Is Tampa Bay's future being outsourced?
That's what some civic activists, including one of our bloggers at fixitnowtampabay.com, are starting to suspect. They've become increasingly leery of the private-business interests involved in One Bay, a visioning project that is working over a seven-county area to bring about a common goal to plan the next 50 years of growth.
One Bay is the follow-up to Reality Check, the 2007 civic exercise in which 300 political, environmental and business leaders from seven counties met around tables to play with Legos. The red and yellow blocks represented growth of various kinds, and the object was to figure out where to put them all. Though the participants were using children's toys, this was not a child's game.
While One Bay is not a government agency, the way it defines our choices and puts lines and homes on maps could hold great sway over public officials who will make those final growth decisions from Crystal River to Venice.
After the May 2007 Lego exercises, Reality Check morphed into One Bay, hoping to refine the ideas and arrive at some options for the future of the region to present to public officials by the end of this year. An interim report is due May 22.
But the person chosen as project manager for the second phase of the exercise, Amy Maguire, turned out to be a lobbyist with a high-powered Tallahassee firm who also had ties to a group of property owners in rural southern Hillsborough County, owners who want to develop their land. Some activists, notably from eastern Hillsborough groups such as U-CAN and R-Land, cried foul, and the resulting publicity forced One Bay to unload Maguire and take a step back to re-evaluate its process — and the people it is hiring to do its work.
Meanwhile, the Hillsborough County Commission denied a $100,000 request for its official planners to conduct their own future visioning work, citing the work already done by One Bay. Kelly Cornelius, a Fix It Now Tampa Bay blogger and member of R-Land in eastern Hillsborough, wrote, "Planning land use with transportation seems to make good sense. What doesn't make good sense is handing over a project like this to a public-private partnership like One Bay, which will certainly benefit from its planning outcome."
And so last week I found myself at a table in the SunTrust building in downtown Tampa with leaders of the five core groups behind One Bay: Tampa Bay Partnership, Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council, Tampa Bay Estuary Program, Southwest Florida Water Management District (Swiftmud) and the Urban Land Institute.
Their message: We're a broad-based visioning movement that is fully open to the public, not a business group trying to grease the skids of government on behalf of developers.
"It's been our intent from day one that this group, One Bay, is to be a resource. … for our community," said Dave Moore of Swiftmud. "Our goal is not to prescribe how the region develops but rather to give a descriptive analysis so that everybody can digest it."
Throughout a 45-minute talk, the group talked about being descriptive vs. prescriptive, describing what the future could be, not must be; giving choices and explaining how they would work, or not work, with competing regional desires for growth.
But the underlying fact remains that the two most visible and dynamic groups dealing with our region's future — One Bay and TBARTA, the regional transportation group — were created by private business interests; the Tampa Bay Partnership was instrumental in the creation of both, and that has some civic activists nervous.
The Partnership's executive director Stuart Rogel said they shouldn't be. "[We're] creating a process setting a stage for the citizens of the region, literally thousands of them, to come together," Rogel said, "and [they're] very diverse. The door's open to anybody who wants to participate in the process. I still don't know who those activists are [who raised the red flags about Maguire], but we welcome them to come to the table and be part of One Bay.
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2008.