Pinellas County gave nonprofit free home, raising red flags

LEALMAN — Since 2016, the former firehouse in a historically impoverished area north of St. Petersburg has sat on a list maintained by Pinellas County of public land to be transformed into affordable housing.

Earlier this year, the county gave away the property — valued at $1.2 million — to a nonprofit that works with homeless and low-income people in the community. But it won’t go toward housing. The complicated transaction with the Florida Dream Center was made possible thanks to the billions of dollars doled out by the federal government in the name of pandemic relief.

The machinations of the deal have no known precedent in Pinellas, according to a report last year by the county’s Division of Inspector General. The same report noted a personal relationship between the nonprofit’s CEO, Steve Cleveland, and Tom Almonte, the assistant county administrator who put the deal in motion.

Emails and messages obtained by the Tampa Bay Times show it went forward despite questions and concerns from county employees, including an assistant county attorney. She strongly recommended that, based on state law, the county solicit other offers for the property and consider them competitively based on which would benefit the community most. That never happened.

County commissioners approved the sale without a bid process. In interviews with the Times, most of them said they don’t recall being briefed on any legal concerns.

Almonte and County Administrator Barry Burton, in an interview with the Times, said they were confident in the deal and the way it got done. The Dream Center provides services, such as food access and job training, that the county wouldn’t provide in Lealman if the nonprofit didn’t exist, Burton said. For that reason, commissioners were determined to give it a permanent home.

Once county attorneys learned that the plan to transfer the building to the Dream Center was considered a “policy decision,” they went back to work. Burton said they furnished a new opinion that put county officials at ease.

“People can make allegations, god bless them — that doesn’t carry the weight of, you know, anything,” Burton said. “We determined that, absolutely, it’s defensible.”

Lealman has struggled for decades with blight and institutional neglect that some residents have said has verged on corruption. In 2020, a longtime assistant county administrator retired as concerns were raised over a real estate deal involving an affordable housing development firm where his son worked. He was replaced by Almonte, and, after a scathing internal investigation, the county promised greater transparency in its Lealman dealings.

But in the year-and-a-half that the county worked on the Dream Center deal, it never brought the plan to an advisory committee that makes recommendations to the county on funding and policy decisions in Lealman. During that time, Cleveland was the committee’s chairperson.

Jeremy Heath, who also sits on that county-appointed board, said he worried that its unusual circumstances signaled it wasn’t made in the community’s best interest.

“It’s a poor look,” he said.

“I couldn’t follow where the money was going”

When county commissioners approved the sale of the old firehouse last November, they did so with little fanfare. But the sale itself was hardly simple, and it changed shape over time.

Under the first plan the county laid out, the Dream Center applied for $1.8 million from the American Rescue Plan Act that the county was distributing to local nonprofits. About two-thirds of the money would cover the purchase, and the Dream Center would use the rest on renovations.

After the committee overseeing grant applications approved it, though, the county changed its plan. Only the $595,000 for repairs would come from federal dollars. The county would bank the remaining $1.2 million then give the same amount from its own accounts to the Dream Center. The Dream Center would then hand it back to the county to buy the property.

Inspector General Melissa Dondero later reported that she asked if the mechanics of the transaction had any precedent. Employees in the county’s Office of Management and Budget “said they were not aware of any instances.”

Burton said county officials changed the plan because, after promising the money, they realized they were unsure whether funding the Dream Center purchase would be an allowable use of Rescue Plan dollars. They decided to put those federal funds toward 911 operations, which was clearly permitted. In turn, they moved the same amount of money out of the 911 fund and gave it to the Dream Center.

The transaction was so convoluted that Dondero’s report included a flowchart to explain it. When staff presented the plan to commissioners in August, Commissioner Dave Eggers was perplexed. He was later one of two commissioners, along with Brian Scott, to vote against the sale.

“You’ve seen those hats that just kind of get shifted around?” he said, describing a shell game. “I couldn’t follow where the money was going.”

By the time the sale closed in January, others had started raising similar concerns. In December, Lealman resident David Lee appeared at a County Commission meeting, where he urged board members to look more closely at the transaction.

“My concern is that we’re going back to the old way of doing business,” Lee said.

