Decision: Kenneth City

Two Town Council Seats Up For Grabs

By Monroe Roark

Four candidates are competing in the March election for two seats on the town council in Kenneth City.

The Gabber reached out to each candidate at the email address provided on his or her qualifying documents at the city clerk’s office. Three of the four candidates responded to the questionnaire, and their answers are listed below in the order they were received.

Kyle Cummings is a Kenneth City councilmember, and the current vice mayor. Born and raised in St. Petersburg, he has lived in Kenneth City for eight years and has worked for the Pinellas County School Board for 22 years, currently as a technical projects coordinator overseeing large construction projects. With 30 years of total construction experience, he is also a past business owner and a licensed commercial electrical inspector.

“Just in the short time I have been in office, I have worked with administration staff on multiple approved improvements for the town,” said Cummings, citing updated accounting software for town staff and the police department, as well as a large stormwater improvement project to help combat flooding and beautify Lake Lori.

“We approved additional parking by the police station and additional sidewalks for a longer trail and additional safety at the park,” he said. “We approved a new contract to do all of our permitting, inspection, plan reviews and now we can do all of this online, including paying with a credit card which we couldn’t do before. This will speed up the whole construction process for both homeowners and contractors and not limit the time for permitting.”

Cummings said the city is working on a number of grants that would help continue that recent progress.

Barbara Roberts is the other incumbent member of the town council, having served eight years. She has lived in Kenneth City more than 40 years and listed her occupation as “purchasing-buyer.” She wants to continue to see the town progress and says that is why she is running again.

“My vision for Kenneth City is to restore it to its hometown feel that was enjoyed for many years,” Roberts said. “We are a community of diverse residents with diverse needs. I intend to bring back our town motto and reason for existence – being a small town that is safe while still being friendly.”

Roberts said she intends to develop strong standards for maintenance, provision of services, and hosting events while remaining vigilant over the budget and use of the town’s funds and resources.

“Lastly I intend to restore civility in all we do, inclusiveness and the empowerment of our residents to voice their opinions and keep council accountable,” she said. “I intend to continue in my efforts as I have in the past eight years.”

Tony Chan, one of the challengers for a town council seat, is an eightyear resident who works for the City of St. Petersburg as an economic development specialist and also as the lead for workforce development for that city. His interest in Kenneth City politics was sparked by what he considers high turnover of the town’s employees.

“I began attending the council meetings and from there I noticed a lot of unnecessary spending that could be avoided, but members of the council chose not to listen to the constituents and took the easy way out,” he said. “It was at that point that I decided to run and to place power back to the community.”

Chan, who has never held elected office, outlined his goals simply: cut spending; employee attraction and retention; strengthen and incentivize Kenneth City businesses; and give back to the residents by revitalizing the neighborhoods.

“My goals are simple, but they are far from easy,” he said. “If I’m elected, I’d like to start the ball rolling in that direction and make a difference in both the businesses and the residents of Kenneth City.”

Jeffery Pfannes, the fourth qualifier for the at-large town council election, did not respond to The Gabber’s questionnaire.

Vocationally Yours Meet E. H. Tomlinson

By Jim Schnur

Late last year, the Pinellas County School District floated the idea of converting the former E.H. Tomlinson school building, closed since December 2021, into affordable downtown housing for educators. This structure, located at 296 Mirror Lake Drive North, originally opened in 1924 as St. Petersburg Junior High School (SPJHS).

For most of its history, however, this building on Mirror Lake’s western shore honored the legacy of Edwin Hyde Tomlinson, a lifelong bachelor known to early St. Petersburg residents as a patron saint for his philanthropy. While Tomlinson’s name has adorned this building since the mid 1930s, his legacy spans across much of the Sunshine City’s downtown.

An Early Resident

Born in October 1844, Tomlinson led an adventurous life after leaving the family farm in Seymour, Connecticut. He traveled throughout America, investing in oil and mineral holdings, and built one of the earliest resort hotels in Aiken, South Carolina. He first visited St. Petersburg in March 1891, less than three years after the Orange Belt Railway reached the then-remote village. His father, Peter, joined him the following year.

At a time when St. Petersburg had fewer than 1,500 residents, Tomlinson invested much of his wealth in the community. He created one of the city’s earliest tourist attractions when he built a wooden pier that extended nearly 2,000 feet into Tampa Bay where 4th Avenue South meets 1st Street. The pier began near the current location of the Mahaffey Theater/ Duke Energy Center for the Arts, then part of the bay.

This narrow wooden pier remained an iconic symbol in the growing city until it collapsed during the ferocious October 1921 hurricane. Tomlinson also drilled into an artesian well to create the “Fountain of Youth” near the pier’s entrance. For decades, people drank the sulphur water from this fountain before crews later connected it to city utilities.

Tomlinson’s father donated the land for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church at 2nd Avenue North and 4th Street in 1894, and Edwin provided more land and funds to the church in honor of his mother, Augusta, who passed away in Connecticut in 1888, before Peter and Edwin came to the area. Edwin’s efforts later led to the creation of the city’s first hospital, Augusta Memo- rial, the predecessor to Mound Park and Bayfront hospitals.

