The Political Whore

This week’s column from the print edition of Creative Loafing:

About 500-600 people are voting for a new mayor of St. Petersburg every day now, part of what has become a vote-by-mail system of absentee voting in Florida. Nearly 60,000 city residents have requested an absentee ballot, almost 40 percent of the registered voters.

That’s a big number. So why do I hear so many complaints about the 2009 race to succeed Mayor Rick Baker being a real snoozer? Polling earlier in the month showed that 61 percent of the voters didn’t have a preference among the 10 candidates running. And although nearly 7,000 people had voted by the end of last week, there is very little visible to any of the campaigns, beyond the ubiquitous yard signs. It’s impossible to time the peak of your political campaign when Election Day lasts 45 days, and no candidate has enough money to run a full-bore mass media campaign for that long.

Take the latest mayoral forum, held by St. Pete Preservation last week in front of about 100 good folks at Studio@620. I popped in to shoot a few photos and perhaps hear their stump speeches, but after almost an hour the crowd had heard only from preservationists, who got five minutes apiece to school nine candidates on why historic preservation is important. Even the hometown St. Petersburg Times didn’t staff the preservation forum. When the candidates did begin to talk, there wasn’t much separation.

How can something be anticlimactic before it’s even over?

Here are the reasons why this year’s city election is having a hard time connecting with voters:

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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.

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UPDATE: We have 10 candidates for mayor, as Alex Haak didn’t qualify. They are Deveron Gibbons, Kathleen Ford, Bill Foster, Scott Wagman, Larry Williams, Jamie Bennett, John Warren, Richard Eldridge, Ed Helm and Paul Congemi. The primary election to determine the two finalists is Sept. 1.

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Today is the last day to file all the necessary paperwork to run for St. Petersburg mayor or city council, a day called Qualifying Day. We’ll know who is in and who is out by 5 pm.

A last-minute entry into the field, however, is entrepreneur, preservationist and restaurateur John Warren, 59, who owns Savannah’s Cafe on Central Avenue in St. Petersburg.

Warren, who has been frustrated by the city’s inability to help small businesses and truly grow its downtown in a sensible fashion, told supporters in an e-mail that he knows he is getting in late but doesn’t hear the issues he thinks ought to be disucssed.

“I don’t believe current candidates are addressing the issues that need to be discussed, nor do I feel they have the vision or experiences to deal with today’s challenges. Apparently many of you agree,” Warren wrote.

He also hints that he will get rid of controversial police Chief Chuck Harmon if the SPPD can’t start battling crime more effectively.

Here is his e-mail to supporters: Read the rest of this entry »