Pinellas and Lealman

Wedged between St. Petersburg and Pinellas Park, Lealman has more than 20,000 residents. It is larger than all but six of Pinellas’ two dozen cities. Because it’s unincorporated, the county governs it.

In the past decade, the county acknowledged that it needs to take better care of the area. In 2016, it made much of Lealman a community redevelopment area, the first in unincorporated Pinellas. This meant that tax dollars generated in Lealman would stay there to improve living standards. It also necessitated the creation of the advisory board, made up of residents and others with ties to the community, that would speak for the citizens.

One of the first people appointed to the advisory board was Steve Cleveland, a general contractor who had been a high-ranking volunteer for the Dream Center. In 2016, he became the top executive at the nonprofit, which has done work ranging from food distribution and workforce training to art therapy courses for survivors of sex trafficking.

That same year, the county spent $4.6 million on land in Lealman that it intended to use for affordable housing. It included property that had once been a firehouse, which it envisioned as the site of a community center for future residents of a housing complex. Instead, in 2017, it started renting the property to the Dream Center for $2,375 a month. In 2019, it updated the lease and changed the rent: $1 for the entire next five years.

Lealman residents were, around the same time, turning their attention to a different piece of land that had been set aside for similar purposes. After an affordable-housing company bought a decrepit mobile home park and sold it to the county for a quick profit, the county leased the property back to the same company.

An assistant county administrator, Jacob Stowers, had previously worked for the housing developer, and his son was still the company’s vice president. The elder Stowers denied being involved in the plan and retired amid the uproar, and the project, dubbed Oasis Acres, fizzled amid delays and opposition.

An Inspector General’s report later validated residents’ concerns. When the dust settled, the county promised to do better. Almonte, who had been hired to replace Stowers, vowed that all Lealman projects would go before the advisory board.

“We have increased transparency which was not there,” he said in 2021, “to make sure we can mitigate something being approved that maybe the community doesn’t support.”

An alleged conflict

The Dream Center first floated the idea of buying the firehouse in 2020, according to a later application for federal funding. The county turned it down but offered help finding the nonprofit a permanent home. Over the next year, it looked at 15 properties, but none worked — Cleveland and Burton said all were too small, too expensive or too far from Lealman.

The idea of the Dream Center buying the property reemerged in 2022. This time, according to Dondero’s report, it came from the county, with Almonte suggesting the Dream Center buy it with some of the federal money the county was distributing. Almonte said he didn’t recall who came up with the idea. With the county struggling to find an affordable housing developer for the land, officials had decided the firehouse property could be put to better use.

Someone within the county reported the idea to the Division of Inspector General, alleging a conflict of interest: Almonte, the county official, and Cleveland, who runs the Dream Center, were friendly, the person said.

In her report, issued in late 2023, Dondero ruled the conflict-of-interest allegation unfounded, though she made it clear the accusation hadn’t come out of thin air. While Almonte told the inspector general that his regular meetings with Cleveland concerned Lealman business, Cleveland said they’d gotten together for family dinners, where “each family pays separately for their meals.” Because there was no evidence that Almonte would benefit from the land deal, it didn’t meet the county’s definition of a conflict of interest.

Almonte described Cleveland as a friend but said he didn’t believe they’d be close if not for the ways their jobs intersect.

“He’s a friend, just like the other members of the community that I work with,” Almonte said. “But I met Steve just like I met everyone else — through the work that I do for the county.”

Cleveland said he didn’t believe the Dream Center had benefited unduly from his closeness to Almonte or any other county official.

“We applied” for the funding, he said. “Just like to anything else.”

A risky sale

State law generally allows counties to decide what to do with their property. But in September, Maria C. White, an assistant county attorney, alerted staff of a law specifically governing county-owned land within a community redevelopment area — like the Dream Center property. To follow that statute, the county would have to solicit bids for at least 30 days and sell based on those proposals.

The county could make an argument for selling without bids under the broader statute, she wrote, but it would be “riskier from a legal perspective given recent case law … and is not the recommended course of action.”

