UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who bore with us through our tech issues today for the live stream. We finally got it done.
The video stream of the taping is after the jump:
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Yesterday, former 2nd District Court of Appeal Judge Thomas E. Stringer Sr. pleaded guilty to one count of mortgage fraud in connection with a home he purchased in Hawaii with New York stripper Christy Yamanaka. PoHo has been abe to obtain surveillance audio from that real estate closing, and we warn, it is Not Suitable For Work (and entirely satirical):
My guest co-host for this week’s HoCast is Seth Nelson, a Tampa lawyer who is running for the Tampa City Council in 2011 (for Linda Saul-Sena’s citywide seat; she is term-limited).
He is a former law clerk on the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, so we look at how Sonia Sotomayor did in explaining her statement about policy being made at the appellate court level. Plus, we discuss Walter Cronkite’s death and how it shows what is wrong with today’s news media and ask ourselves whether Barack Obama’s health care reform effort is in trouble.
And between all those headlines, Seth talks about why he’s running for the Council and what his top priorities are.
I’m fascinated by John Warren, a longshot and last-minute candidate in the St. Petersburg mayoral race. He has a long history in the city as a preservationist, history advocate, real estate investor and — currently — the owner of Savannah’s Cafe on Central Avenue. Yes, he’s made rookie mistakes at a recent forum and in his campaign finances. But that’s not important. What is important is his message about learning from the past and looking at the city’s problems (especially those downtown) as all linked. He would restart the city’s visioning process to work on solutions in the aggregate.
Listening to Warren makes you think outside the box about the problems in St. Petersburg. Sure, as the Times has pointed out, he’s long on pointing out the problems and short on pat “solutions.” But his solution is the processes he advocates, the transparency and inclusion and comprehensiveness, and he bring an entrepreneurial bent and preservationist’s soul to the campaign, and that is refreshing.
I also asked him about the problem of aggressive panhandling. He had this to say:
Well, we do have an ordinance that serves a portion of downtown and it’s to discourage aggressive panhandling. But I think for a lot of the merchants who are down there right now, aggressive can be anybody who is sitting in front of their business. The presence of an unbathed individual sitting right at their front door is as aggressive and deters as much business as somebody that’s actually going up with a stick and asking you for a dollar.
CL: But that’s not something that’s drawing police action.
They are not. What really ought to be recognized is that downtown sidewalks and our whole street grid system is intended to allow for society to move, to flow, and your sidewalks downtown originally were owned by the property owners, and those rights were given up so that commerce could be conducted. Commerce is important for a strong tax base. Unless the community has a source of revenue, there is no way they can take care of the destitute. It’s important, No. 1, for us to recognize that the homeless, … is completely different from the career panhandler or the individual who has chosen not to live in a shelter or live in a home. And that distinction needs to be recognized. A lot of downtown business people are very charitable. They’d like to be able to help.
It makes business very difficult if you have the career panhandler who is competing and threatening the livelihood of those businesses whose sales and taxes are going to be providing for the other individual who genuinely has that need.
So, how do you balance that? One of the things that has been considered in other communities is extending to the merchant, or property owner, a bit more control. you’re not giving the land back to them, because you can’t, but assigning back to them some responsibilty for maintaining the property between the curb and their doors.
CL: So they would have the ability to say you’re trespassing on their area.
Exactly. It’s a delicate issue. There still are a lot of people who feel that any piece of property in front of business out to the curb belongs to the public, it’s a public right of way, without recognizing that public right of way was intended for infrastructure elements that are under the surface…
CL: And not as a living room…
It’s not somebody’s bedroom or bathroom.
Listen to the full interview with John Warren after the jump.
Of the Big Six candidates for St. Petersburg mayor (Jamie Bennett, Kathleen Ford, Bill Foster, Deveron Gibbons, Scott Wagman and Larry Williams), the only one that I have not had a chance to have in the CL Studio was Williams — until now. The former St. Pete city councilman came in recently to tape his half-hour on the HoCast, talking about how to battle the city’s crime problems and whether he is behind the eight ball because he got into the race late.
Sonia Sotomayor with her kids nephews at a ballgame. She certainly will have to be alert for foul balls in the confirmation process. (photo courtesy of whitehouse.gov)
This week’s podcast breaks down the Sonia Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination with Tampa media lawyer David Snyder. We talk about her race-based rulings, her temperament, Rush Limbaugh and Tom Tancredo’s charges of reverse racism and whether judges really do/should make policy or not.
Download or stream the HoCast after the jump.
I’m kicking off my series of 30-minute interviews with the top St. Petersburg mayoral candidates today with a chat with Kathleen Ford. Here is an excerpt from the Q&A:
CL: Why run now?
Ford: We have experienced some incredible changes here locally, and the concern I have is the city finances, frankly. We have a current city policy that has allowed the gambling of our payroll. A lot of folks really don’t know about that yet, and i think there will be more in the press as more of the information is revealed as to what those policies were and what the ramifications were to the city of St. Petersburg.
How did the city do that?
There’s a concept called securities lending, and basically, the city had 39 loans out for $194 million of our operating revenue, and as you know, our operating budget general fund is approximately $200 million, more or less. So that’s the entire amount of our operational funds that were being allowed to be invested in some riskier investments, and we still have not seen publicly the report that was written by KPMG over a year ago [that audited those investments].
Do you suspect the city lost a lot of money in those investments?
$15 million to $30 million, and the fact that they can’t tell us how much is lost or where these funds are or how it happened is extremely troubling. …This is an additional layer of irresponsibility, carelessness and a lack of due diligence, and it still has not been addressed.
You can hear the entire interview in the cool little player on the top right hand side of this blog post or download it after the jump.
