Although Bob Buckhorn has extolled the policies of Rudy Giuliani, it's another iconic New York City mayor he invoked during a lunch interview two weeks ago.
"How'm I doing?" he inquired, echoing the famous question Ed Koch regularly asked New Yorkers during his 12-year reign in the '70s and '80s.
It wasn't an easy question to answer. Even though he reached his 100-day milestone on July 9, Buckhorn hasn't made many headlines since taking office on April 1. "I expected it would be a little more interesting," says former Tampa Mayor Sandy Freedman, laughing. Emphasizing that the circumstances were different in 1987 when she was elected, she remembers being told by her then 28-year-old special assistant that she needed to move faster.
That aide? Bob Buckhorn.
But the mayor did make news earlier this week: He told local reporters that he will be able to present his first budget to City Council July 28 without having to lay off any current staff members, raise taxes or substantially cut essential services. That's a long way from two potential scenarios that his finance director, Sonya Little, presented to the Council last month — one of which would have cut 10 percent of the workforce, another by 15 percent, which would have meant firing hundreds of employees, "decimating City Hall," said the mayor ominously during our lunch interview.
So how did he avoid such severe cuts and still balance the budget? Buckhorn said earlier this week that he had department heads "literally sweep" their respective agencies to look for funds that had been earmarked but not actually expended over the past year, which resulted in some of the $9 million he says he found in savings. He will also be dipping into the city's reserve fund (as his predecessor did), but will tap only $6 million of said funds. That allows the city to keep over 20 percent of its budget in reserves and preserve its triple A bond rating versus a single A, which would increase its borrowing costs.
The only immediate hit on consumers will be an increase in electricity bills, he says, but that will only measure around $1.40 per month for the average TECO customer. Given that the city was facing a $34 million deficit — chiefly attributable to a drop in revenue from property taxes and communication service fees — Buckhorn's budget news seems, unlike that of many municipalities, relatively rosy.
It remains to be seen how the budget will address other challenges to the city's financial stability. During our lunch two weeks ago, the mayor acknowledged the urgency. "I don't have the luxury of prolonging any of this stuff," he said. "It's not anybody's fault, but I've got to do it. I was elected to do it. … I'd rather fix it now, take the heat for it, but have a healthier city and a structurally more sound and more efficient city, so that when we come out of this recession, we'll be ready to start growing again."
Of all the drags on the budget, the most prominent are the annual $7 million deficits in the city's parking division, not only in 2012 but for years and years to come. Currently eight of the 11 city-owned garages are losing money, and some of the deals made by former Mayor Dick Greco in Ybor City illustrate why, including a commitment to Centro Ybor that allows motorists to park for a dollar for up to three hours — great to lure tourists, bad for the owners (i.e., city taxpayers). Buckhorn says many other city garages charge rates that are significantly below market. He's apt not to sell them, either, since he doesn't believe he'll get much for them in this moribund economy. "I do know this," the mayor says. "The current situation is not sustainable."
Salaries and pay raises pose another difficult challenge. City staffers haven't received a cost-of-living increase in several years. And then there's the issue of step increases for police and fire department members, who were big supporters of Buckhorn's campaign. Public safety takes up over half the city budget, and has been left relatively unscathed through all of the budget cuts that have occurred since 2007. The mayor did include such step increases, saying, "that's a cost I'm willing to pay for."
Mark Anderson, who chairs Tampa's Citizens Advisory Budget Committee, believes the city must consolidate some non-essential functions with other governmental entities, such as Hillsborough County, and cites as an example the city's seven E911 dispatching centers for emergency, police and fire.
Neighborhood activist Spencer Kass, who sits on the Hillsborough County Citizens Advisory Committee, says he's eager to see what such a merger plan between the city and county would look like. Nothing's been specified yet, but Buckhorn says that purchasing and minority business departments are among those being reviewed for consolidation.
One of the issues that dominated the mayoral and City Council campaign this past winter was the panhandling ban, something Buckhorn boasted he'd accomplish in his first week in office.
It hasn't quite worked out like that, but Council is poised next month to enact a proposal that would ban such activities every day but Sunday, to preserve the hundreds of part-time jobs that newspaper hawkers make.
One reason the Council has balked at such a ban is the fact that some members have felt such a move is cosmetic and doesn't address the larger issue of homelessness.
But the Council also asked that the administration look into acquiring government and/or private funds to help out.
Buckhorn says he understands where the Council is coming from, but wants to know specifically what they want to do. "Merely throwing money at it without a targeted outcome and without specific expectations doesn't solve the answer, either," he says.
And Buckhorn says the number of homeless in Tampa "is astounding. It is a big number, much bigger as a percentage of the population than in other cities," and he expressed concern about groups feeding the homeless downtown in Bourquardez Park just north of Stetson University on Tampa St. ("That's not the right answer," he maintains. "That doesn't solve the long-term problem."
The mayor has also received a bit of pushback from the council about his recently announced committee to revive economic competitiveness — something he promised on the campaign trail. There was some carping that the names on that list were too heavily weighed on the development side (there's just one neighborhood representative — Bill Duvall).
Neighborhood activist Susan Long says it was "disappointing" that there weren't more small business or small development people on the panel. City Councilwoman Lisa Montelione, one of 18 people named to serve on the board, says that many environmentalists and citizen groups are worried that their needs won't be considered in the overall process. But she cautions that this is simply a "first step," on the way toward providing recommendations by year's end.
If it's difficult to evaluate the mayor too thoroughly in terms of policy through his first 100 days in office, City Hall insiders say they've seen a definite change in style. Specifically, they say that under former Mayor Pam Iorio and Chief of Staff Darrell Smith, only department heads were allowed to speak and meet with city council members. The situation is definitely different under the Buckhorn administration.
Councilwoman Montelione, just elected in March, recalls that, after one of her first meetings as chair of the Building, Zoning & Preservation Committee, she had a question about a real estate transfer. So she contacted "the first guy on the list." The "guy" happened to be a staff member, not a department head or manager. She says after she filled him in on the background of the issue, he said, "It's so great to be able to talk to Council members," explaining how much clearer it would be to have direct contact with her, vs. going thru different layers of City Hall.
Former Mayor Sandy Freedman says a lot of employees were "fearful of their jobs if they offered an opinion" in the Iorio administration, which she says stifled creativity and ideas bubbling up from under the surface. (CL contacted Mayor Iorio for comment. She chose not to respond.)
City Councilwoman Mary Mulhern said she hasn't noticed any major differences, but agrees that the "atmosphere feels a lot easier and more collegial." She thinks Buckhorn is being "kind and patient" in letting city staffers show him who they are, as he hasn't made any wholesale employee changes — yet. "Pam did a great job and Bob comes in thinking, it's not broke, don't fix it." But Mulhern believes there probably does need to be an infusion of new faces to go with the new policies.
For all the doom-and-gloom scenarios that accompany a multi-million-dollar deficit, Buckhorn is anything but pessimistic. He says it's not just his 26-point victory over Rose Ferlita that gives him that confidence, but the fact that there are four new faces on the Council, a different County Commission and County Administrator. "What I sense now is the beginning of a new chapter in Tampa's history, where we're less burdened by old battles, less burdened by politics, and there's a new younger, energetic, more forward-thinking, visionary types of elected officials and staff here, and it's contagious."
Though the Tampa Bay area has been as hard hit as any region in the country in this (double-dipped?) recession, Buckhorn believes he has the unique opportunity to make a difference. "I was elected because I offered a vision of hopes and aspiration," he says. But can his clear-eyed optimism transcend lackluster economic times? Stay tuned.
This article appears in Jul 21-27, 2011.