Although it's still extremely early on, former Tampa City Councilman Bob Buckhorn has gotten off to a nice start start in his campaign for Tampa mayor. Last week he announced he had raised $52,000 in the race, the most by any declared candidate so far, and he was able to procure a surprise early endorsement from the International Association of Firefighters Local 754.
But it's still over 7 months until Tampa citizens will go to the polls, and still the possibility of several more high profile candidates joining Buckhorn, Tampa City Council Chair Thomas Scott and Hillsborough County Commissioner Rose Ferlita as serious contenders to succeed Pam Iorio as the next Tampa leader.
Among the possible candidates, none looms larger, at least symbolically, than Dick Greco, the 76-year-old who was first elected to be mayor over 40 years ago.
Buckhorn is hyper alert to Greco getting into the race. His reaction if he does?
"You're never going to get to the future by looking in the rearview mirror," he said while speaking to CL from a fund raiser held for him at Mise en Place last week. " There’s a time to move on, and there’s a time to recognize when it’s time to move on. It requires a different skill set, this city is in a different place, this economy’s in a different place, it’s going to require a Mayor who’s not holding on to the past, but looking for a path to the future. So the voters will have to decide on Dick Greco," Buckhorn said of the former mayor who he worked with frequently during Greco's second reign in office, from 1995-2003.
Buckhorn is also keenly aware that Jim Davis and Ed Turanchik continue to float the idea of getting into the race. He hints that the job may not mean as much to those men as it does for him. " This is not just another retail politicians job," he says. "This is not a job to end a career on. We won’t get where we need to be, and we won’t be competitive as a city unless we move in a different direction."
This article appears in Jul 15-21, 2010.