Retired, yes, but Critchfield's baseball fever endures

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By ROBERT TRIGAUX

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 24, 2001

Ex-Florida Progress chairman, and longtime Tampa Bay promoter of Major League Baseball, Jack Critchfield is retired and gone from the local business spotlight. But his obsession with baseball endures -- even now that the Tampa Bay Devil Rays play here.

Critchfield and wife Mary this spring tossed $500,000 at western Pennsylvania's Slippery Rock University to help build a brand new baseball complex.

Jack Critchfield was a 1955 SRU graduate, and apparently a decent college baseball pitcher there. The Critchfield gift is the largest ever by a Slippery Rock alumnus.

Of course, donating a half-million bucks is a drop in the bucket for Critchfield. As part of his 1998 retirement package from St. Petersburg's Florida Progress -- which has since been sold to a North Carolina company -- Critchfield gets $644,009 a year for the rest of his life.

Critchfield joined the local power company in 1983 and logged 15 years at Florida Progress, but he was credited with 35 years of service. That increased the size of his pension. If he dies before his younger wife, she will receive $489,104 annually for the rest of her life.

Perhaps Critchfield is inspired by the legacy-building ways of former CEO Charles Rice of Barnett Banks, where Critchfield was a director. Rice gave $1-million to Rollins College (where Critchfield was once president) in Winter Park. In thanks, Rollins revamped its student center into the Charles Rice Family Bookstore and Cafe.

At Slippery Rock, the new baseball complex might might make the Devil Rays a bit jealous. The complex will feature sunken dugouts, padded outfield walls, a sound system, a scoreboard with an optional message center, an enclosed grandstand, a player clubhouse, concession and press box areas and a picnic area for spectators.

And it will carry a new name: Jack Critchfield Park.

Is the Florida Panhandle getting too big too fast for its economic britches? Pretty soon, it will think it ranks up there with the Tampa Bay area.

Now that the St. Joe Co. has handed over 9,000 acres for Panama City to build a bigger airport, the Panhandle has grand plans.

Bechtel Infrastructure Corp., a consulting firm, last Monday unveiled a layout for the proposed airport northwest of Panama City. It features a 12,000-foot primary runway. A second, parallel runway is not needed for 25 or 30 years, but is part of the future plans.

That way the Panhandle may eventually run with the big dogs.

"Tampa Airport has two parallel runways, Orlando has two and Atlanta-Hartsfield International Airport has four," says the Panhandle's Don Crisp, chairman of the city-county airport board.

The New Jersey-based company that's started construction on Tampa Bay's first desalination plant wants to build it right. Why? Because Covanta Energy Corp. expects to see plenty more water treatment opportunities to develop, build and operate in Florida.

That's the spin, at least, from Covanta CEO Scott Mackin in remarks to analysts this month. Covanta (formerly known as Ogden Corp.) already has bids out to build water supply or treatment facilities in the Florida Keys. The company also says it is working on additional bids for four new projects.

"Most of them are in Florida -- a key market for us," Mackin says.

And no, the recent increase in rainfall is not slowing Covanta plans in the state.

With Huntington Bank's Florida branches up for sale, plenty of banks have stopped by for a look. Potential buyers aren't talking, but the industry chatter is that Georgia's SunTrust (already No. 3 in Florida), Alabama's SouthTrust, North Carolina's BB&T and Royal Bank of Canada are among those considering a bid.

Huntington of Columbus, Ohio, said it was bailing out of Florida to concentrate on shoring up its midwestern franchise.

SunTrust won't comment directly. But George Koehn, SunTrust's chief executive for Florida, says most of the Huntington branches have good locations because they were mostly castoffs from Barnett Banks. And Huntington has done a good job of whipping the Florida branches into shape.

A chunk of the Florida banking market as large as Huntington's does not come along often any more. So analysts such as Edward R. Najarian at Merrill Lynch Global Securities think the price tag could be steep: between $675-million and $810-million.

Meanwhile, Wachovia Corp. on Thursday released the final results of its shareholders vote to merge with First Union Corp. About 60 percent of the 203-million shares favored the $14.3-billion merger over the hostile counteroffer by SunTrust.

Poor Paul C. Reilly. St. Petersburg's one-time Chamber of Commerce president and honcho for KPMG International had barely recovered from jet lag in Los Angeles as the new head of the Korn/Ferry International executive recruitment firm when the shrinking began.

This week, Korn/Ferry said it will post a quarterly loss and slash its work force by 20 percent in response to a slowdown in corporate hirings. The company also said it will take an $86-million charge to pay for the job reductions of 500 employees.

And -- this must really zing Reilly as he hunts for pricey L.A. housing -- the company said it trimmed executive salaries by 10 percent as part of a cost-cutting plan.

"The economy is having a profound effect on corporate hiring," Reilly says.

The effect on corporate firing seems pretty big, too.

-- Robert Trigaux can be reached at trigaux@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8405.

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