platform and his debate remind us of all the offices he used to hold.
But listen to the Bay News 9 mayoral debate—the only one Crist agreed to—and watch those informative one-on-one interviews on Fox13. What you get from the two candidates is this.
Ken Welch speaks in specifics. Crist speaks in bromides.
I’m going to take as just one example their views on the Historic Gas Plant District, the 86-acre tract that will be freed up when the Rays depart. The mayor talks about the Burg Bid, the plan already developed with Blake Investment Partners and others that would have an estimated $8 billion impact, leading to affordable housing, more than 30,000 jobs, and workforce training that would tie into arts and innovation in the district.
Crist’s plan? “I think it should be very green. I’d like to plant a lot of trees.” Oh, and he wants to form a “blue-ribbon panel.”
Right. Another panel. “We have studied this to death for 40 years,” says Welch, and he’s right. Another panel is exactly what we don’t need.
And then there’s Crist’s notion that we can still get the Rays to stay in St. Pete. “Ya never know unless you try!” he says, employing one of his favorite platitudes. To which, in the debate, Welch responded, “To say we have a shot at baseball now when they’re signing contracts in Tampa is just not realistic.”
Not realistic—that sums up a lot of what Crist is campaigning on. Regarding the Gas Plant, Welch wants to live up to promises made to the community 40 years ago. Crist wants to make pie-in-the-sky promises of a Rays rescue that cannot possibly be kept.
Then there’s the promise Crist is making to cut property taxes by cutting city bureaucracy. Sounds nice, but the cuts Crist is proposing wouldn’t make a difference because those positions are not funded by property taxes.
Another impossible dream: Crist insists that Welch should have sued DeSantis and his lackeys to stop them from painting over the rainbow crosswalks. Crist knows well that suing the mini-Mussolini who so soundly beat him for governor would have done no good—and it’s Welch, not Crist, who has the endorsements of Equality Florida and Stonewall Democrats.
More woulda coulda shoulda: According to Crist, Welch and the city shoulda been more prepared for the hurricanes. For two storms unprecedented in their impact. Uh-huh. To his credit, Welch is now supporting the $600 million GO (General Obligation) bond referendum to fund improvements to stormwater systems under his St. Pete Agile Resilience (SPAR) program—a bond referendum which, by the way, Crist once supported until he didn’t.
As for decisions over which Welch did have control, there’s the whole Moffitt Cancer Center dust-up. His decision not to accept a deal for Moffitt to build a St. Pete branch has been excoriated by Crist as a missed opportunity. Ignored by those who agree with that stance is Welch’s reasonable—and fiscally sensible—response that the developer wanted a multi-million-dollar discount on city-owned land. Plus, he points out, Orlando Health has now built a respected cancer facility right downtown.
Are there areas in which Welch can improve? As numerous critics (including Crist) have pointed out, Welch’s City Hall has problems with accessibility and transparency that must be addressed. He’ll never be as natural a glad-hander as Crist, but he needs to examine how his office communicates with citizens—and how it responds to queries. (Anecdotally speaking, it’s notoriously difficult for new businesses to get through the permitting process in St. Pete.)
But Ken Welch has been here—not just as our mayor for four years, but as a county commissioner for 20. He’s seen our area’s problems up close and personal for all that time, while Charlie Crist was climbing various political ladders to higher office. I had the pleasure of working with Welch when he was, as commissioner, an ex officio board member for Creative Pinellas, where I serve on the board. I knew him as a sage, effective advisor with a calm demeanor and dry sense of humor that maybe voters don’t always see.
Bottom line, I trust Ken Welch. Charlie Crist is likeable, but I don’t trust his reasons for running.
The race is nonpartisan, but given the boatloads of Republican, lobbyist, and utility-tied money supporting his campaign, I have to wonder whether this Republican-turned-Independent-turned-Democrat-turned-whichever-way-the-wind-blows candidate will truly have St. Pete’s interests at heart.
Early voting in Pinellas County runs Oct. 19-Nov. 1. Election day is Tuesday, Nov. 3.
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This article appears in Oct. 15 – 21, 2026.
