by David J. Wilson

ABR Properties Inc. president Joseph C. Lukason supervises renovations preceding ABR Information Services Inc.'s move. Photo by Alex McKnight

Its 15-year quest for a major league baseball franchise satisfied, St. Petersburg now seems to be concentrating on strengthening its corporate and residential foundations in a manner that will underpin its future, no matter the performance of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

Expressed in diverse ways by a variety of economic observers is the idea that baseball may have put some sizzle in St. Petersburg, but it's the depth of the city's growing economic base that matters most in the long run.

The facets of that growth are endless, from the surge in downtown luxury residential and commercial development to the move by ABR Information Services Inc. into the former Florida Power Corporation headquarters on the city's south side (accompanied by the utility company's move downtown); from the upgrading of retail facilities in the Tyrone Mall area to the renovations under way at several of the city's hotels.

The single biggest coup for St. Petersburg is the deal that brings ABR Information Services Inc. and a potential 1,500 to 2,000 employees to 34th Street South, in the city's Enterprise Zone next to Mayor David Fischer's Challenge 2001 area (the plan has a broad focus, but one goal is to create 2,500 new jobs in the south central area of the city). ABR officials have told the city it will have at least 900 jobs to start.

ABR's story is a lesson in enterprise. Chief executive officer James MacDougald, with his wife, Suzanne, started a benefits management company in their New Jersey garage in 1982. In 1987 they moved to Florida and watched their concept grow through various name changes to Applied Benefits Research and finally ABR Information Services Inc. The idea of applying micro computer technology to human resources and benefits management got a boost in 1987, when federal COBRA legislation (which requires companies to transfer continuing insurance coverage to former employees) took hold. "Employers started outsourcing that work, and our clients were telling us, we'd rather have you do it for us." The company went from seven people to about 900 now in Florida, with an additional 500 employees in six other states.

Florida Power Corporation recycled its former Bayboro generating plant, which now serves as office space for staff that used to be housed in the headquarters building on 34th Street South. Photo Courtesy Echelon International Corporation

Fast-growing ABR eventually settled into 60,000-square-foot premises on the east side of U.S. Highway 19 in Palm Harbor, then bought 72 acres in Tarpon Springs along the Anclote River, intending to renovate a former Costco warehouse for a company headquarters building. Despite what MacDougald says were totally cooperative efforts of Tarpon Springs officials, traffic light and construction problems soon forced ABR to look elsewhere.

"Pinellas County and St. Petersburg officials were proactive" in facilitating the Florida Power deal, MacDougald says. As the firm moves its employees into downtown St. Petersburg in stages, ABR is renovating the abandoned offices. In six to eight months, MacDougald says, ABR would have been out of room in various owned and leased premises in Palm Harbor and Clearwater.

"We haven't really decided yet who will move to St. Petersburg. It depends on the growth of the company. We move fast in terms of acquisitions - we acquired three companies in this fiscal year - and we know we'll be hiring. But some employees may stay in Palm Harbor, some will move south in Pinellas County.

We'll provide incentives for some to move, preferred bank loan rates, that kind of thing. We don't want to lose people, but we can't grow unless we move. Some cannot move, and we know that. Many, we hope, will use the opportunity to buy their first home. But it will be a very long commute for some. I know, I live in southern Pasco County."

With Florida Power slated to be out of the building in March, MacDougald estimates it could be the beginning of 2000 before it is completely renovated to suit ABR. In 2000, we'll probably have 1,300 to 1,500 people there," he says. "We've been growing our head count by 30 to 35 percent per year over the last three or four years."

"(Some ABR employees) will move south in Pinellas County. We'll provide incentives . . . preferred bank loan rates, that kind of thing. We don't want to lose people. but we can't grow unless we move." - James MacDougald, CEO, ABR Information Services Inc.

In the meantime, the largest single corporate influx into the city's core - more than 900 people - largely has been completed. Florida Power Corporation already has shifted the majority of its staff, says Rick Janka, senior communications coordinator, filling up Central Station (the first two floors beneath the South Core parking garage) and the former Bayboro Power Plant, Florida Power Company's former generation facility at the northeast corner of 13th Avenue South and 3rd Street South. Only senior executives and their staffs remain to be moved into space in the Barnett Tower, where renovations are to be complete by early 1999.

