UPDATE: (Doug Guetzloe responds. Please read below).
Doug Guetzloe is the Orlando man behind Ax the Tax, a Florida political action committee that has fought rail initiatives throughout Florida over the years — and he boasts that they've yet to lose such a campaign. This weekend the group began airing ads targeting Hillsborough GOP Commissioner Mark Sharpe, who has been the biggest advocate for the one-cent transit tax that voters will decide in November. Sharpe is involved in a contested primary with Josh Burgin right now, where his support for the rail initiative is front and center (read more about the race here).
Guetzloe and some anti-rail friends held a news conference Monday morning in front of the County Center in downtown Tampa. He said his group is budgeting "at least $75,000" to try to defeat the rail initiative, for direct mail and ads. He said that the ad that ran this weekend on local cable targeting Sharpe cost $10,000.
Guetzloe says government — in this case, Hillsborough County — has plenty of money in its coffers to pay for a light rail system that goes before the voters. If approved, the penny cent sales tax would boost the tax to 8 percent in the county, making it the highest in Florida. He made similar arguments earlier this year in a one-on-one duel with Sharpe at a Hillsborough Republican Party meeting, in which local Republicans ranked him as "winning" that debate.
"You can't tell taxpayers that there isn't money available," he said, referencing today's front page story in the St. Petersburg Times by Lucy Morgan about a $48 million courthouse being built in Tallahassee. "We're wasting more money than they're talking about spending," he said.
Guetzloe blasted the projections for Tri-Rail in South Florida, saying that it took 20 years for the system to begin providing service for 15,000 riders.
He insisted he wasn't intimidated by the million-dollar budget assembled by Moving Hillsborough Forward, the pro-transit referendum organization that boasts of plenty of businesses in the region giving their financial support. He said that in his last battle against rail in Orange County in 2003, his group was outspent on a scale of $2 million to $40,000 — and still won.
Guetzloe acknowledged that among those who have contributed to his campaign is Eastern Hillsborough power broker Sam Rashid, who has dropped $500 to Ax the Tax. He said he hoped Rashid would want to give more when the vote grows near in the fall.
This article appears in Aug 5-11, 2010.