Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio confirms she is eyeing US Senate campaign
January 27, 2009 at 12:33 pm by Wayne Garcia
Her name has been out there before (in this blog post two weeks ago) but now Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio has confirmed (first to TBO’s William March) that she is considering running for the U.S. Senate in 2010:
“It was not something I was considering when there was a possibility that Alex Sink might run,” Iorio said this morning. “But since she bowed out, I have had people talk to me about it. So I am analyzing it, and that’s where I am right now. I have not ruled it out.”
I reached her just after noon, when the story was just breaking out on TBO’s blogs and spreading through the state.
“I don’t want to make more of this than it really is,” Iorio said. “I haven’t organized anything. I am analyzing.”
I reminded the Democratic mayor that she told me last year that she was inclined against running for a legislative-type seat when her term ends in 2011, enjoying elected offices that are more administrative in nature. But she said Tuesday that the opportunity to serve in the U.S. Senate is so unique — and an open seat such a rarity — that she feels she has to think about it seriously.
“At that level, it is such an opportunity to have an impact on the issues of today that I just cant let it go by without knowing that I analyzed it and did everything that I could to come to a good conclusion,” Iorio said this afternoon. “I’m talking to people who have supported me for many years. Just to say no to people [who are urging her to consider a campaign] just didn’t seem like the right thing to do. I’ve got to look at all the facts and see if it is something that is right for me and my family.”
You have to believe this Senate seat is a serious matter for her; Iorio is not one given to public speculation, as she said in our July interview:
Where do you see yourself next, after 2011?
I don’t know. People tend to think I have some master plan. I had to be cajoled into the mayor’s race at the last minute. That was not part of any master plan. In fact, my master plan had been not to run. I had decided not to run. Then, at the last minute, [supporters said], “Why don’t you run?” and they showed me a poll and, you know.
Now that I’ve been mayor, I don’t have a master plan beyond that either. I just have never operated that way.
I’m not a person who has great ambitions or great master planning to my career, but I always believe that there are many opportunities in life. You have to be open to them.
There is a move to create a county mayor position, and some critics believe this was done to create an office for you to run for. Interested?
It certainly hasn’t been created just for me, that’s for sure.
This discussion has been going on for as long as I’ve been in office and even before then. When I became a county commissioner in 1985, I was all new to politics. Ron Glickman and I were the under-30 group. I probably was a county commissioner for all of six months when I saw, boy, this system sure doesn’t work well. I’ve been for a county mayor ever since 1985 or ‘86. You cannot govern such a complex community by committee. I reached that conclusion when I was in my 20s.
Now I’m in this position as mayor. How county government is formatted is their business. I’m not involved in it whatsoever. I don’t even know if the position is going to be created. I have absolutely no plans to run for it.
I think if they do create it, they’re going to have a very tough transition to it. You don’t just snap your fingers and create a form of government. There’s going to be a lot of pain and suffering along the way.
Your last two jobs have been administrative rather than legislative. The job’s not open right now, but how do you think you would do as the president of the University of South Florida? Is that in your future?
I don’t see that in my future. Judy [Genshaft] does a great job. I don’t want to speculate on such a thing. I don’t speculate on any job. I wouldn’t speculate on county mayor. It’s just not fruitful for me to do that, particularly when I don’t have a plan on aspiring to any of those positions.
After the jump, more on Iorio from my July Q&A with her:
Iorio was 26 when she was first elected to public office in 1985, part of a youth movement in Hillsborough County government at a time when local voters still skewed Democrat in their choices, in the aftermath of a scandal that saw three county commissioners led away in handcuffs in a bribery investigation. Iorio is the daughter of a University of South Florida professor, and her political approach and demeanor border on academic. (She received a bachelor’s degree in political science from American University and, seven years ago, a master’s degree from USF.)
After two terms on the County Commission and two more as Supervisor of Elections, Iorio became mayor of the region’s largest city. But for someone whose politics are centrist and who has enjoyed strong support in every campaign she has undertaken, Iorio elicits a strange blend of adoration, grudging respect and underground criticism for her cautious approach.
Fans of her work say she dismantled the good ol’ boy system at City Hall, deliberatively recruiting professional administrators with years of experience in either government elsewhere or, more often, the military. Neighborhood leaders applaud her as a real partner who has empowered them.
Criticism is muted, mostly because some activists in Tampa fear the power of the mayor’s office and can’t quite understand how they are sideways with Iorio despite her often-progressive stances. Some environmentalists say she moved too slowly to save the Hillsborough River. Urban advocates grumble that the city bureaucracy ground to a halt during her administration and hasn’t moved to increase densities or change the city’s 1970s-era development codes and regulations. She upset many Tampa Museum of Art backers when she killed plans for an expensive new building for the collections and, instead, undertook a “methodical” search of downtown buildings and sites before settling on a scaled-down plan along the waterfront, in Curtis Hixon Park. And the project for which she has shown the most passion — a $40 million Riverwalk stretching along almost all of downtown northward into a planned development in Tampa Heights — has drawn only middling private funding support. Critics split: some believe it represents Iorio having too expensive a vision, others point to it as an example of how her vision is not grand enough.