Renovations to both facilities were completed by Echelon International Corporation, which, since it was spun off to Florida Progress Corporation shareholders in December 1996 has become a development powerhouse in the city. Echelon is building a 12-story retail/parking/office structure at the southwest corner of 2nd Street South and 1st Avenue South. A restaurant is slated to occupy the ground floor, below seven stories of parking (for 716 spaces). The second phase of construction will add 110,000 square feet of office space on the top four floors.

Considered along with the continuing growth of Andersen Consulting Inc., Bankers Insurance Group Inc., and the growing appeal of the Center for Ocean Technology at the Marine Science Center at the University of South Florida, where manager Larry Langebrake says he is building and continuing to look for more business collaborators on marine science breakthroughs, the city seems to be expanding an already sturdy core. Even auto racing will return to the city's streets. The 1999 Florida Grand Prix of St. Petersburg is scheduled to be raced in the streets around Tropicana Field February 19 - 21.

Echelon's The New McNulty is rising quickly. Photo by D.J. Wilson

"I think we're really at a fascinating transition point in the city," says Marty Normile, a long-time observer of the city's economic fortunes and executive vice president of St. Petersburg's Downtown Partnership Inc. "Baseball has been driving us for years. Now that we've got it, now what? I've been having some discussions along the idea of, 'OK, now what do we do?' It seems everything we've done has had something to do with baseball. The original people who renovated the Vinoy, for example, had to be convinced about the city, and what convinced them was the city's determination in pursuing baseball."

While various critics have cast a questioning eye on the Devil Rays' ability to do more than draw people to Tropicana Field and some of the nearby restaurants and drinking establishments on game nights, Normile believes it's too soon to draw conclusions on whether Major League Baseball's influence has been oversold.

"It's too early to make an assessment of baseball's impact, but there is no question it still represents a marketing opportunity that we haven't fully captured or capitalized on. We're still in the process of enticing people who are coming to baseball games to also recognize the other things we have in the city.

"We want them to see baseball as an integral part of downtown, which has much more to offer than baseball. I think the cultural and residential development going on now is what is driving the downtown."

Cultural development may well be leading the residential interest, suggests Scott Shimberg of Hyde Park Builders Inc., whose 27 townhomes in the gated Huntington community, at the southwest corner of 2nd Street North and 4th Avenue North, sold out before they were completed.

"All our buyers - young professionals, people whose businesses are downtown, lawyers, physicians, journalists, city administrators, and the 'actively retired' - were looking for an opportunity to live where they were working. They like the parks, the museums, the entertainment possibilities. They perceived the impact of baseball in that it was a stimulus for other development, that there was a snowball effect from the idea of pursuing baseball. But they mostly were aware of the theaters, museums, and the restaurants." The Huntington's townhomes sold from the $160,000s to the $180,000s. Shimberg says his company wasn't really surprised that the timing was "right for infill development. St. Petersburg's wonderful infrastructure of natural surroundings is finally being discovered."

JMC Communities Inc.'s Lee Allen agrees. JMC broke ground on a 21-story (19 living levels, two parking levels, and space for retail at the ground level) Mediterranean-styled luxury condominium called The Florencia where the Soreno Hotel once stood at 100 Beach Drive NE (see related story, page 4). Living units are priced from the high $300,000s to $1.5 million for the penthouses. Allen says JMC Communities was looking at the area before baseball arrived, examining land values in the city's northeast section, "where it costs $500,000 just for a lot on Brightwaters Boulevard (on Snell Island). St. Pete's quality downtown gives the city an unparalleled opportunity as a magnet for people who enjoy the cultural life," he says.

The Cloisters' large condominiums and four penthouses will add a tone of luxury to the residential scene in downtown St. Petersburg. Photo by D.J. Wilson

Two blocks north, at 288 Beach Drive NE, an investment group that includes former mayors C. Randolph Wedding and Bob Ulrich, is building a 14-story luxury apartment building called The Cloisters. It will include a ground floor offering 4,500 square feet of high-end retail, 12 floors of 1,800- to 2,800-square-foot living units and four 6,500-square-foot penthouses.

