From Surf to Success

From the turquoise gulf waters to the oak-lined streets of its mainland historic neighborhoods, Clearwater residents and business owners are increasingly finding the coastal city an ideal place to live, play and work.

Tourism on Clearwater Beach is booming, the mainland downtown is surging and outlying commercial cor-ridors are growing. All thanks in part to the city’s planning and investment. Of course, Clearwater’s mild weather and natural beauty don’t hurt.

Most every day is sunny and warm here. The city even holds the Guin-ness World Record for most annual

sunshine: 361 days. In the evenings the sky changes from baby blue to shades of orange and pink as the sun melts into the shimmering Gulf of Mexico.

“I can afford to live on the water. My commute is five minutes over a gorgeous bridge where I watch the sun set on my way home every night. The view outside my office window looks like a scene out of National Geographic with all the seabirds strut-ting by. As a financial planner, I can work anywhere, but there’s nowhere in the world I’d rather live,” says Tina Tenret, vice president of ProVise

Management Group.Clearwater is year-round home to

about 108,000 and part of the second largest metropolitan statistical area in Florida. It is the county seat of Pinel-las County, within an easy drive of St. Petersburg and Tampa.

The city consists of a barrier island that is heavily tourism-oriented and a mainland expanse that includes a traditional downtown overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway, and commer-cial corridors and residential areas that stretch to Tampa Bay.

Clearwater’s tale of success ranges from surf to city. Read on to learn why.

Clearwater is a jewel of the Gulf Coast, filled with family-friendly attractions and home to the nation’s top beach.

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CLEARWATER!

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A Natural Playground

Visitors and residents love Clear-water for its beauty and also for its vitality.

Sun lovers and beach aficionados consistently rank Clearwater Beach as the nation’s best beach vacation spot. They cite the white sand and warm, blue surf but also the family attractions ranging from a nightly sunset festival to an aquarium with a world-famous bottlenose dolphin that wears a prosthetic tail.

The beach also has the largest concentration of hotel rooms in the wider Tampa Bay area, making it a popular resting place for guests of large area events such as Tampa’s Outback Bowl and the Republican National Convention, which was held in Tampa in 2012.

FIre pits in the sand and nightly sunset festivals are just part of Clearwater Beach’s allure for visitors from around the globe.

The public fishing pier along Beach Walk doubles as a venue for the free nightly Sunsets at Pier 60 festival with craft vendors and street performers. At Clearwater Marina, on the Intracoastal side of the island, you can board a sunset cruise, fish-ing party boat, a faux pirate ship or whopping speedboat.

With an average high temperature of 83° and an average low of 63°, the outdoors is often treated like a tropi-cal living room, or in the case of the annual Pier 60 Sugar Sand Festival, a dining room. The 10-day event in April includes not only sand sculpt-ing, but also dining tables literally made of sand.

Sports and sports fans abound. The Bright House Clearwater Super Boat National Championship & Seafood Festival attracts more than 150,000 on- and off-shore viewers each September.

Clearwater Beach also has been selected to host the 2016 Olympic trials for three sailing categories.

On the mainland, the Philadelphia Phillies take Bright House Field for Spring Training, and the minor league Clearwater Threshers play there in the summer. Championship golf courses and tennis facilities are abundant and playable year-round.

Downtown Coachman Park is rarely empty on weekends. Over-looking the sparkling Intracoastal Waterway and beach island, it is one of the area’s most scenic event venues. Boaters can arrive by water and take advantage of the nearby city marina. You can catch an arts festival, concert or sporting event at the park most any weekend. Every October the park hosts the four-day Clearwater Jazz Holiday, one of the nation’s largest jazz festivals.

The adjoining Cleveland Street District is another popular gathering spot for outdoor events and a weekly farmers market. Music lovers catch up-and-coming performers and old school artists performing at the monthly free Blast Friday event on Cleveland Street.