Such a case played out just across Tampa Bay in 2020. In a showdown between two Tampa property developers, one alleged that the city had violated law by agreeing to sell property in the Tampa Heights Riverfront Community Redevelopment Area without soliciting bids.

Appellate court Judge J. Andrew Atkinson ruled the city had erred: “no property that is located in a community redevelopment area can be sold without public notice and the solicitation of proposals,” he wrote, underlining the word “no.”

Emails and Microsoft Teams messages obtained by the Times show that the opinion from the assistant county attorney on the Lealman deal came after at least two high-ranking county employees asked about the law.

The opinion made its way to Almonte. In a Sept. 19 email, he wrote: “Let’s proceed with providing the Board (of County Commissioners) with option two” — the riskier option.

In an email later that month, Almonte told Burton that Don Crowell, another assistant county attorney, agreed with White’s assessment. They would brief commissioners about the legal risk. Burton told him to fill them in on the safer option, too.

Several commissioners said they remembered meeting individually with Almonte and Crowell. But none recalled being told about a legal risk associated with the sale, or that the county attorney’s office had issued a cautionary opinion.

At some point after the initial opinion, Burton said in an interview, county attorneys provided a revised recommendation.

It is not clear whether that revision appears in any public records or when it was made. In a response by text to follow-up questions, Burton said county attorneys “met with staff and myself to understand both available options.” He did not answer questions about whether lawyers provided a second opinion in writing, or, if they did so orally, whether anyone took notes.

Burton noted that the terms of the sale mean the Dream Center could lose the land if it uses the property for commercial or non-public purposes. He also wrote, incorrectly, that White’s legal opinion “did not say that it was risky” to sell the land without seeking bids.

“We don’t see the risk,” he said in the interview. “Anybody can sue anybody, OK? Same way anybody can make allegations, completely unfounded.”

The county has acknowledged potential risk publicly at least once, though. In March, at a meeting of the Lealman advisory committee, Jeremy Heath suggested the county had opened itself up to a lawsuit.

“We are going to have consequences from it,” he said.

Jason Ester, an assistant county attorney attending the meeting, responded.

“She didn’t say ‘illegal’ — she said ‘risky,’” he said, referring to White’s email. “Happily, illegal and risky are different things.”

A resignation and unanswered questions

Heath joined the advisory committee in 2020 in the wake of the scandal over Oasis Acres, the ill-fated housing project. His professional background is in finance, and he thought having someone on the committee inclined to follow the money might help prevent a rehash.

For nearly three years, he said, he prided himself on being the kind of committee member who didn’t rock the boat. When he first heard about the Dream Center deal last summer, he was a little surprised but didn’t speak up.

The more time passed without anyone mentioning the sale to the advisory committee, the more he worried. Cleveland was both the chairperson of the committee and the CEO of the nonprofit benefiting from the sale, which struck Heath as a conflict.

And the more he learned about the deal, the more he wondered: Why not run the sale by the committee? Why reroute the money the way the county did? Why run in the opposite direction from the attorney’s advice?

He badgered county officials, he said, but never got an answer.

“Was it really absolutely necessary to go this route?” he asked.

Heath voiced his concerns at a committee meeting in January; the land deal closed days later. At the next meeting, in March, he was more forceful. He noted that the chairperson of a similar committee in St. Petersburg had resigned after city staff worried about the appearance of a conflict of interest. In that instance, the St. Petersburg official had ties to a project that stood to receive funding as part of the deal for a Tampa Bay Rays stadium.

“I suggest, Jeremy, that if you want me to resign, then you write a letter to your commissioner,” Cleveland said. “Because you can’t vote me out.”

But at the end of the next committee meeting, on May 22, Cleveland announced he was leaving after a decade. He referred to accusations against himself and the Dream Center and denied any wrongdoing.

“I don’t want to step down, but I am doing it for the better of our community, and that’s it,” he said. “I do not want to hear my name mentioned again.”

Though the county stands by its handling of the deal, it could have done a better job telling Lealman residents about the plan to transfer the land, Burton said.

“Frankly, Tom should have taken it to the advisory committee,” he said.

Asked whether the county had lived up to the standards of transparency and communication it promised, Almonte said it had.

“Exceeded, in my mind,” he said.