CL endorses in St. Pete Council races: Newton vs. Wheeler-Brown, Garrett vs. Kornell, Abbott vs. Gerdes

Creative Loafing makes political endorsements only on an occasional basis, but in the case of the current hard-fought and often bitter St. Petersburg Council races, we decided to weigh in.

That’s partly because the three members of our ad hoc editorial board — Editor-in-Chief David Warner, News & Politics Editor Kate Bradshaw, and Managing Editor Scott Harrell — all live in St. Pete, so we feel a bit of proprietary interest.

But it’s also because two of the three races have been so clouded by other factors — negative flyers, campaign machinations, the tunnel vision of the Tampa Bay Times editorial board (RAYS RAYS RAYS) — that we felt we had to meet with the candidates ourselves in order to cut through the fog.

Finally, this election is important because it’s citywide; every voter in St. Pete can help decide who represents these districts, and determine not only the future of the city but of the entire Tampa Bay area.

We were able to meet individually with both candidates in the District 7 race — Lisa Wheeler-Brown and Will Newton — and with the incumbents in Districts 1 and 5, Charlie Gerdes and Steve Kornell. Gerdes’s opponent, Monica Abbott, did not return requests for an interview. After repeated attempts to reach Kornell’s challenger, Philip Garrett, we finally managed to schedule an interview appointment which he then canceled due to a work conflict, and we did not have time to reschedule. David Warner did get the chance to hear Garrett speak at a recent NAACP-sponsored candidates’ forum.

DISTRICT 7: SOUTH ST. PETERSBURG (Midtown)

Newcomers Lisa Wheeler-Brown and Will Newton are vying for the council seat being vacated due to term limits by incumbent Wengay Newton (older brother of Will).

Wheeler-Brown is a medical billing specialist. Her civic experience includes heading the Council of Neighborhood Associations, a diverse group that often weighs in on important local matters. A wife, mother and grandmother, she cites the murder of her son — a cold case until she got involved and tracked down the killer through her own sleuthing — as the impetus for her civic engagement.

Newton is a retired firefighter who currently heads a local firefighters’ union. He spent extensive time working with local and state officials on collective bargaining agreements, and has volunteered with troubled youth in south St. Pete. While his brother is known for being stubborn on some issues, Will Newton stresses his ability to collaborate and negotiate.

Both candidates were raised in St. Pete — mostly within the district — by mothers who were domestic workers.

Both are Democrats (though the race isn’t supposed to be partisan).

Both want to see District 7, which largely consists of impoverished, predominantly African-American neighborhoods,
redeveloped into an area with an abundance of jobs and affordable housing, and both want to help south St. Pete’s five notoriously anemic elementary schools churn out more successful students. They also agree that the city should move toward decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana.

Here are some of the salient points about each candidate.

Lisa Wheeler-Brown

• She enjoys strong grass-roots supports among progressives, including endorsements by Councilmembers Darden Rice and Karl Nurse and the Stonewall Democrats of Pinellas County, the LGBT political action group.

• She has stated that she would allow the Tampa Bay Rays to explore stadium sites in Hillsborough County.

• She also has the Times endorsement.

• She’s likely to support Mayor Rick Kriseman. It’s not that her opponent would arbitrarily stand in the way of the mayor — he says with conviction that he’s his own man — but it appears as though Brown would be a stronger ally. That’s especially important to Kriseman going into 2017, when he is likely to face a formidable challenge from the right.

• She offers specific ideas for improving the educational climate, such as expanding the availability of after-school tutoring at community and recreation centers.

• She has guts. She braved potentially dangerous situations to gather information that ultimately led to the arrest — and three consecutive life sentences — of the man responsible for her son’s death.

• Her record at the Council of Neighborhood Associations suggests she can lead at the city level. While Brown’s predecessor at CONA criticized her for playing politics to get ahead, she points to successes the group experienced during her tenure, such as convincing groups that had defected to rejoin.

• Though she comes across as warm and genuine, she’s not as polished as Newton and is clearly the greener of the two candidates.

