But this time, it was actually a showcase of the candidates' contrasting policy positions for the few who are still undecided, punctuated with cheers here and jeers there. Yay.
At the beginning of the debate and at times throughout, Pastor Clarence Williams and Bay News 9 reporter Trevor Pettiford — who moderated the event — made it clear that disruption similar Monday's was not going to fly. And largely, it didn't.
Given that the venue was an African American church in a predominantly African American part of town that seems far from a lock for any of the candidates, the questions focused on south St. Pete — the candidates riffed on questions about how to remedy the area's rampant economic woes and other problems plaguing the community.
There wasn't really a clear winner here. Like any debate these days, you probably think the winner was the candidate you support no matter how well he or she did. And nothing new really came out, either.
But it still offered insight on the candidates' positions — especially those of the lesser-known ones — and was at many points delightfully weird.
These were some of the funniest, most compelling, and/or most telling moments and observations from the evening (from where we sat, anyway).
Sewage only came up, like, six times. Incumbent Mayor Rick Kriseman's opponents have tried to place the entirety the city's wastewater woes on him, and defending himself against claims that he singlehandedly "broke" the sewers and thus caused millions of gallons of sewage to flow into the bay has been his biggest challenge.
Former Mayor Rick Baker, his toughest challenger, blames the closure of the Albert Whitted plant for all of the city's sewage woes, even though Kriseman's only crime was bad timing in that regard — the closure was years in the making, thought it actually happened when he was mayor.
So Kriseman's administration is getting into the weeds in order to determine how to solve the problem.
“What's been apparent to us is that there hasn't enough money spent on the system,” said Kriseman.
Touché.
Baker countered that he did invest in updating the system, though, and that none of this would have happened had Whitted not closed.
Uhuru candidate Jesse Nevel blamed — among other things — institutionalized racism (which is said to be rampant in the city's water department).
“The sewer problem is in city hall,” he said. “The solution is workers' power.”
"Two-headed Rick." A big reason for Monday's disruption was that the Uhurus and their supporters are pissed that only Baker and Kriseman were invited to the Bay News 9/Tampa Bay Times/St. Pete College debate at the Palladium July 25.
Nevel railed against the debate format and how its organizers changed their first-come-first-served admission policy to invite-only.
"“That's just the two-headed Rick talking to his own supporters,” said Nevel, who maintains that despite the media's portrayal of the race as Rick vs. Rick, they're basically the same guy when it comes to policies that hurt the black community, like policing and gentrification (the Ricks and their backers would probably beg to differ, but we digress).
When Anthony Cates III accidentally got a little Trumpy. He's run for mayor once or twice before, and was a manager at the WalMart in Tangerine Plaza before it closed. In response to a question about what to do with the empty space there, Cates said he didn't see Kriseman or Baker once when he was employed at the store. If elected, he said, he would still care about the things he cared about as mayor even after leaving office. But it came out wrong.
“When I'm elected mayor, I won't be mayor just four or eight years. I will be mayor of this city until I die, until my children can take over,” he said.
He probably didn't mean to imply that he would violate term limits or forge a dynasty, but the line still drew a few laughs during discussion of a tense subject: whether or not a corporate chain grocery store will really do anything to help the economy on the south side.
Kriseman said if people don't have enough money to shop there, it won't; thus the city needs to offer more economic opportunities. Baker blamed Kriseman for not keeping the WalMart. Nevel called the practice of putting a WalMart in the middle of a neighborhood "capital extraction" and said increasing local, black-owned businesses is the answer.
“Mexicans with the hair and all that.” Probably the most bizarre moment of the night was longtime south-side-activist-turned-longshot-mayoral-candidate Theresa "Momma Tee" Lassiter's response to the WalMart question. Like Nevel, she called for more black-owned businesses, but audience members seemed to audibly cringe when she referred to Latino/Latina-owned businesses as "Mexicans with the hair and all that."
Rick Baker wants to talk about education, guys. There's not much the city can do to counter the school district's poor judgment, but Baker would like to try. He his three minutes allotted for closing remarks to talk about what he'd do to help south St. Petersburg's schools perform as well as their counterparts north of Central Avenue (Baker was mayor when the schools re-segregated, but it wasn't his decision, obviously).
Among things he'd like to implement or bring back: interest-free home loans for educators who work where they teach and better incentives for schools in disadvantaged areas that raise their grades.
Jesse Nevel: not a protest vote? Nevel swears he's not the Jill Stein of this election. But to Kriseman voters who see that one or two percentage points he's pulling in the polls as crucial, he kinda is. To them, it's a scenario eerily similar to 2016: a highly capable Democrat who oughtta be a shoe-in faces a monied conservative Republican aligned with Sarah Palin for chrissakes, and a vocally anti-establishment candidate who supposedly brings people into the fold who are disillusioned/siphons Kriseman votes from progressives. (Granted, the St. Pete mayoral race is ostensibly nonpartisan.)
He certainly does draw a younger crowd into local politics, though; the average age his supporters in the audience was substantially lower than that of the Ricks — and that should be refreshing.
Know what, guys? The next mayoral forum is Tuesday at City Hall.
This article appears in Jul 13-20, 2017.