The recent decision by St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman to destroy the historic but aging bait house associated with the previous incarnation of the St. Pete Pier isn’t sitting well with some members of the city council, who expressed their displeasure about the incident at Thursday’s council meeting.

The pier bait house dates back to the 1926 Million Dollar Pier, but it had been collecting dust sitting in a storage facility since 2015 when Councilman Robert Blackmon came up with the notion of repurposing back it in October. That’s when he began communicating with city officials about finding a way to activate the small structure and perhaps locate it somewhere near the new Pier, and potentially even derive some revenue from it. 

But officials with the city informed Blackmon that Mayor Kriseman had no interest in doing anything new with the bait house. Blackmon then decided that he wanted to open his idea up for discussion with his colleagues on the council and informed city officials that he was placing the issue up as a new item on the council’s agenda for the January 7 meeting. 

Then, he learned last week that the structure had been destroyed.

“I thought it was a joke at first,” Blackmon told Spectrum Bay News 9 on Thursday. “It needed work for sure. We could discuss at council whether we were going to spend the money. We could have public input. It’s always worth the investment to have a historic part of our city preserved.”

But Mayor Kriseman said no preservation group was interested in the structure.  

“This thing has been available for more than five years, and no one wanted it. We were willing to give it away,” he said Thursday, hours before he would defend his decision before the city council.

Kriseman’s unilateral decision clearly rubbed some members of the council the wrong way, and the fact that it happened around the same time period that Blackmon had proposed discussing it was “very curious” in the words of Council member Gina Driscoll.

“I was just shocked and so disturbed when I found out what had happened,” she said at the council meeting, adding that it was “unconscionable” that a historic structure has been destroyed.

Council Chair Ed Montanari agreed, saying that he was “shocked” and “disturbed” to learn that the structure had been destroyed. Noting that he spent more than a decade on an advisory committee that worked towards creating the Pier, he wasn’t sure that he concurred with Blackmon that the bait house should be part of the new Pier, “but I was hoping to have that talk.”

Kriseman told the council that as a former city council member himself (2000-2006), he understood all too well their feelings about being left out of the decision making process, saying it happened to him on several occasions. But he maintained that he knew nothing about Blackmon’s desire to revive the bait house when he had made his decision, and he questioned Blackmon on why he hadn’t directly reached out to him about the issue, since he has on several others since was elected to the council a year ago.

Blackmon said he thought the mayor had to have been aware, since he not only had placed the item on the council’s agenda, but also had been communicating with Chris Balestra, the city's managing director of development coordination about his idea.

Towards the end of the discussion at Thursday’s council meeting, Councilmember Brandi Gabbard said that while she wasn’t really that supportive of Blackmon’s proposal, she thought that the bigger issue resulting out of the dustup had been a serious breakdown in communications and respect between the mayor and the council, and it that it was time for a “reset.”

“We can reset our respect for each other,” Gabbard said. “We can reset our communications for each other. And we can all come to a place where we have mutual respect for not only what your position is, mayor, but for us as a body. Because we are elected officials, we get elected the same way we do. We answer to the people of the city the same way you do. So what I hear is that this body is just looking for that same communication and respect that you and your staff want from us.”

The council then approved a motion by Blackmon to have a committee investigate the possibility of creating a duplicate to the bait house, despite Kriseman’s acknowledgement that he had no interest in exploring the issue further.