“We don’t need to change to a leader who hasn’t been here, who hasn’t had a voice and a vision,” said Mayor Ken Welch during a campaign event Wednesday night at St. Pete Athletic, delivered amid the scuffle of competitive pickleball on the courts behind him.
Welch repeatedly framed the race as a matter of continuity, lobbing the notion that Crist, who is expected to run for St. Petersburg mayor, is joining the political game without having gone through the struggles St. Pete recently faced.
“We are winning; we have a winning team,” Welch said. “We don’t change quarterbacks in the middle of the playoffs.”
Welch also referenced Crist’s finances. “We are facing an opponent who has hundreds of thousands of dollars from campaigns five years ago,” he said. “We’re not trying to go dollar for dollar like some Washington bag, but we need to be able to tell our story of what we’ve achieved in St. Pete.”
Crist’s PAC, St. Pete Shines, touted notable campaign finances in January, but a portion Crist transferred $336,458 from Friends of Charlie Crist, a previous political action committee created for his unsuccessful attempt to unseat Gov. Ron DeSantis in the 2022 gubernatorial race.
Since then, Crist’s campaign has self-reported upwards of $1 million in campaign donations. Welch, meanwhile, has recently reformed his third PAC after his former campaign treasurer, Yolanda Brown, allegedly fleeced $207,000 in campaign finances, significantly setting Welch back to about $30,000.
At the moment, there are no recent filings to demonstrate how Welch has recovered from the loss. However, in a previous interview Welch’s new PAC chair, Adrienne Bogen, told Poliverse, “[Welch] is not running on nostalgia or leftover campaign infrastructure; he’s running on performance.”
Bogen added, “St. Petersburg needs a full-time mayor focused on this city’s future, and that’s exactly what Ken Welch is doing every day.”
During the kickoff, Welch doubled down on his promise to restore the Historic Gas Plant District, which was razed to make room for Tropicana Field in the 1980s, displacing a thriving Black community with promises of remuneration that have yet to be realized.
“The promise I made is we would move forward with the Historic Gas Plant,” Welch said. “This is a win-win for everybody, when we are on the same base on our history, we can move forward together.”
During his introduction of Welch, City Council member Copley Gerdes delivered an emotional appeal to the crowd. “For my daughter, [I want] some guy to get on one knee, and ask her to marry him [in the Gas Plant], where my son has his wedding rehearsal dinner – like I had mine at Tropicana Field – because those are the core memories I want my kids to have,” Gerdes said.
“When I think about the future of my kids, there’s one person with the vision, and that’s Mayor Kenneth Welch.”