St. Pete city officials want to build a park beneath Interstate 275. They don’t yet own the land, haven’t secured the money, and are working on a decade-long timeline — but the master plan cleared its first procedural hurdle this week anyway.

St. Petersburg’s Public Services and Infrastructure Committee reviewed a detailed draft of the “Trails Crossing” master plan Thursday and agreed it could advance to the full City Council without further committee review. The proposal would convert roughly 12 acres beneath and alongside I-275, running from Fifth Avenue South to Burlington Avenue North, into parks, trails, playgrounds, public art and event space, along with a rebuilt 18th Street corridor for pedestrians and cyclists.

The concept has been around since 2022. The city has already spent money developing it, hiring landscape architecture firm LandDesign to draft the master plan and splitting the planning costs with a nonprofit, Friends of Trails Crossing.

City estimates put full build-out at $55 million, broken into phases: roughly $23 million for the first two segments, followed by $16 million and $15 million phases. As of Thursday’s meeting, there is no funding package in place for any of it.

Transportation Director Evan Mory told the committee grants would likely cover a significant share, with additional city funding potentially coming through future budget cycles. Friends of Trails Crossing president John Barkett said his group would chase down other funding sources as well.

“Funding is coming from all buckets,” Barkett said.

That’s an answer, but not a plan. Nothing presented Thursday guarantees the $55 million materializes, and a project with three major funding gaps and no anchor commitment is, at this stage, closer to a wish list than a budget line.

There’s also the matter of who actually owns the land. The property beneath I-275 belongs to the Florida Department of Transportation, not the city. St. Petersburg has operated the lots under an agreement with FDOT dating back to the 1970s, but that agreement would need to be renegotiated to accommodate the new park — a process city staff acknowledged won’t be simple.

“Negotiating an agreement with them will be a pretty heavy lift,” Mory said, while expressing confidence FDOT would ultimately go along with it.

Councilmember Mike Harting pressed on exactly that point, asking how the city could be certain FDOT would keep the arrangement in place for the years it will take to build the project out. The honest answer, based on Thursday’s discussion, is that the city can’t be certain — it’s counting on a state agency’s continued goodwill for a park it doesn’t yet have the money to build on land it doesn’t own.

The city also has to work around an existing tenant. Vertical Ventures, a climbing gym along the Pinellas Trail, depends on parking beneath the interstate that the project would eventually reshape. Mory said the city has negotiated a five-year agreement with the business, still pending FDOT sign-off, that would preserve some of its parking during early phases. Councilmember Copley Gerdes noted the tension directly.

“I think everybody wants this to happen, but nobody wants it to happen at the cost of what is, I think, a thriving business,” Gerdes said.

Beyond construction, the plan envisions the finished park being run through a public-private arrangement, with Friends of Trails Crossing or a similar nonprofit handling day-to-day operations and programming rather than the city alone. Councilmember Richie Floyd flagged that model as something that will need real scrutiny before it goes further.

“That’s going to be something I’m interested in,” Floyd said, adding the city needs “a real firm grasp on how issues will be handled and access will be handled” before handing off management of a taxpayer-funded public space.

To be clear, Thursday’s committee action didn’t authorize construction or commit the city to spending $55 million — it simply lets the master plan move to the full City Council while the harder questions around land, funding and management get worked out. Supporters describe the project in sweeping terms: a “trailhead” connecting neighborhoods, a safer north-south corridor as the nearby Historic Gas Plant District redevelops, even a nod to the historic homes that once lined the area before the interstate was built.

Those ambitions may be worth pursuing eventually. But for a city facing no shortage of competing infrastructure and housing needs, a $55 million commitment with no funding source, no finalized land agreement, and a ten-year runway deserves a harder look before it picks up any more momentum.

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