The city is rich in parks and bike trails. Cyclists can travel the award-winning Pinellas Trail throughout Clearwater and to most any other city in the county. But with all Clear-water has to offer there is really no reason to leave.

Spectators get a close view of the race at the Bright House Clearwater Super Boat National Championship & Seafood Festival.

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CLEARWATER!

A Magnet for Business

More than just a sunny place to play, Clearwater is a great place to work, with more than 7,300 busi-nesses that employ 89,000 people.

The city is part of the larger Tampa Bay market, which a recent Milken Institute report rated one of America’s “best performing” mar-kets in 2013.

Tourism is the cornerstone of the local economy and Clearwater Beach leads the area. With more than 100 hotels, Clearwater is a primary rest-ing place for Tampa Bay visitors, and their numbers are growing. The city welcomed more than 5 million visitors in 2013.

On Clearwater Beach, occupancy is high. Hotels, restaurants and shops of all sizes thrive, and more are planned. The city’s Jolley Trol-

ley, a non-profit controlled by local owners, has expanded its route for a third time.

The Clearwater Beach boom was sparked by a $30-million redevel-opment project in 2006. The me-andering landscaped Beach Walk promenade opened the gulf-front to pedestrians and attracted new 4-star

hotels, restaurants and shops and prompted the revitalization of exist-ing ones.

But tourism is far from Clear-water’s only economic engine. On the mainland, health and business services, technology and retail are the leading business sectors. Several international corporations have their

Business Savvy and Tech SmartThe City of Clearwater launched a Technology District in 2012 to assist companies that generate significant job growth in the IT and software fields.

The district is now made up of more than two dozen IT companies — including GreatCircle Studios, AutoLoop, Fleetmatics, ZVRS and IDatix — with more than 800 employees.

Seeking to create even more high-tech jobs, city officials have launched a Virtual Incubator Program in partnership with the Tampa Bay Innovation Center for tech startups that locate downtown.

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“If we’re trying to recruit someone from Milwaukee and they come to Clearwater and see the beautiful beaches, we win them. It’s a good place to do business — a good place to raise a family.” — Tech Data CEO Bob Dutkowsky

headquarters in Clearwater, includ-ing Tech Data, one of the world’s largest distributors of IT products and services and Florida’s second largest publicly traded company.

Tech Data CEO Bob Dutkowsky says Clearwater’s beauty and quality of life make it easy to attract and

keep top-notch employees. “If we’re trying to recruit someone from Mil-waukee and they come to Clearwater and see the beautiful beaches, we win them,” Dutkowsky says. “It’s a good place to do business — a good place to raise a family.”

MarineMax, the world’s largest

boat retailer, FrankCrum human resources company, AmeriLife and Bouchard insurance companies, BayCare Health System, Lincare respiratory supplies and the Original Hooters restaurant chain are among the ranks of large businesses that call Clearwater home.

MarineMax CEO Bill McGill Jr. says his employees love living in Clearwater too much to consider re-locating elsewhere, so the company is expanding in place. “Clearwater is a great place to do business. The city’s economic development team was instrumental in our expan-sion plans and helped us obtain tax incentives to keep our headquarters operations in Clearwater.”

The Clearwater Economic De-velopment & Housing Department has also been successful in foster-ing small businesses and growing a technology district. The Clearwater Technology District downtown in-cludes more than two dozen IT busi-nesses that employ more than 800.

Retail is growing on the mainland and the beach. Westfield Country-side mall, the largest in Pinellas County, recently expanded its res-taurant row and added Cobb The-atre Countryside 12. “We’re hitting record traffic numbers that we’ve never seen before,” says Lauren Clark, Countryside marketing direc-tor. “We’re seeing strong interest from national brands because they realize retail is growing here in the Tampa Bay area. There is demand.”

Florida’s second largest publicly traded company, Tech Data employs more than 1,500 at its Clearwater headquarters and 9,000 worldwide.

58 FROM SURF TO SUCCESS

CLEARWATER!

Sizzling Economic Forecast

From gulf to bay, Clearwater is positioned for continued economic growth.

