He’s not up for re-election until 2017, but already the cards are stacking up against St. Pete Mayor Rick Kriseman. The same mayor who always shows up in public with a beaming smile touting his Sunshine City also seems to have a dark cloud following him around.
No matter how much good Kriseman accomplishes, he always seems to be moments away from damage control.
Since taking office in 2013 Kriseman has faced mounting criticism for failing to garner enough support from City Council to move an agreement with the Tampa Bay Rays, pushing forward with a Pier process too quickly and without transparency, launching a curbside recycling program that ignored 40 percent of the city’s residents, dumping millions of gallons of raw sewage into environmentally sensitive land, covering up another dump and, most recently, failing to take swift action to refund wrongly ticketed drivers in poorly marked school zones.
It’s a calamity of errors that will be difficult to overcome. Each of the complaints against Kriseman can be explained away. Kriseman has lobbied his council hard to pass the Rays agreement, but a stubborn half of the council has been unwilling to move. He offered massive public input during the Pier process, but the public’s favorite choice was dismissed by Kriseman’s committee set to choose a new design based on state laws. What’s ignored in that argument is that only a minute fraction of city residents participated in the survey.
Kriseman recently fixed the curbside recycling hiccup that originally forced residents in traditional neighborhoods to put recycling by the curb instead of alleys where trash was collected.
The sewage dump into Clam Bayou was the result of a 100-year rain event in which the city didn’t have much of a choice. Had they done nothing the sewage would have poured through manholes and into the city’s streets and possibly even backed up into residents’ homes.
As for the issued school zone tickets uncovered by WTSP’s Noah Pransky, the predatory ticketing of drivers in illegally marked school zones was a problem that launched long before Kriseman ever sat in the mayor’s office.
Nevertheless, it’s a parade of horribles happening now that stands to make Kriseman an easy target for re-election. He’d have drawn a Republican challenger no matter what. But the list of blunders stands to encourage a divisive challenge from his own party.
Perhaps the loudest calls for Kriseman to be a one-term mayor come from those angry about the Pier process.
“How many more deceptions and lies can #StPete residents take before they send a clear message to the City that that’s enough,” the group Voteonthepier.com wrote on its Facebook page Monday.
Just one day earlier the group wrote that Kriseman “sure likes to spend taxpayer dollars on downtown when the rest of the City is suffering with poor education.”
During an event honoring the inverted pyramid Pier and celebrating the future of a new Pier, a handful of protesters wandered around Spa Beach with signs calling for Kriseman’s administration to swiftly end when he runs again.
Now Kriseman is also facing heat from the union representing his city employees. He came under fire when an employee was suspended for calling him a “clown” on social media. Kriseman rescinded the suspension and ordered the employee paid for the time she missed at work after pushback from the union and negative press.
Even still, the union is still battling with Kriseman and his administration over the proposed step-increases employees received at milestones in their service to the city. Union representatives even question whether the administration is specifically targeting unionized employees.
But to look at Kriseman’s administration through just the numbers it would seem he’s doing a good job. Kriseman’s latest budget doesn’t raise property taxes and is a giant step closer to actually lowering them. Downtown development continues to boom as new condos and retail developments pop up all over town. He’s also ushered in the creation of a new Southside Community Redevelopment Area that stands to infuse millions of dollars into one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Kriseman has strengthened the city’s employee leave policies, implemented a higher minimum wage and banned the box to promote better opportunities for ex-felons looking for meaningful employment.
And he’s well on his way to fulfilling a good bit of what he promised during campaigning nearly three years ago.
According to Politifact’s Krise-O-Meter, Kriseman has kept 36 percent of his campaign promises including tightening the city’s high-speed pursuit policy, ushering in universal curbside recycling, updating the city’s antiquated website and funding youth summer employment programs, among others.
Meanwhile, he’s broken just 16 percent of the promises made during his campaign. Three of the four promises broken all have to do with the timeline he laid out. Kriseman was overly optimistic in planning a new Pier by the end of 2015. That timeline is now pushed back two years. The fourth promise broken involved red- light cameras. During campaigning he supported keeping the cameras with a vow to use them for public safety, not revenue. After taking office, Kriseman canceled the program.
The rest of Kriseman’s campaign promises have either stalled, been compromised, are in the works or haven’t been rated.
It’s too soon to speculate who Kriseman might face as a challenger in 2017, but the rumor mill in St. Pete spits out the name of his former opponent regularly. That would be St. Pete attorney and Pier activist Kathleen Ford.
Kriseman’s administration has a robust team of marketers branding the city, and in turn Kriseman, in a positive light.
The city recently launched its “You are my sunshine” marketing effort geared at letting residents share their positive stories within the city. The city launched a creative new marketing effort that spanned the weekend in which a digital sun rose on the Priatek building in downtown as residents took to social media to share positive vibes using a specific hashtag. The positive tweets and Facebook posts were displayed on the side of the tower as well.
