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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Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: Winning a mayoral forum or debate is not the most meaningful thing in a campaign. The myriad gatherings of the 10 mayoral candidates in St. Petersburg that have already occurred and are yet to occur likely won’t alter the Sept. 1 primary outcome one iota.

Why?

Because such forums are a place that can only do a candidate harm. Stumble, or stumble badly, and the media coverage can magnify it into major damage. “Win” such a debate and not only will the MSM mostly not declare you the winner, but you have only “won” in front of a few hundred people, at most.

The way campaigns are really won are through spending campaign contributions on direct mail, television and radio advertising and through a concerted grass-roots voter contact effort.

So that brings me to reporting the “results” of Monday night’s mayoral forum held by the St. Pete Pride organizers at the King of Peace MCC. The “winners”?

Read the rest of this entry »

Trimming the fat at the top of the St. Petersburg City Hall pecking order would help mayoral hopeful Kathleen Ford trim property tax rates in the city by 8.5 percent, according to a proposed budget she released this afternoon.

Here is her plan, in her own words:

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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.

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Kathleen Ford, the former St. Petersburg City Councilwoman who took Rick Baker to a mayoral runoff election back in 2001, will file her paperwork to run again now that Baker is term-limited for this year’s elections.

Ford is expected to give a news conference at 11:45 a.m. on the steps of City Hall coinciding with her dropping off her campaign paperwork.

She joins this lineup already in place: Councilman Jamie Bennett; St. Pete College trustees Chairman Deveron Gibbons; former City Councilman Bill Foster; business owner Scott Wagman; and lesser-known candidates Paul Congemi and Sharon Russ.

Ford has a long history of raising hell in the city — more hell than most folks cared to hear, especially if those folks are the city’s ruling class. She has worked against the downtown waterfront ballpark for the Tampa Bay Rays and been critical of Baker’s police department.

By Peter Schorsch
PoHo contributor

Bracketology for Mayoral Madness

It’s a month earlier than college basketball’s March Madness, but with both Rick Kriseman and Ken Welch deciding this week not to run for mayor of St. Petersburg, political observers are now left with a much clearer “playoff picture.” The race is still in the first round, but the paths to victory for some candidates are now better defined.

In my analysis, I thought only either Deveron Gibbons or Ken Welch could move forward by consolidating the African-American vote. Although it may be passe to view the black vote in such monolithic terms, Gibbons is now the default leader of an entire voting bloc.

The other big winner this week was Jamie Bennett (disclosure: I am a volunteer on Jamie’s campaign). With Kriseman’s withdrawl, Bennett was ceded a huge swath of political geography in the south and west districts of St. Petersburg. More importantly, he is now the standard-bearer for the city’s Democrat and progressive voters. And don’t discount the fact that he is also the only candidates still in office. Read the rest of this entry »

First it was a Tweet from St. Petersburg Times columnist Howard Troxler:

HowardTampaBay My Sunday column: St. Pete mayor’s race. Wanna take bets on Kathleen Ford entering? Who do you like?about 1 hour ago from web

Then BayBuzz weighed in with this:

The buzz around town is that former city council member Kathleen Ford has reconsidered and will run for mayor.Ford declined to comment on her mayoral ambitions, but confirmed that numerous community leaders have approached her about running.

“There are a lot of people concerned about the issues facing the city and the lack of leadership to address the crime problem, the decline of Baywalk, the outrageous property taxes collected over the past eight years,” she said. “Folks want an open, honest, accountable and affordable government. We are tired of the secret deal making.”

I said on WMNF’s Radioactivity on Wednesday that Ford’s name had dropped out of the murmurs about who’s in and who’s out, but that there wasn’t another candidate running from the ranks of the, for lack of a better term, revolutionaries in St. Petersburg, many of whom have taken up under the umbrella of POWW on the baseball issue. The absence to date on the mayoral ballot leaves that sector of St. Pete politics wide open for a Ford run.