The Cloisters "was a long time in the dreaming stage," says director of sales Pat Baldwin, citing familiar reasons why the building is already more than half sold. "Downtown St. Petersburg is no longer a sleepy little town. There's been a revitalization of the whole urban area. The museums bring in lots of new, small businesses, and the restaurants help tremendously." Buyers "are a much younger age group than we had anticipated," Baldwin says. "These aren't people who have retired. They're people still active in business, lawyers, business people from Palm Harbor, the beaches, Sarasota. They like the idea that you can really walk to everything from The Pier to the yacht club to the banks and restaurants and the concert hall."

Downtown St. Petersburg is "the hot spot in south Pinellas County," says Craig McLaughlin, whose Vinoy Place waterfront residential project along 5th Avenue NE will include two towers, 10 townhomes and a total of "about 98 units" when it's complete in 2000. He says Vinoy Place units will range from $449,000 to $1.2 million and up for the four penthouses, which will range in size from 4,500 to 10,000 square feet.

Wherever they walk downtown, these new residents will be treading on much more expensive property than they would have been a decade ago. Former City Council member Connie Kone, a real estate agent in the 1980s, recalls downtown property selling at $6 a square foot. It's a dramatic sign of the turnaround in downtown property values, reflected in Pinellas County Property Appraiser Jim Smith's figures that show downtown land and building values rose nearly 7 percent last year.

Those $6-a-square-foot parcels were expected to be priced at about $20 per square foot when the city sells land in the so-called North Core area (the block between 1st and 2nd streets North and 2nd and 3rd avenues North) to The Sembler Company for $1.7 million. The company, along with Redevelopment Partners Inc., is scheduled to break ground just after the first of the year on its $22-million BayWalk project. That development, due for completion in the spring of 2000, is to include 60,000 square feet of retail shops and restaurants, plus a 20-screen Muvico cinema, says The Sembler Company's Craig Sher. The city has agreed to put the land proceeds towards building a $10-million, 900-space parking garage in the Mid-Core block (on the north side of Central Avenue, across from the South Core garage) to serve the project.

A 20-story Mediterranean-style luxury condominium called The Florencia will fill the block where the Soreno Hotel once stood. Photo Courtesy JMC Communities Inc.

While it may take a while for BayWalk to add some buzz to downtown's evening and weekend activities, other moves on the cultural scene are imminent. Great Explorations, the children's hands-on museum, is vacating its Echelon International Corporation-owned 1120 4th Street South premises to take up the third floor at The Pier (formerly a banquet area for the Columbia Restaurant, which continues its restaurant operation on the fourth floor). New museum director Bob Patterson arrived in June from a position as director of the Science, History and Art Museum in Clarksville, Tennessee, just in time to pack up for an October or November move. He says the new location will help make his museum another part of the downtown package. "We're part of the variety, the growing menu of opportunities to do things in the downtown," Patterson says.

Another item on that lengthening menu could be an event at The Palladium, a medium-sized performance hall in the building that since 1925 had been the First Church of Christ Scientist at 253 5th Avenue North. The Palladium Theater Inc., headed by Paul Stavros, bought the building and is converting the interior to seating for 800 and a large stage.

"Our mission is to provide a medium-sized, low-cost rental facility for local performing arts groups," Stavros says. "Theater and dance will work just fine here, but we expect to have mostly instrumental groups, small chamber orchestras, baroque groups, composers' forums." Stavros says the mid-sized venue is needed in south Pinellas County because local groups now have a choice only between the 2,000-seat Mahaffey Theatre and the 140-seat American Stage premises. Fairly decent off-street parking and another parking lot a block away make the location attractive, he says. The first concerts are booked for February.

"Our mission is to provide a medium-sized, low-cost rental facility for local performing arts groups . . . mostly instrumental groups." - Paul Stavros, on the new Palladium Theater

Closer to the city center, the Florida International Museum is preparing its next exhibit, "Empires of Mystery," featuring objects from the Inca cultures of the Peruvian Andes. It may not draw the numbers equal to the hordes who examined artifacts from the Titanic, but downtown hotels, having noted increased business and cultural activity, are also in an upgrading phase.

Visitors will find new furniture, lighting, a 3,000-square-foot computer training center and a range of other interior and exterior renovations valued at $1.5 million at the St. Petersburg Bayfront Hilton at 333 1st Street South, says general manager Duane Sherman.