On Clearwater Beach, developers have proposed building more than 2,000 new hotel rooms. The city ap-proved six new hotel projects for a total of 843 new rooms in 2013 alone.

Ocean Properties had just broken ground on a 230-room, 15-story beachfront hotel when it proposed another hotel project in February. Ocean Properties, teamed with an international hotel developer, is seeking city approval to build two 15-story towers, one with 208 hotel rooms and the other, 74 condo units.

Several existing hotels are expand-ing upward. The popular Shephard’s

Beach Resort is in the process of almost doubling in hotel size and tripling its pool area. The Decade Group, owner of the new Pier House 60 Marina Hotel, is breaking ground on a 125-room hotel adjacent to its Holiday Inn Gulfview.

Business leaders are excited about the prospects for a thriving downtown entertainment district. The renovated Capitol Theatre has already brought more people to the Cleveland District, and a planned new aquarium is expected to draw thousands more. Clearwater resi-dents voted in 2013 to allow the city to lease prime downtown property overlooking the waterfront to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, which plans to build a $160-million facility across the street from the Capitol Theatre.

The downtown population is also growing with the addition of two condominium towers — Water’s

Water’s Edge, a new waterfront condo-minium tower, is sold-out, evidence of the popularity of downtown Clearwater.

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Edge and Station Square — which offer a combined 277 units.

The future is bright for other business sectors as well. General Electric is spending $49 million to turn its current Clearwater subsidiary — Instrument Transformers — into a national “Center for Excel-lence.” Instrument Trans-formers, which already employs 436 locally, has operated in Clearwater for 28 years. It’s adding 263 manufacturing jobs. The 212,000-square-foot expansion is expected to be completed by the summer of 2015.

Clearwater Mayor George Cretekos says the

city’s economic devel-opment ad valorem tax exemption encouraged GE to expand its operations. “It shows that we can compete for high quality jobs.”

Clearwater’s top publicly traded companies — Tech Data and MarineMax — are expanding their headquar-ters. Tech Data is adding 40,000 square feet to its existing complex. Marine-Max is relocating support operations to a larger facil-ity a few miles from current headquarters and adding 30 employees.

As Nick DiCeglie, chair-man of the Clearwater Regional Chamber of Com-merce, says, “The future of Clearwater is now.”

Clearwater’s Cleveland Street District is poised to become Tampa Bay’s hot entertainment destination.

“Clearwater is a great place to do business. The city’s economic development team was instrumental in our expansion plans and helped us obtain tax incentives to keep our headquarters operations in Clearwater.” — MarineMax CEO Bill McGill Jr.

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CLEARWATER!

Small Town Charm, Big City Benefits

Clearwater, a coastal city of 108,000, is a jewel of the larger Tampa Bay region. Being a part of the second largest metropolitan area of Florida allows Clearwater busi-nesses access to a market of 2.8 mil-lion and a wealth of amenities, while executives can live and play in a city with small-town charm.

The Tampa-Clearwater-St. Peters-burg metropolitan area not only topped every other Florida metro area in growth in 2013, it ranked 16th among 363 areas nationally, accord-ing to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The metro area’s economic output totaled $125.5 billion in 2013, making it the 22nd-most productive area in the nation.

Being a part of the larger Tampa Bay community also has many life-style advantages for employees and visiting business associates.

The Salvador Dali Museum, the Chihuly Collection and other world-class museums and scores of galleries are only minutes away in downtown St. Petersburg, a city that American Style magazine has dubbed

The Philadelphia Phillies have been training and attracting fans of all ages in Clearwater since 1948.

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the best mid-sized city for the arts three years running.

Busch Gardens theme park, the Lowry Park Zoo, Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, Broadway shows and a major convention

center are a short drive across Tampa Bay.

