The Guardian Is the Defendant

The City of St. Petersburg, Florida, has been certified to protect historic buildings since 1986, and on 12 October it became the defendant in a federal suit brought by the congregation of one of them: the former Euclid Methodist Church, built in 1926.

Treehouse Sanctuary, Inc., an interfaith nonprofit, says in its 30-page complaint that the City has kept the red-brick church on 10th Avenue North closed to worship since September 2025. The dispute is nominally about pews and sprinklers. Underneath it is a question about authority: when a protected building changes how it is used inside, who decides whether the change counts, the congregation that uses it or the government that has promised to preserve it.

What does the complaint say happened?

By the complaint’s account, the congregation took out the fixed seating and the City shut the building. Noam and Irene Krasniansky bought the property in 2023 for $1.1 million, St. Pete Rising reported, and the complaint says they did so to preserve it and return it to community use. Work between April and August 2025 included new electrical systems and air conditioning, and the Sanctuary opened in August 2025. Because several traditions worship there, it removed the fixed seats from the main sanctuary so the floor could be set in forward-facing rows for some services and in circles, or left open, for others. The suit says nothing structural was altered, the exits were left as they were, and the building’s Certificate of Occupancy does not make fixed seating a condition of use.

In September 2025 the Fire Department ordered the building closed, citing “substantial modifications,” and told the Sanctuary it would need a “change of use” and zoning approval before services could resume. That classification carries the rest of the case. A change of use brings a requirement for a full automatic sprinkler system and a voice alarm system, which the Sanctuary says a building of this age could only take with major structural work and the loss of its historic interior.

Who promised to protect the building?

The City did. A Certified Local Government is a city or county admitted to a federal programme, created by an amendment to the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and administered by the National Park Service, under which it commits to keeping a preservation commission and local laws that protect historic properties. St. Petersburg has held that status since 28 January 1986, according to the Florida Division of Historical Resources’ list. The church has been on the City’s own register of historic places since 2004, St. Pete Rising has reported, and the Sanctuary says it is on track for the National Register.

The fire code and the preservation code therefore answer to the same government. Florida’s Existing Building Code has a chapter on historic structures, written to keep them in use while protecting the features that make them significant, and it reaches locally designated buildings. The Sanctuary’s position is that the City’s own codes, read with federal preservation law and the Constitution, favour keeping the church open for worship.

What has the City said?

Its stated position is in a letter of 17 March 2026, which the complaint attaches. In February the Sanctuary’s architect, Architecture Humanity Awareness, LLC, had asked the Fire Marshal to approve alternative measures giving equivalent fire protection without stripping the historic fabric. The City’s reply acknowledged that the church is classified as an existing assembly occupancy and holds a Certificate of Occupancy for assembly use. It denied the request regardless, on the ground that removing the fixed seating, basement partitions and ceiling finishes amounted to significant modifications, which trigger a change of use and require sprinklers and a fire alarm.

The City had filed no response on the docket as of 19 October, and no comment from it on the suit appears in published reports. Public records show City staff from the Building, Planning, Historical and Zoning departments coordinating on the property, the complaint says; it does not describe any step the preservation staff took to keep the church open.

“St. Petersburg tells the country it protects its history,” Noam Krasniansky, the Sanctuary’s co-founder, said in a statement. “Our architect gave the City a way to keep people safe and keep this sanctuary intact, and the answer was no. We are asking a federal court to hold the City to its own word.”

What happened in the year before the suit?

The complaint describes a year of attempts to settle the matter without a judge. The Sanctuary appealed several times to Mayor Ken Welch, who referred it to City staff. Told it could operate if seating went back in, it reinstalled the chairs it had, except those damaged by termites. In November 2025 a City inspector said the building looked satisfactory pending minor corrections, but the report arrived too late for a planned Sunday service, and the next one again called for sprinklers and a voice alarm. A later reinspection report, issued without anyone entering the building, ordered chairs put back in a third-floor mezzanine from which, the suit says, they had been removed about 20 years earlier, long before the Krasnianskys bought the property. When community events moved to the parking lot in January 2026, the Fire Department told the Sanctuary to stop those as well. A formal written demand to let worship resume followed in March.

The costs the complaint lists are concrete. Regular worship stopped, a wedding planned for September 2025 was cancelled, and food drives for The Kind Mouse, a St. Petersburg nonprofit that feeds hungry children, ended. The suit links bankruptcy proceedings involving the building’s owner, Treehouse Development Group, LLC, to the strain. The Sanctuary had already lost commercial funding after Hurricane Helene and held a farmers market to raise repair money, ABC Action News reported.

What is the court being asked to decide?

The complaint pleads the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth, three provisions of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act and the Florida Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The federal statute, known as RLUIPA, is the one built for this kind of dispute: its land use provisions, the Justice Department says, protect houses of worship from discrimination in zoning and landmarking laws. For comparison the suit names Allendale United Methodist and St. Pete First United Methodist, which it says replaced fixed pews with flexible seating without facing the same demands. Two other historic churches within about a mile have been converted to housing, it adds.

The Sanctuary wants temporary and permanent injunctions allowing worship, weddings and religious gatherings to resume, and it has asked for a jury. The case, Treehouse Sanctuary, Inc. v. The City of St. Petersburg, Florida, No. 8:26-cv-03106, is before U.S. District Judge Steven D. Merryday in the Middle District of Florida. Luke Lirot and Rachel Ricks of Luke Charles Lirot, P.A., in Clearwater represent the Sanctuary.

The Certificate of Occupancy, on the complaint’s reading, never mentioned the pews. Whether taking them out turned a church into something else is now a question for Judge Merryday, and so is who had the authority to say that it did.