Extensive expansion is under way at the Heritage Inn, at 234 3rd Avenue North. When work is finished in mid-1999, the Holiday Inn affiliate will have grown from 71 to 135 rooms, says Sandi Jones, vice president of corporate communications for Orlando-based Cypress Hotel Management Company, Inc., which owns the hotel. The hotel, which Jones says has a large corporate clientele, also plans to expand its meetings, lounge and restaurant facilities. "We're doing both soft and hard renovations," Jones says, noting that the room she is in has muted silk wall coverings, and classically styled furniture with mahogany inlays.

Holiday Inn will add to its St. Petersburg choices in October, when the former Marina Beach Resort becomes the Holiday Inn SunSpree Resort - Marina Cove. The resort, operated as a Days Inn for the past 12 years, is just completing a $2.5-million upgrade, with a new restaurant, restyled rooms, a waters-edge beach bar, port-cochere, and new landscaping on its 18 acres, says Darren T. McCoy, director of sales. The 18-acre resort at the edge of Tampa Bay off Pinellas Point Drive maintains a strong base among British and German visitors. McCoy says as a Holiday Inn it will make its efficiency-style townhomes and 5,100 square feet of meeting space better known to Pinellas County businesses.

Other developments away from downtown include the continual upgrading of the Tyrone Mall area in the western part of St. Petersburg. The mall itself has a new food court, and a Borders bookstore is being built on an outparcel near the JC Penney store. Nearby, a 45,000-square-foot Best Buy electronics and computer retail store opened just over a year ago at the southwest corner of 66th Street and 22nd Avenue, as did a freestanding Eckerd drug store on a site once occupied by a Goldome Savings Bank.

Jim Kelsch of the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce's Northwest Council, says if the Florida Department of Transportation follows through on the idea of dismantling the old overpass on Tyrone Boulevard, "it will tend to open up that area to the west of the mall."

In the north, booming Gateway corporate development continues (see Maddux Report for February 1998), with Aegon/Western Reserve (and IDS Mutual Funds about to move its new 255,000-square-foot quarters, and Franklin Templeton Group contemplating building an eight-story building and parking garage to complement the four structures it occupied in January. Raymond James Financial Inc., Jabil Circuit Inc. and Danka Business Systems, Inc., are doubling or tripling in size, says Wayne Smith, economic development coordinator for the city. All are taking advantage of programs that provide corporate tax refunds for creating new jobs, he says.

Echelon International is heavily involved in Gateway, too, having already broken ground for its Carillon Town Center development, a 1.1-million-square-foot project to build a 300-room hotel, a fitness center, 24-screen cinema, restaurants and bars, with 200 apartments above the retail, and a main thoroughfare inspired by a cobblestone street in Barcelona, Spain. More immediately, its 105,000-square-foot Castille Class A office building in the south part of Carillon is nearing completion, says Julio Maggi, vice president for commercial development, and fast-growing Echelon itself will be moving some offices into the Castille building.

A developer who is constructing four speculative buildings totaling 600,000 square feet at one site and 200,000 square feet at another in the Gateway area says: "Market demand is still strong." - Grady Pridgen, developer and building contractor

Developer Grady Pridgen is constructing four spec buildings totaling about 600,000 square feet on the city's north side, north of Gandy Boulevard, just east of Interstate 275, starting with a 60,000-square-foot office building. Pridgeon says it will be followed by three tilt-wall buildings from 130,000 to 200,000 square feet, with 30-foot-high ceilings. "Market demand is still strong," he says, a factor which has led him to also clear a 10-acre site on the north side of Gandy Boulevard at Oak Street, where a 200,000-square-foot industrial/manufacturing building is going up. And Pridgeon says he recently obtained a permit for a 100,000-square-foot self-storage facility on ground west of the K-mart between Gandy and Frontage Road.

Elsewhere, the changing world of banking is generating activity. Tampa-based investment banker Kendrick, Pierce & Co. has founded Cornerstone Community Bank, with its first office due to open in the first quarter of next year at 4th Street North and 62nd Avenue North. Pinellas Community Bank and Anchor Savings Bank have merged to become Premier Community Bank of Florida.