Fans of most every sport have a local team to root for within a half-hour drive. The National Hockey League’s Tampa Bay Lightning and

the National Football League’s Tam-pa Bay Buccaneers play in Tampa. Along with Philadelphia Phillies spring training and the Clearwa-ter Threshers’ regular season, the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team and the North American Soccer League’s Tampa Bay Rowdies take the field in downtown St. Petersburg.

With two international airports, tourists and business travelers from around the world can easily reach Clearwater. Allegiant Air at St. Pete- Clearwater International Airport (PIE) flies to and from 31 U.S. and Canadian cities. Allegiant’s growth helped the airport top 1 million passengers in 2013, a 17 percent increase over the prior year. Mean-while, nearby Tampa International Airport (TPA) ranks as one of the top airports in the nation and is expand-ing in size and service. Recently TPA added direct flights to Seattle, Zurich and Panama City, Panama.

St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport served 1 million travelers in 2013 and is home to the world’s busiest Coast Guard Air Station.

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GLOBAL HEADQUARTERS: 5350 Tech Data DriveClearwater, FL 33760TechData.com

From the dawn of personal computers to the latest mobile

devices, Tech Data has brought the world cutting-edge

technology for 40 years. Since our founding in Clearwater in 1974,

we’ve grown to one of the largest public companies in the state

of Florida, ranked No. 119 on the FORTUNE 500® and annually

named one of FORTUNE’s World’s Most Admired Companies.

And we’re just getting started.

THEY SAY LIFE STARTS AT 40

CLEARWATER!

Clearwater’s Dolphin Tale

In December 2005 a remark-able thing happened in the Atlantic Ocean that would change the face of Clearwater. A baby dolphin was rescued from crab traps and brought to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium (CMA) on the gulf coast for intensive medical attention. Named Winter by the staff, the bottlenose dolphin lost his tail due to his injuries. But thanks to a brilliant doctor and the aquari-um staff, Winter not only survived, but swims with a prosthetic tail.

Winter’s miraculous survival made the bottlenose dolphin a movie star. The 2011 major motion picture box office hit “Dolphin Tale” was shot locally. Along with Winter, the film featured Harry Connick Jr., Morgan Freeman, Ashley Judd and Kris Kristofferson.

To say Winter has been a hit for Clearwater is an understatement. Aquarium attendance has increased almost tenfold to 700,000 since Win-ter’s arrival and release of the film. The aquarium’s success led to the opening of Winter’s Dolphin Tale Adventure in downtown Clearwater featuring props from the movie.

Then in 2013, USA Today read-ers voted the Clearwater Marine Aquarium Florida’s best attraction, topping theme parks and beaches.

Frank Chivas, whose Baystar Restaurant Group owns the Island Way Grill adjacent to the aquarium, says Winter’s contribution to the community surpasses finances. “I’ve seen what it’s done for this whole community. You can’t measure that. You see the kids and the families, the wounded soldiers who walk in with glum looks and walk out with a big smile on their faces. Winter has a pretty special way of touching people.”

With the movie’s sequel, “Dolphin Tale 2,” to be released in September 2014, Clearwater and the aquarium are poised for continued growth. In 2013, Clearwater residents voted to allow the city to lease downtown property to the aquarium for a new facility. The $160-million new aquarium will be at the site of the existing Dolphin Tale Adventure, be-tween the downtown marina and the renovated historic Capitol Theatre. Clearwater Mayor George Cretekos projects a new aquarium could attract 2 million visitors a year, pre-dicting “It would be a game changer,” for Clearwater’s downtown.

Actors Harry Connick Jr. and Nathan Gamble with Winter in a scene from “Dolphin Tale.”

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GLOBAL HEADQUARTERS: 5350 Tech Data DriveClearwater, FL 33760TechData.com

From the dawn of personal computers to the latest mobile

devices, Tech Data has brought the world cutting-edge

technology for 40 years. Since our founding in Clearwater in 1974,

we’ve grown to one of the largest public companies in the state

of Florida, ranked No. 119 on the FORTUNE 500® and annually

named one of FORTUNE’s World’s Most Admired Companies.