• She’s been in the race since January; Newton joined in June. Brown frequently says she “didn’t just wake up in June and decide to run” on the campaign trail, a phrase that visibly irks Newton.

• She’s a uniter: She organized flag football events to foster more positive relationships between police and members of her community.

• She committed a handful of campaign finance errors, including $500 in dental work paid for in misreported campaign money (which she says she has since paid back).

Will Newton

• He believes City Council should stay tough on the Rays.

• He didn’t get the Times endorsement.

• Then again, he seems willing to compromise on the issue. While he was uncomfortable with the amount of money offered by the Rays in the Kriseman deal, he isn’t an “absolute no” to allowing the team to look elsewhere, and would consider other deals.

• He did get the endorsement of the Tribune — after a while. Before the five-way primary, the Trib endorsed Wheeler-Brown, but in the wake of questions raised about her campaign finances, the editorial board shifted its endorsement to Newton.

• His years as a firefighter and union leader equip him with a unique understanding of City Hall and Tallahassee, experience that suggests he is more prepared than Wheeler-Brown for the nitty-gritty of government bureaucracy.

• As head of his union, he negotiated succesfully with the city, but also wound up in multiple impasses.

• He’s been endorsed by four sitting council members — Bill Dudley, Amy Foster, Steve Kornell and his brother.

• He has bipartisan support from prominent Republicans, including former Mayor Rick Baker, State Sen. Jack Latvala and State Rep. Kathleen Peters.

• He says he will act independently and view all city matters on a case-by-case basis — despite all that Republican support.

• He explains that he waited to enter the race till June because he was weighing his run while shuttling between St. Pete and Tallahassee over two legislative sessions — and not, as some have suggested, because he was being pressured to enter the race by opponents of Wheeler-Brown and Kriseman.

• He paid the IRS over $32,000 in what seems to have been a disagreement over how much taxes he owed on contract work he performed on behalf of unions.

At the NAACP forum on Monday, the two candidates’ discourse remained relatively low-key in contrast to the battle between the contenders in District 5. But the differences in their leadership styles were evident.

Newton talked about wanting to invite voters “into the system” — giving them a place at the table, as it were. He has plenty of experience sitting at that table, and would in fact be ready, as he says, “on day one” to do the work of council, bringing with him a long familiarity with the players, the policies and the acronyms (MOU, TIF, CRA and all the rest) that are the stuff of doing city business.

Wheeler-Brown, on the other hand, emphasized the collective vision of the community; it’s time, she said, to “bring the village back.” She uses the word “community” often, and it feels earned. She’s been out there, literally hitting the streets — not just as the mother of a murder victim seeking justice but as the grandmother of a child who goes to one of the so-called “failure factories.” When she talks about what’s needed in Midtown, her suggestions (like extending free after-school tutoring beyond one day a week) derive from her own everyday experience.

Would she have a realistic command of what City Council could do? One of Newton’s strong suits during the debate was his quiet reminder to the audience to not get “lost in soundbites” — to realize that anyone can make a promise, but that it’s City Council’s job to figure out what can actually be accomplished. His pragmatism suggests he’d work well with Kornell; they’ve worked together in the past, on the Juvenile Welfare Board’s 21st Century Community Learning Centers, and Kornell has said that it was Newton’s effectiveness in that volunteer role that led to his endorsement of Newton for Council.

CL ENDORSEMENT, DISTRICT 7

The circus that has surrounded this race has obscured a very real truth: these are two excellent candidates.

But on balance, we are most excited by the prospect of a fresh voice, one with a drive to achieve and a visceral sense of the everyday challenges that face the communities of District 7.

We endorse Lisa Wheeler-Brown.

Full disclosure (from David Warner): I gave $100 to Lisa Wheeler-Brown’s campaign in February, long before Will Newton entered the race, primarily at the recommendation of my husband, who had met her and been impressed by her. Since then, I’ve come to appreciate the strengths of Newton as well as Wheeler-Brown.

This was not an easy decision for any of us, and we went back and forth many times on our choice. We fully believe that either candidate would be a valuable addition to City Council, and hope that, if Wheeler-Brown wins, Will Newton will run again in the future.

