Pushing back against the Tampa City Council
May 5th, 2008 by Wayne Garcia in Politics, Tampa Bay Politics
Second time in the past few weeks that we’ve seen this storyline play out in the local dailies:
What has become of the Tampa City Council?
Council members often spend hours debating issues over which they have little say - such as complaints about Verizon’s customer service or whether to make state road Florida Avenue a two-way thoroughfare - while issues they can influence often take weeks if not months to resolve.
One of the major complaints in the Trib version of this tale? The “highly paid” administrators that Mayor Pam Iorio dispatches to answer Council questions are left sitting there for hours.
Boo-fricking-hoo.
The developers’ lawyers who make up 90 percent of the audience aren’t quoted as complaining, because they’re ringing up billable hours, so they don’t really give a shit when their case gets heard.
What’s going on with this spate of stories about the “dysfunctional” Council?
No doubt it is push-back caused by increasingly strident Council members, mainly Linda Saul-Sena, Mary Mulhern and John Dingfelder. You know how it is around these parts: ask a few too many questions and somebody is dropping a dime to the fishwrap to spin up a negative story about you.
Let’s face it, the Council has always been a slow and somewhat dysfunctional body. It has limited powers under the city charter: to set the budget, vote on allowing restaurants and bars to serve alcohol and decide zoning cases, among a small list of responsibilities. The relationship between this board and Mayor Iorio has not been good, but I’ve seen worse. It seems to me that a healthy dose of dissent and questioning is a good thing (unlike over in St. Pete, where until recently, blind loyalty to Mayor Rick Baker was a given). Otherwise you have a rubber-stamp board’s whose concern is not doing right for the public but getting some “highly paid” bureaucrat back to his or her desk in a timely manner.
Worse still is this from the Council’s chairman:
 ”I’m a lot more frustrated,” said council Chairman Tom Scott, who served on the county commission when that board was considered highly dysfunctional.
If the board meetings are a mess, can’t the chairman do something about it? He does, after all, run the meetings, doesn’t he? . Scott is a capable man; we could expect him to control the board’s activities, unlike the previous chairwoman, Gwen Miller.
Let’s hope he doesn’t. If this kind of dysfunctionality is giving us a green-building ordinance with real incentives and hope of working (Councilman Dingfelder’s suggestion) or questions about the city’s lack of involvement in the EPC struggle (Councilwoman Mulhern on that one, to the consternation of the mayor), I say bring on more dysfunctionality.
(Full disclosure: Mulhern was the visual arts critics for CL prior to her election.)Â
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May 5th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
“Scott is a capable man”? Where have you been living? This is the former county commissioner who told the media “we sign things around here all the time without reading them” (paraphrase).
If you put his acumen together with Kevin White’s reputation for honesty and integrity, you’d have the Democrats’ answer to Brian Blair.
May 6th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Yes, then there were the sad efforts of the Brandon Historical Society a few years back to save the circa 1900 Brandon-Jaudon House, one of the last vestiges of Brandon’s history. Ronda Storm’s church wanted the lot for a parking lot.
Guess what happened?
Anyway, the demolition was helped by nitwit Scott since the house was “owned by Crackers” whose legacy, I suppose, he is not in the habit of wanting to preserve…..
Thanks for everything Tommy!