And we’re just getting started.

THEY SAY LIFE STARTS AT 40

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Stars of the Arts

You don’t have to venture far into Clearwater to see that residents ap-preciate art as much as they do their famous dolphin Winter.

Winter, which swims at the Clear-water Marine Aquarium, inspired the Clearwater Regional Chamber of Commerce to begin a novel art project for the 2012 Republican National Convention held in Tampa. Businesses and non-profits commis-sioned artists to decorate 50 dolphin statues. The dolphins were such a hit that the chamber later received requests for more. Now 115 unique dolphins grace businesses, sidewalks and homes throughout Clearwater and beyond. The chamber offers a dolphin trail map.

Downtown Clearwater’s newest star is the recently renovated histor-

ic Capitol Theatre. The 1921 Med-iterranean-Revival style landmark had lost its shine and was in financial ruins when the city purchased it and an adjacent building in the heart of the Cleveland Street District in 2008. It was reopened in December 2013 after a massive renovation that

restored the theatre to its original grandeur with added modern conve-niences. Operated by the city’s larger award-winning performing arts center, Ruth Eckerd Hall, Capitol Theatre has already hosted national performers such as Art Garfunkel and comedian Jay Leno.

“Sunset Rush” welcomes diners to Palm Pavilion Beachside Grill & Bar.

The historic Capitol Theatre again dazzles audiences with splendor.

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Business, Recreation, Culture, Sports, Nature, Community. You can have it all when you experience Clearwater.

MyClearwater.com/econdev(727) 562–4220

Clearwater, Florida

Opportunities abound here in Clearwater.

CLEARWATER!

The Best of Florida

Clearwater wears the crown of excellence in many categories.

Vacationers and beach aficiona-dos continually rank Clearwater Beach among the nation’s best. Most recently USA Today readers voted it “Florida’s Best Beach Town.” It outranked the next closest beach by more than 25 percent of votes.

While Clearwater Beach’s sand and surf has long been a natural tourism magnet, its aquarium is a relative newcomer to the spotlight. USA Today readers selected the Clearwater Marine Aquarium on the east side of the barrier island as “Florida’s Best Attraction,” topping the state’s theme parks, beaches and museums.

USA Today readers also voted Clearwater Beach the best place to catch a sunset, over other North American destinations such as North Shore Oahu in Hawaii, the Grand Canyon and Cabo San Lucas. Sunsets are celebrated nightly at Clearwater Beach’s Pier 60. Families stroll the pier lined with craftsmen, artists, ma-gicians and other street performers.

Clearwater also ranked tops with destination magazine Gulf to Bay readers. In addition to having the Tampa Bay area’s best beach, the magazine’s poll showed that Clear-water also has the best beach bar (Palm Pavilion Beachside Grill & Bar), best Sunday brunch spot (Is-land Way Grill), best restaurant for Grouper (Frenchy’s Rockaway Grill), best music festival (Clearwater Jazz Holiday), best family outing (Clear-water Marine Aquarium) and best spa experience (Sandpearl Resort).

“We are seeing an all-time high, an unprecedented demand,” says Jack Guy, Sheraton Sand Key Resort’s vice president of sales and market-ing. He attributes it to the synergy of events — the movie publicity of Winter the dolphin, the renovation of downtown’s Capitol Theatre, more direct international flights and new development along Beach Walk. “All these things together are put-ting Clearwater on the map.”

About the writer: Freelance journalist Lynn Harvey is a long-time Pinellas County resident.

USA Today readers voted Clearwater Beach the best place to catch a sunset.

Events such as Sugar Sand Festival help make Clearwater Beach a family favorite.

Frenchy’s Rockaway Grill is famous for its grouper and stone crab claws.

USA Today Readers VotedFlorida’s Best Beach Town - Clearwater

Best Place to Catch a Sunset - Clearwater

Florida’s Best Attraction - Clearwater Marine Aquarium

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CLEARWATER!Sponsors

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