CLEARWATER, Fla. — The three men and one woman who are vying to succeed Clearwater Mayor George Cretekos debated for an hour-and-a-half at the Clearwater Main Library on Tuesday night.  

  • Four candidates vying for Clearwater mayor seat
  • Issues include:
    • Imagine Clearwater, affordable housing, downtown redevelopment
  • Election on March 17

“We call this a forum, but what it really is is a job interview,” financial advisor Frank Hibbard said to moderator Al Ruechel at the beginning of the evening.

Hibbard is the best known candidate of the quartet. He preceded Cretekos as mayor from 2005 to 2012 and has received most of the major endorsements in the race.

While Hibbard represents a continuation of sorts in local government, his three challengers were more critical on Tuesday night of some of the actions of the Clearwater City Council, of which the mayor serves on in the city's "weak mayor" form of government.

Specifically, the other candidates were critical of how the council has handled the issue of Imagine Clearwater, the $60 million-plus downtown waterfront project.

“I think it lost touch with what the people voted for,” said small businessman Morton Myers of the council, referring to the 2017 referendum approved by more than 75 percent of voters that allowed construction on the waterfront.

Bill Jonson, who has served as a Clearwater City Councilman for four previous terms, said that there had been “no effective outreach” by city leaders on the plan, and said it is in current violation of “the basic premises of the original plan, which was to make it for the residents, not just paid for by the residents.”

When it came to the issue of bringing more affordable housing to the city, environmental activist and attorney Elizabeth Drayer said there was a variety of techniques that other cities have employed, such as accessing affordable housing trust funds and designating a percentage of buildings to be set aside for workforce housing, as well as offering tax incentives to employers.

Perhaps the biggest issue in the race is what can be done to energize the downtown core, which is dominated by properties owned by the Church of Scientology.

Hibbard said, in fact, there are some businesses doing quite well downtown, such as the Capitol Theatre.

“Scientology is not contagious,” he cautioned. “You’re not going to catch it by coming to downtown. And you have to support some of these businesses and these people who have made an investment.”

Myers says he has family “on both sides” when it comes to Scientology. He has previously said he has members of his family who are Scientologists while adding that he is not. “I can clearly understand the issue,” he said.

Myers added that the city needs more community centers or similar types of venues that will convince people to visit downtown.

When asked what role Scientology should play in city government, Hibbard said the city needed to do an inventory of all the properties in downtown and determine their intentions. But he said that the solution to create a bustling downtown isn’t so easy to determine.

“People think there’s a silver bullet. There’s not. If so, people would have fired it by now," he said.

Jonson said that the reason why other Pinellas cities like Dunedin and Safety Harbor may be doing better in their downtown areas is because “they have things that are attractive for people to come down to.”

“Property owners in Clearwater have been looking to the city to solve their problems, rather than working on it for themselves,” he said.

One of the major decisions that the new mayor will have to work on is finding a new city manager to replace Bill Horne, who is stepping down after 20 years of service. In Clearwater’s “weak mayor” form of government, it’s the city manager that makes the major decisions in terms of budgets and personnel. Voters in Clearwater voted down a proposal in 2018 to change city government to a “strong-mayor” system.

Tuesday’s debate is the last scheduled before the March 17 election. But the voting is set to begin within days, as the Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections is mailing out vote-by-mail ballots this week.