January 2025 Work Plan Update

As you know, St. Pete was impacted by two major hurricanes in 2024. As many of our members spent the last few months recovering from storm impacts, we pulled back on our communications, but our work continued. Thanks to support from our members and board, we made progress on many of the priorities we identified in our 2024 Work Plan and kept momentum in our mission to champion community prosperity through purposeful, transformative projects.

Thanks to everyone who participated in our lunches focused on hurricane impacts on insurance rates, housing values and development efforts. Special gratitude to Bob Glaser from Smith & Associates and Jake Holehouse from HH Insurance Group. We are always grateful to hear from our colleagues at the USF College of Marine Science and appreciate the leadership from Dean Tom Frazer and the scientific analysis from Dr. Gary Mitchum, also presented at our November meeting.

Thanks also to everyone who joined us for a candid conversation with Mayor Welch regarding storm cleanup, the future of the Historic Gas Plant Development and other issues impacting the City of St. Petersburg. This December meeting was timely and relevant.

We were pleased to hold a Leadership Circle event with Kathleen Peters, chair of the Pinellas County Commission and hosted a hard hat tour of the new Reflections Condominium in Mirror Lake. Special thanks to our member Angelo Cappelli with HP Capital who helped to host this group.

The Partnership continued to play an advocacy role for the Gas Plant District and we worked diligently to get the deal back on track when many folks assumed it had died. We still believe there is a way forward on this effort and that the end results will bring significant tax benefits and finally fulfill promises made to the Gas Plant residents decades ago.

The Partnership helped to convene stakeholders in the Warehouse Arts District to propose zoning changes that will allow for smart growth and additional density. We were pleased to see the City Council adopt most of our recommendations in September. We hope to extend some of these zoning changes along the rest of the Pinellas Trail and SunRunner corridor in 2025.  

We also made progress in capital improvement planning and fundraising for Williams Park and Central Ave, developing an enhanced urban management plan to provide additional services in this neighborhood. And we identified two funding sources to provide additional clean and safe services to downtown without raising taxes.  

As a continuation of our Urban Exploration series, some of our Supporter & Sponsor level members joined us in Nashville in November to learn more about projects including Nashville’s recent successful public transportation ballot initiative, the Nashville Entrepreneurship Center, The Finery development by Hines, and the East Bank stadium project.

In 2025, we have already hit the ground running in making progress towards our 2025 Work Plan. This includes hosting events to honor our local arts leaders and to highlight innovative developments like Haddy’s newest micro factory. In the next few weeks, we will honor Darryl LeClair, CEO, President & Chairman of Echelon, for decades of work laying the foundation for St. Pete’s renaissance at the first annual City Builders Awards on January 30th and will release our 2025 Downtown Development Guide on February 25th at the 2025 Downtown Development Summit. We look forward to telling you more about these initiatives and others in our next Work Plan update in March.