DISTRICT 5: SOUTH ST. PETERSBURG (Skyway Marina District, Pinellas Point, Lakewood Estates)

The Garrett-Kornell race has been contentious, largely due to the Tampa Bay Rays stadium issue. Kornell rejected a deal that would have allowed the team to explore possible stadium sites in Hillsborough County and opt out of its contract to play in St. Pete until 2027. He reasoned that the team’s offer of $17 million would be too paltry a return on taxpayers’ $350 million investment.

“There is a deal I could say yes to, but that one’s just not it,” he said in a recent CL interview. [In fact, he did say yes a few weeks later to a proposal by fellow Councilman Jim Kennedy asking the team for $33 million.]

The Tampa Bay Times editorial board has been so put off by Kornell’s stadium stance that they endorsed Garrett instead. A firebrand who consistently introduces himself on the stump as a “God-fearing family man,” he stirred up the crowd with effective rhetoric at the NAACP candidates’ forum, but spoke in generalities, including the vaguely stated goal to get “education into the city charter.” His vow that “I’m not afraid to shake up the status quo” is admirable, but judging by his performance at the panel, a Garrett term on City Council would be one long, hectoring (if occasionally entertaining) filibuster.

Kornell, a guidance counselor at a South St. Pete high school and the first openly gay man to be elected to St. Petersburg City Council, counts among his achievements the recent purchase of land surrounding the environmentally critical Boyd Hill Nature Preserve as well as Abercrombie Park and the creation of the Skyway Marina District in a blighted part of south St. Petersburg. Rather than make empty promises about improving schools, an area which the Council has relatively little control over, he suggests making changes at the source — tackling child homelessness, which he said would go a long way toward creating better education outcomes.

“The school system has identified this year 3,700 homeless students,” he said in his meeting with CL. “And last year it was 2,500. So, if you’re homeless, everything else is a Band-Aid.”

The Times’s decision to excoriate the candidacy of an accomplished incumbent based almost entirely on the Rays issue — an issue with little relevance to the residents of District 5 — seems at best single-minded and at worst spiteful.

DISTRICT 1: WEST ST. PETERSBURG

Gerdes, Kornell’s incumbent counterpart and current chair of the council, is having a quieter reelection bid. Abbott is largely self-funded and has criticized Gerdes in the past for not paying close enough attention to the district.
Gerdes, elected in 2011, counts among his achievements the groundwork for a smart-growth plan aimed at attracting employers to the city.

“The analogy is, we’re the water boy right now to Tampa in terms of attracting employers that pay $60,000 and benefits, all that kind of stuff,” said Gerdes, a lawyer. “And it’s time to put a jersey on and get on the playing field instead of being the water boy.”

On the Rays, he was in favor of Kriseman’s deal and sought a compromise after the council rejected it. Weeks ago, when he and Councilman Kennedy had dueling proposals, he allowed Kennedy’s plan, which would net more for the city, to be heard first out of fairness.

Council passed that proposal (with Gerdes and two of his colleagues rejecting it). Gerdes said he didn’t see any point in raising the bar on the deal when the team has already said it wouldn’t go that high.

“The classic setup is, if you’re in a negotiation with somebody and you’re trying to get to a place where everybody agrees, the offers typically start approaching one another,” he said. “And so the Rays took this position that their last offer was the best they could ever do, and don’t come back to us with anything worse. Even my own proposal was a little bit more than their last proposal. I took the big part of the deal and I flattened it out.”

CL ENDORSEMENTS, DISTRICTS 1 & 5

We went into our consideration of endorsements in these races with generally positive opinions of the incumbents.

Despite some gridlock here and there, namely when it comes to the Rays, the city is headed in the right direction.

We would have liked to speak in depth with their two challengers. And the fact that one was difficult to get ahold of and the other didn’t even respond to interview requests, suggest that despite whatever good intentions and rhetorical talents they may have, they aren’t quite ready to hold office.

So we endorse incumbents Charlie Gerdes in District 1 and Steve Kornell in District 5.

This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2015.