Champion of Education

Tomlinson’s generosity reshaped educational opportunities in St. Petersburg. He supported the local student Cadet Corps at the first George Washington birthday celebration in 1896, an event that later transformed

Tomlinson continued from page 9 into the annual Festival of States parade. At a time when school resources came mostly from within the community rather than the county or state, Tomlinson provided musical instruments and books for the library at St. Petersburg’s original school, located on the present site of city hall.

With Tomlinson’s assistance, a new Public Training School opened in December 1900. Touted as the first manual training school in Florida, boys took classes in military science, industrial arts, and manual training. Girls began taking classes at this school after February 1902, when it moved into an 80 x 150 foot building known as the Domestic Science and Manual Training School.

This structure, located immediately east of city hall at 440 2nd Ave. N., currently is the home of Greenhouse, a collaborative business assistance initiative managed by the city and St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce. At a time when the Pinellas peninsula was part of Hillsborough County, Tomlinson provided more than $10,000 to build and equip this structure. School administrators in Tampa offered only minimal funding.

This school offered students interested in vocational pursuits a variety of classes. Alongside the younger students at this facility, the state launched a post-secondary curriculum in 1901 when classes began at the St. Petersburg Normal and Industrial

School in a nearby building. Tomlinson offered support for the city’s first college. At the May 1905 commencement ceremony, Tomlinson gave the four female and two male graduates each $20 in gold.

The state abolished this technical college a few months later after only four years of operation, moving its programs to state universities in Gainesville and Tallahassee. Despite this setback in adult vocational education, Tomlinson continued to support programs at the Domestic Science and Manual Training School. The creation of Pinellas County in 1912 and federal funding under the Smith–Hughes National Vocational Educa- tion Act of 1917 allowed programs to expand just as the land boom required a workforce with vocational and technical skills.

Community Leader

Although E.H. Tomlinson never held public office, his civic and business activities benefited the city during its formative years. He provided funding for docks along the waterfront, uniforms for firefighters, space at one of his school buildings to serve as a city hall for many years, and a home for the city’s post office at 4th Street and Central Avenue beginning in 1907 that offered round-the-clock access

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He met early radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi while in Europe in 1898, and offered to help Marconi build an early radio network to transmit signals between the United States and Latin America in 1900, 20 years before the first American radio station (KDKA in Pittsburgh) began broadcasting.

In an attempt to accomplish this feat, he had workers build a tower more than 100 feet high at his house on 4th Street South, installing equipment for Marconi’s wireless experiments in 1900. Since he also owned a cottage on Pass-a-Grille, he placed additional wireless antenna equipment on Cabbage Key, a small island that later became part of Tierra Verde, at a time when Silas Dent kept cattle on that island to provide fresh milk for the people in Pass-a-Grille.

Despite his efforts to put St. Petersburg and its fewer than 2,000 residents on the map as an early wireless radio outpost in North America, this experiment failed when a bolt of lightning hit the tower above his home in July 1901, ruining the equipment.

Tomlinson did bring a different type of technology to the area a few years later, however, when he became the first person to drive an automobile in the Sunshine City. His one-cylinder Orient Buckboard certainly made a lot of noise as he drove it around town, and he made noise as well, when the wheels frequently became stuck in the sand or mud.

Vocational Excellence

Classes began at SPJHS in 1924. After St. Petersburg High School moved to its present home in 1926, the former campus on the north end of Mirror Lake became Mirror Lake Junior High School. Between 1926 and 1930, the school district assigned boys to St. Petersburg Junior High and girls to Mirror Lake Junior High. Beginning in 1931, both schools became coeducational, with Mirror Lake offering general curriculum and SPJHS turning into an institution known as “The Vocational School.”

Tomlinson moved to Tampa in the early 1930s. Although nearly 90 years old, he continued to keep track of vocational offerings in Pinellas that covered everything from basket-weaving to automotive repair. The original school he opened in 1902 no longer held regular classes, though its annex still served as city hall. In May 1935, the school district decided to rename the vocational school after E.H. Tomlinson.

In November 1938, students at Tomlinson Vocational performed a skit in his honor. The 94-year-old shared his appreciation in communications with the class. Less than a month later, workers began to demolish the city’s original primary school so they could construct the present-day city hall on that site. As crews dismantled that building, Tomlinson passed away on December 6, 1938. Buried at Saint Bartholomew Episcopal Cemetery on 19th Street South, Tomlinson and his impact on early education were largely forgotten in the years following World War II.

Vocational programs continued at Tomlinson until the end of 2021. After junior high classes were transferred from Mirror Lake in 1964, the curriculum at Mirror Lake/Tomlinson offered a variety of industrial and adult education programs, including language classes and GED courses.

When developers converted the Mirror Lake school structure into condominiums in 1991, downtown classes remained a proud tradition at Tomlinson for another 30 years.

Proposals for the Tomlinson building’s next chapter were due to the school district headquarters on February 1. Perhaps the 99-year-old structure will find new life as housing for teachers or a mixed commercial and residential development. Hopefully, Tomlinson’s name will remain identified with this building as a way to honor a pioneer who cared about education and the community.

Airport, Gulfport, and The Port Things Said In and Around Gulfport

By Chris Shablak