The future of Tampa Bay
May 18, 2007 at 12:41 pm by Wayne GarciaIf Tampa Bay has any hope of being liveable in 50 years, after absorbing another 3.2 million people from Brooksville to south of Sarasota, then the answer may lie in a stack of yellow and red Legos sitting on 30 tables in the Tampa Convention Center.
Business and civic leaders from seven counties are taking part in Reality Check Tampa Bay, a visioning and planning session put together by the Tampa Bay Partnership. The 300 participants included elected officials from all over the greater Tampa Bay region, including the “Big Three” mayors, Pam Iorio of Tampa, Rick Baker of St. Petersburg and Frank Hibbard of Clearwater.
The exercise put eight of the leaders at a table with stacks of children’s toys and colored ribbon. They had 90 minutes to plan the next 50 years. The Legos represented people (yellow) and jobs (red) that will come to this region during the upcoming half-century. The ribbons were road corridors (orange) and transit lines (purple).
The tables came up with very divergent plans, some clustering growth along roadway corridors, some pumping Tampa and Westshore into Manhattan-esque densities, some continuing a sprawling growth pattern that exists today.
At one table, Hillsborough County Commissioner Mark Sharpe called to Ron Weaver, one of Tampa’s best known development lawyers, “Ron, come over here and help me rebuild Tampa.”
Organizers say the effort will not result in a report that will sit dusty on a shelf with the other visioning efforts from the past two decades. They hope to narrow down the best Lego plans to about five and then take those out on the road, to other influential community leaders for their input.
The biggest positive of the session, however, was just putting leaders from seven counties into the same Tampa Convention Center room so they could learn about each other’s concerns and desires for growth.
“I don’t know that I’ve seen a group like this assembled since I’ve been here” in Tampa Bay, Mayor Baker said.
“What’s interesting to me is to look at other people’s perspectives,” Mayor Iorio said. “That is very helpful to building a consensus.” She acknowledged learning a lot about the Bradenton-Sarasota area’s possibility as a future jobs hub. She also saw lots of variation in her own city’s downtown-Westshore nexis, from super-high densities to a slowdown in its growth. “Different people have different sizes for Tampa,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons we don’t have a regional vision. We’re fixed in our own worlds.”
