The worst kept secret in Tampa politics is officially official.
This morning, flanked at the Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections (SOE) office by his wife Dr. Cathy Lynch Buckhorn, former Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn finally filed paperwork for the 2027 race to be the city’s next mayor.
Ashley Bauman, former City of Tampa Director of Communications under Buckhorn and current Mayor Jane Castor, was also there. Bauman is now Managing Director at Mercury Public Affairs.
Buckhorn, 67, served two consecutive terms as mayor from 2011-2019. He endorsed his successor, Tampa’s former Chief of Police Jane Castor, who is terming out after her own back-to-back turns leading city hall.
There are nine other candidates officially in the race with Buckhorn, including Tampa City Councilwoman Lynn Hurtak, urban designer and USF assistant dean Taryn Sabia, entrepreneurs Gary Hartfield and Alan Henderson, plus Best of the Bay-winning online food critic Anthony Gilbert Jr., and more.
Getting along with council
The mayoral race will get even more crowded in the weeks to come. District 4’s Tampa City Councilman Bill Carlson, a political foe to Buckhorn, teased an announcement last weekend.
Echoing past comments, Buckhorn said he’s not thinking about others entering the race.
“I’m here to finish the job,” he told reporters after filing, promising to go home after what he hopes is another turn as mayor. “I’m not running for anything else. I’m not burdened by ambition.”
With Hurtak running for the mayor’s office, and Carlson expected to announce soon, the makeup of city council will look different for Tampa’s next leader—and Buckhorn was clear about how he sees the mayor’s role in city hall.
Responding to a question from Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, he told reporters that the language in Tampa’s charter allows for a strong mayor form of government, where the mayor runs the day-to-day and is “basically the CEO of 4,500 employees and a $2 billion budget.”
Tampa City Council members have mostly gone along with the city’ last five mayors, but Hurtak disputed Buckhorn’s charter interpretation.
“If the mayor functioned as the CEO, then the council would report to the mayor, and we just simply don’t,” she told CL this morning, adding that council is its own entity.
“Over the years, council has basically given up a lot of the power they have, and this council has been slowly bringing it back by paying attention to budgetary items, focusing on ordinances” Hurtak said, noting that while council can fund items, the mayor doesn’t have to actually do them. “That is a sticking issue. It requires two parts of government to work together, which, traditionally, in the last 16 years, hasn’t worked very well.”
But Buckhorn, who served as a councilman under former Tampa Mayor Dick Greco—the only other mayor to come back for a third and fourth term—told reporters that, “This government works when people stay in their lane and do their jobs.”
“During my eight years, our mantra was no drama. We weren’t interested in drama. We didn’t have the luxury of drama,” Buckhorn added. “My job is to execute, my job is to finish the job. I anticipate the council to be good partners in that. But at the end of the day, council has its lane and the mayor has its lane.”
Hurtak argues that local governments function better when parties work together.
“It’s not whether or for or against a strong mayor, it’s just that in order to do the work, which is helping people, everybody has to work together,” Hurtak said, “Government by fiat doesn’t work.”
Big money for Buckhorn
Buckhorn enters the race with the biggest war chest of campaign funds, thanks to a PAC that has more than $1.8 million in the bank.
Sabia leads the rest of the field in campaign funds raised, posting $21,171.54 from 114 unique donors since announcing her candidacy last March. Hurtak, who filed last February, posted $14,782 in her Q1 report, from 45 unique donors.
Hurtak’s largest single contributions are for $1,000 checks from friends and family, and also civically-engaged Tampeños like Elizabeth Corwin, environmental activist Todd Randolph, plus locals connected to Tampa’s Timmel family of harbor pilots.
Sabia’s campaign has eight $1,000 donations from OutsideIn Architecture (tied to Brooksville architect Darren Azdell), attorney Troy Carnite, former Tampa mayoral candidate Ed Turanchik, and pro wrestler Dean Muhtadi (aka WWE’s Mojo Rawley).
The next closest fundraisers in the Tampa mayoral race, based on Q1 data from the Hillsborough SOE are Hartfield ($3,876.58), contractor and real estate broker Julie Magill ($2,100), and Henderson ($583.08).
Combined, all candidates running against Buckhorn have raised $42,818.20 for the election, which wraps on March 2, 2027. (If no candidate earns more than 50% of the vote, a runoff will end on April 27, 2027.)
Latest reports for the Friends of Bob Buckhorn PAC show the former mayor with more than $1.8 million in the bank, from nearly 300 unique donors, collected between July 1, 2025-March 31, 2026.
As previously reported, much of that stack comes from development and investment interests.
The Buckhorn PAC’s largest single contribution ($200,000) comes from Ayon Capital, founded by Bay area philanthropist and health care entrepreneur Sidd Pagidipati who co-founded Ellison Development.
