The Big Story: Ronda renews city-county war
March 5, 2008 at 11:19 am by Wayne Garcia
A rent-subsidized apartment complex in Belmont Heights, part of the East Tampa CRA, which would be impacted by Sen. Ronda Storms’ new legislation. (photo courtesy of tampagov.net)
The Times reports today that Sen. Ronda Storms has filed a bill that would make it tougher for cities across Florida to revitalize their decaying urban neighborhoods:
Storms, a Republican from Brandon, has proposed limiting to 15 years the life of special taxing districts intended to boost economic development in blighted areas. She also wants any district already in place for 15 years dissolved in 2009.
Such districts, called community redevelopment areas, redirect property taxes raised in their borders toward improving infrastructure and the economy in the area. They typically remain in place 20 to 30 years.
“It takes some time to build up resources that can be used to cure some of the more significant blight conditions in a community,” said Mark Huey, Tampa’s manager of economic development.
The motivation, ostensibly, is to get those property taxes now locked up in CRAs returned to county governments. It is part of Storms’ and her allies’ longtime power struggle against the city of Tampa. It is SB 1528, for those keeping score.
In the past year, Hillsborough County leaders have locked horns with the city over several issues, from Jim Norman’s insistence that county paramedics have a shot at extra-hours jobs at Raymond James Stadium to the possibility of consolidating some city-county services. That last idea, a pretty good one, was scuttled by Iorio because of the county’s anti-gay stance, which (and now we come full circle) was initiated by then-County Commissioner Ronda Storms.
All of this is the result of the fact that city leaders lorded over the unincorporated county and county commission for years until suburban sprawl in the ’80s and ’90s saw so much population growth that the county ended up with three times as many residents as the city. In the power struggle that ensued (and continues today), fiscal and social conservatives came to dominate county politics, which Tampa’s political structure remained more ethnic and more progressive. I wrote about the phenomenon in 2006, and not much has changed since then:
It is about control. It is about who will run Hillsborough. It is about growth and increasing the raw numbers of voters.
It is all about power.
Few of Tampa’s urban power brokers realize the depth of dislike out in the ‘burbs and beyond for their brand of politics. For decades, Tampa and its downtown set called the shots for the entire county. Tampa’s mayor sat atop that heap.
But starting in the 1990s, a group of political activists in eastern and southern Hillsborough worked to change that mix. They knew that the Tampa political base had something they didn’t: access to money, and lots of it. Developers and captains of industry played their politics and elected officials who hewed to a pro-downtown line. Tampa, with its working-class ethnic population, also skewed more Democrat.
So, armed with computers that constantly ran voter statistics, fueled by money from a handful of key supporters to pay for intensive polling that showed how and why certain candidates won races, and aided by a national swing to the right in 1994, these activists were ready to level the playing field. They brought together a working coalition to support conservative suburban candidates: anti-impact fee advocate Ralph Hughes, fiscal conservative Sam Rashid and anti-abortion financier Lorena Jaeb, to name a few.
They tapped into a basic reality: Most suburbanites live outside the city of Tampa because they want to. They don’t like the city, with its urban ways, its ethnic flavors, its rundown sections and its too-exclusive, too-expensive neighborhoods.
They also realized much better than their city counterparts how to use grassroots support, mainly along social conservative lines.
And so slowly and surely — to paraphrase H.G. Wells — they drew their plans against Tampa.
