Bruce Rector, Mayor, City of Clearwater

In an interview with Invest:, Bruce Rector, mayor of the city of Clearwater, highlighted the city’s efforts in infrastructure repair and emphasized the importance of sustainable growth, improving public transportation, and ensuring the city’s resilience. 

What are your immediate priorities?

We are letting the world know that Clearwater is open to creative, innovative and dynamic real estate development, and revitalization. We’re focusing on revitalizing all of Clearwater, not just downtown. We’ve had great success revitalizing Clearwater Beach through Beach by Design, Beach Walk, and improving and adding flagship branded hotels. We need to apply the same approach across all of Clearwater and present the city to innovative thinkers as a blank canvas for potential development. We’re actively having conversations with developers and many other private sector leaders who are interested in coming here to make our community better.

What is the status of the waterfront revitalization?

We continue to pursue revitalizing all of downtown by starting with the waterfront. We’ve made significant improvements to Coachman Park and built The BayCare Sound Amphitheater, hosting events like the Purina Incredible Dog Challenge and a wide variety of concerts. The next phase is a large apartment building and a Hilton signature brand hotel. Beyond that, Pinellas County Government has indicated it will move its offices to the center of the county and eventually vacate downtown Clearwater, leaving us with approximately 17-20 separate parcels of land to collaborate with the county to repurpose. We hope to do something truly dynamic with that area and hope that developers from all over the world will be interested in this. If we hit a home run with these phases, it will set the stage for even greater success for all of downtown Clearwater.

Are there specific sectors or industries that you would like to focus on?

I’ve had conversations with St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch and Tampa Mayor Jane Castor and many other regional Tampa Bay economic development leaders. When it comes to economic development, when Tampa Bay succeeds all of our communities succeed. So for Clearwater, it’s about what role can we play in helping the region succeed. Tech industry leader Arnie Bellini recently suggested that Tampa Bay should become a cybersecurity hub for the entire world and Clearwater already has KnowBe4, a leader in that industry that could help our region attract others. 

We also believe that the life sciences sector could be an attractive industry for us to pursue as a region, as we already have BayCare headquartered in Clearwater and many other leading hospitals, healthcare providers and research organizations in the region. From Clearwater’s perspective, life sciences also makes a lot of sense as it includes animal sciences and the Clearwater Marine Aquarium and our Clearwater’s unique access to saltwater, we believe we can attract marine science industries that would benefit the entire region.

How is your office ensuring sustainable growth and resilient development?

Clearwater Beach properties held up well during the hurricanes largely because of the resilient construction we’ve put in place over the past 15 years. That’s why most of our new buildings survived well. We still have a lot of inland housing and commercial building inventory that needs to be updated and made more resilient for wind events. By bringing in new investment and industry and updating our real property inventory we will be more resilient and be able to partner with the private sector to fund further improvements to our city.

Are there improvements being made to public transportation?

All transportation is important to us, but Clearwater’s primary need remains east-to-west transportation. Clearwater provides housing and hotel inventory for major events happening in Tampa. A significant part of our workforce in Clearwater also travels across US-60. Continued improvements are needed to lessen the congestion for travelers arriving from Tampa International Airport as well as St. Pete-Clearwater Airport. I’m pleased to see FDOT doing a study on the entire length of U.S. 60, all the way to Tampa International Airport, to determine what improvements can be made.

We’re also very encouraged by the possibility of Brightline service coming from Orlando, and we’re excited about the potential for air taxis within the next 12 months. While this won’t move huge numbers of people, it would offer an additional way to transport people between Tampa and Clearwater. Additionally, many employees live in Hillsborough and Pasco counties, so the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority is working on improving the bus terminal here in downtown Clearwater. That project continues to move forward and construction will begin soon.

What is the state of public safety in Clearwater?

We completed successful collective bargaining negotiations with both our police and fire departments. Recruiting and retaining personnel has been a challenge because it’s expensive to live here, and so we are pleased that we agreed competitive pay for them while still being fair to taxpayers. That’s why affordable workforce housing is so important to us. It’s really our main challenge when it comes to recruiting and retaining talent.

We’re also looking creatively at other ways to encourage the private sector to get involved. For example, a couple of our hotels have been converted into workforce housing complexes. That type of collaboration is exactly what we need for our workforce and essential workers.

What are your top priorities and outlook for the city?

We hope that creative, innovative private sector leaders with access to capital help us view Clearwater as a blank canvas for economic and real estate development. We really want to think outside the box and encourage people on our team, and across the entire region, to think differently about the opportunities here. We’re having many meetings to collaborate regionally, looking beyond city limits and considering how we can play a role in the success of the Tampa Bay area. We are open to ideas and want to meet with as many leaders as possible to explore the possibilities rather than focus on the impossibilities. The more we succeed here, the more our neighbors succeed, and that’s good for all of us.