Port grant set adrift for lack of matching funds

By BRYAN GILMER

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 31, 2001

ST. PETERSBURG -- The city of St. Petersburg has turned down an $820,000 state grant for improvements at the city port, saying it was unable to come up with the same amount of local money to match the state funds.

"We are basically forfeiting $820,000 for this fiscal year and offering it to the 13 other Florida seaports, seaports that have matching funds available," St. Petersburg port director Michael Perez said Thursday. Perez was attending a meeting of the Florida Seaport Transportation and Economic Development board, which awards the money for certain port improvement projects each year.

Perez serves on the board with the 13 other port directors and representatives from state agencies.

In exchange for passing on the grant this year, Perez has asked his colleagues to allocate the money to St. Petersburg in future years instead. But he acknowledged that St. Petersburg likely could have been awarded money both times if it had been able to come up with matching funds this year.

"It's just a matter of the city having the matching city dollars," Perez said ruefully.

Fiscal Services Administrator Andy Houston said the administration wants to wait until the Council finishes discussing planned improvements at the port before committing to a search for the matching money.

"With the discussion about waterfront dredging, it would be inappropriate to take more grant money until we know where we're going," Houston said.

The dredging would be needed to attract cruise ships the council has discussed trying to lure.

Perez and city budget director Barry Lupiani said the city will still draw down already-awarded state grant funds for a $1.5-million wharf renovation project this year.

"We found the matching funds to do the structural improvements," Lupiani said.

Lupiani said that project is too complicated for the city to do another with the forfeited funds this year anyway. But Perez said he thought he would have been able to spend the additional money on needed port improvements.

The city certainly has expensive plans for the port. In 1999, the City Council approved a $14.8-million port master plan acknowledging that it is unrealistic for the port to try to compete as a freight port with the much larger Port Manatee and Port Tampa close by.

Instead, the plan is for the Port of St. Petersburg to deal in education and tourism. Its central feature is to be a new three-story building that would host a visitors' area, new port offices and "Port Discovery," an education destination for schoolchildren that would be affiliated with the University of South Florida-St. Petersburg.

City Council members have also expressed interest in making the city's port a "port of call" for cruise ships, which would bring tourist spending to downtown.

The FSTED money can be used on any of those projects, said Nancy Leikauf of the Florida Ports Council in Tallahassee, a trade association that works closely with the FSTED program.

"We try to allocate funds to a port," she said. "The port then can choose which of the projects they have submitted to fund with the grant."

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