Story by STEVE TRAIMAN
Images courtesy of City of St. Petersburg
The ambitious, forward-looking StPete2050 visioning initiative is expected to be presented to the full City Council at an upcoming March 18 or April 1 meeting as a Report Item on the agenda.
StPete2050 builds upon the city’s rich planning history, dating nearly 100 years ago to 1923 when the country’s preeminent planner, John Nolen, was retained to develop a city plan. Nolen was an advocate for designing with nature and his plans reinforced the importance of parks, civic buildings and wide boulevards. He completed St. Petersburg Today, St. Petersburg Tomorrow, Florida’s first comprehensive city plan. It called for integrating development with natural features and landscapes. The forward-looking plan was opposed by the Evening Independent newspaper and developers and was never adopted.
Many of St. Pete’s character-defining features derive from his early planning efforts. Jump forward 20 years to 1943 when the Bartholomew Plan is adopted, following an era of municipal debt from the Great Depression. The plan assumed a future population that would stabilize at 120,000 in 1960 (by 1960 the actual population exceeded 180,000).
Rampant growth and water resource issues led to building moratoriums and the adoption of the 1974 conceptual plan. It incorporated a number of planning principles from the Nolen plan. In 1975 a state planning act passed and St. Pete subsequently adopted the 1977 Land Use Plan. In 1989, in accord with the requirements of the state’s 1985 Local Government Comprehensive Planning Act the city adopted its Growth Management Plan.
In 2002, St. Pete adopted Vision 2020, setting the stage for comprehensive plan and land development regulation updates. StPete2050 also builds upon and will replace the prior visioning process that led to the Vision 2020 Plan.
ENTHUSIASTIC KICKOFF
Mayor Rick Kriseman told Paradise News earlier (February 2021 issue), “In 2019, the city embarked upon StPete2050. It’s a planning and ‘visioning’ process organized around 10 priority community themes. City council is expected to adopt the plan in early 2021. While commenting on the planning process is not the most exciting form of civic engagement, doing so is vitally important to future city historic preservation efforts.”
About 300 people used markers, maps, labels and their imaginations to begin creating a vision for what St. Petersburg will be like 30 years from now. The packed house at the James Museum Nov. 8, 2019, was the inaugural public meeting, and the start of a year-long process, for StPete2050, a citywide conversation about the future of St. Petersburg.
“This is a generational opportunity,” Deputy Mayor Kanika Tomalin said. “It’s your opportunity to chart our city’s course, to think about things like sustainability, health and wellness, energy, mobility, housing, education, equity, diversity, our community’s character, what will make sure we will always be a values-driven city, and our economy. It’s all up for discussion.”
“The city followed a similar process two decades ago, when it created Vision 2020,” said Elizabeth Abernethy, planning and development services director. “There have been a lot of changes since 2020, including about an 8 percent gain in population, an increase in household income, a drop in the poverty rate, and new home construction citywide, including double the number of homes downtown. There also are challenges that weren’t top of mind 20 years ago, such as attainable housing, sustainability and resiliency, aging infrastructure and community health.”
“Unlike Vision 2020, there are no designated steering committee leaders for the current planning process,” Tomalin continued. “Each of you is steering. Each of you has your hands on the wheel.”
At the meeting there were 30 tables with 10 chairs each. Groups at each table were encouraged to talk about what they saw as the city’s strengths and opportunities, and to use the markers, labels and maps at each table to document their conversations.
This enthusiastic launch was followed by three community surveys, with local residents and business people encouraged to respond with their thoughts and ideas for the StPete2050 initiative. At press time, city staff was working diligently on edits to the 2050 report to respond to feedback received from the surveys and the Jan. 28 City Council meeting.
DIRECTOR ABERNETHY NOTES
Elizabeth Abernethy, city director of planning and development service, told Paradise News, “My team is responsible for the final edit that is the result of comments at the Jan. 28 council meeting. It is mainly focused on clarifying language with no real substantive changes and will also include results from the most recent community survey.
“We’re anxious and excited to move forward with our Planning Department’s next step that is to update the city’s Comprehensive Plan from the Vision 2020 initiative. We’ll also be updating the Land Development Codes based on last year’s feedback.
“We’ll begin a series of community workshops starting this spring focused on the 10 community themes used to coordinate and guide development in appropriate areas of the city. This is in preparation to coming back to City Council on July 29 with updates to the Comprehensive Plan and Land Development Codes.
“Those community themes included Arts and Culture; Shared Economic Prosperity; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Sustainability and Resilience; Education; Transportation and Mobility; Growth and Community; Character; Attainable Housing; Healthy Communities; Parks, Recreation, and Open Space. Although not identified as a theme, historic preservation is one of the goals within the theme, ‘growth and community character’.
“Community outreach, much broader than that for our Vision 2020 process, had almost 8,000 points of contact. Included were 45 events, including non-traditional outreach sites that reached 2,870 residents; 635 unique emails with 486 comments on the StPete2050.com web page; over 4,000 responses to three online surveys; and 450 attendees at six meetings for two Community Workshop Series. Meetings included city officials’ introductions, Data presentations and table-topic exercises and online survey access and comment cards.”
Included in the comments were local area kids’ images and creative outlook for their visions of their city in 2050 (see examples in article).
Abernethy emphasized, “This project is one of the key reasons I wanted to work for my city where we’ve lived for 30 years and brought up our family. I joined the city six years ago and became City Planner two years ago. It’s very exciting and an honor to do something like this, and we’re very excited to move to this next step. It will be presented to City Council at an upcoming meeting very soon.”
STRONG COMMUNITY SUPPORT
The StPete2050 initiative has strong support from Preserve the Burg (PTB) from both Peter Belmont, a founding member and recent past president, and Jeff Schorr, owner of Craftsman House Gallery & Café, and a long-time PTB activist; Rui Farias, executive director of the St. Petersburg Museum of History; The James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art; and many other local organizations.
PTB’s Schorr said earlier (February 2021 issue), “As Mayor Kriseman noted, in 2019 PTB received grant funding from the 1972 Foundation to start a historic preservation revolving fund. The city of St. Petersburg matched the grant, and the PTB Historic Properties Program was born. A revolving fund is an active real estate-based program for protecting endangered properties using techniques such as: options, purchase/resale, easements and tax credits. These historic structures ultimately are returned to the private sector with deed restrictions in place.
“Another keystone of PTB is the Neighborhoods Program, also strongly supported by the city. The unique character of St. Petersburg’s historic neighborhoods is threatened by rampant demolition and the construction of new homes out of scale with their surroundings. Preserve the ‘Burg works with neighborhood residents and associations on solutions that maintain the historic character of our neighborhoods, including the creation of local historic districts, which discourage unnecessary demolitions and encourage the compatible new construction.”
Summing up, Mayor Rick Kriseman told Paradise News, “First, I want to thank our city team that has dedicated much of their time to StPete2050, and the future of Florida’s best city.
“StPete2050 not only helps us make informed decisions about the future of the Sunshine City today but will help the leaders of tomorrow. StPete2050 will guide programming and services throughout the city and in support of its sustainable, resilient, and equitable growth for the next 30 years. This citywide conversation about our future and the resulting vision plan will continue to honor our rich history.”
[Editor’s Note: Special thanks to St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman and City Planner Elizabeth Abernethy for their excellent comments and images.]
[Steve Traiman is president of Creative Copy by Steve Traiman, St. Pete Beach, providing business writing services at traimancreativecopy@gmail.com or by phone to 727-363-7531.]