Other six-figure donors to Buckhorn’s campaign include a company founded by Tampa investor and landowner Charles Garber, Jeff Vinik’s Tampa Bay Entertainment Properties, and Tapper Ventures—a company with ties Republican and Former Florida Senate President Tom Lee, who is the CEO of the Pepin Family Office along with Pepin Distribution tycoon Tom Pepin, and the distribution company’s Kurt Osborn.
Buckhorn presumably won’t have to reside over debate of taxpayers shelling out money for a Tampa stadium for the Rays, but Dream Finders Homes—owned by new Rays co-owner Patrick Zalupski—donated $50,000 to Buckhorn’s campaign, too.
Buckhorn defended those contributions in past comments to CL, claiming that developers and investors helped make Tampa an attractive destination for talent.
Talking to reporters outside the county center on Monday, Buckhorn reiterated his idea that Tampa was once a “donor city,” from which its “best and brightest” youth moved—and that he would rather preside over a growing city than a withering one.
Buckhorn says streamlining permitting could help ease Tampa’s affordability problem
In the elevator down to the lobby from the SOE office, Buckhorn spoke to the criticism that the city became unaffordable, forcing residents to the outer county, under both his leadership and Castor’s.
There’s a lot that the mayor doesn’t control, he told CL, like foreign wars, grocery, or oil and grocery prices.
“A mayor’s job is to provide a city government that’s efficient and that’s effective. One that provides good service to the people that live here, one that will provide a permitting process that would allow developers and builders to get product out of the pipeline so you can increase the supply and reduce the demand,” he told CL.
A report shared by Plan Hillsborough says that from 2020-2025, the county added 96,878 new residents. But WVTV says fewer people moved to Tampa between 2023 and 2024.
In a town where just 23.2% of eligible voters turned out to vote for mayor in 2019, Buckhorn is confident that he’s got what it takes to reintroduce himself to voters who’ve never heard of him—and those who remember him well, for better and worse.
He wants to remind voters of his wins, and how “we made this a city where their kids and their grandkids are now coming home here as opposed to leaving” and tell newbs that it was his team that built a city they were attracted to.
“I think that’s a winnable case,” he told CL. “They don’t have to ask what I’m going to do, because they’ve already seen what I’ve done.”
Buckhorn, and critics, on East Tampa
For some, what Buckhorn—and past candidates for mayor—haven’t done is advocate hard enough for East Tampa.
Every four years, candidates come around Tampa’s Black neighborhoods asking for votes, but many residents take to public comment during city council meetings to say that elected officials have not done enough.
One of them is Connie Burton, Vice President of Hillsborough County’s NAACP, who has been outspoken against the Castor administration and Buckhorn.
“We look back at the footprint of progress under Bob Buckhorn, what we see is policies that was detrimental to our community,” Burton told CL, alluding to police policies affecting biking while black and renters. She likened Buckhorn to others in the civil rights era who’ve “stood in opposition to Black progress.”
Buckhorn told reporters that he goes to church outside of campaign season and stays for the entire service. Tampa’s Black and Hispanic communities, he said, are what make the city special.
“I have been there from day one, and I have never left. Those that may criticize me obviously don’t know me, and they don’t know my record, and they don’t know my relationships. I will work as hard for East Tampa and West Tampa as I will for downtown Tampa,” he said. “This is a campaign about building a city for all of us—not just some of us.”
Burton says that Buckhorn may be misinterpreting some relationships he has with local religious leaders, where some congregations have started to lose sight of the struggles of people in the community. She pointed to the campaign and 100 days of leadership from New York City’s Zohran Mamdani as an example of someone addressing the issues affecting working class people.
“Bob Buckhorn served on city council. He served two full terms as mayor, and we did not see the end of despair,” Burton noted. “I would say that he was a useless candidate as it relates to our issues around social and economic justice.”
Buckhorn: ‘I know how to do this job’
In his own mayoral announcement last year, Alan Henderson, a young Black man who graduated from Brandon High School, said Tampa deserves a mayor who doesn’t think that the city ends on Ashley Drive or Water Street.
Buckhorn promised reporters that his new campaign is about building a city not just for people who live on Davis Islands and look like him.
“If we don’t succeed together, and if every neighborhood doesn’t enjoy some of the prosperity that we enjoy here in downtown Tampa, shame on us,” Buckhorn said.
“But you can’t do it if you don’t know how to do the job. If you don’t have relationships, you can’t do it, just talking about it. The difference is, I’ve done this job. I know how to do this job,” Buckhorn said, admitting that the gig is tough.
“This job turned my hair white, but that’s OK. I’m coming back, and we’re going to make sure that the success that we enjoyed for the last 15 years touches every neighborhood,” he said. “And there’s no excuse otherwise.”
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This article appears in Apr. 09 – 15, 2026.