Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan said on Wednesday that with the removal of six different road projects in the South County area that were on a list to be funded by a percentage of the sales tax referendum on transit, there was now little incentive for anybody in that part of the county to approve the proposed ballot measure on transit later this year.
Hagan, who has publicly supported the transit tax but has spoken about the importance of funding road projects as well, said, "this area will never see any rail, and now that they're not seeing any road projects. I don't see any reason why any South County voter would support this." Those comments came after Lucia Garsys, the county's Planning and Infrastructure Services Administrator, said that the projects that had been on the list were considered developer funded projects. As CL contributor Kelly Cornelius reported on last week, those projects themselves were initially listed by Hagan's Transportation Task Force.
Commissioner Rose Ferlita immediately agreed with Hagan on the lack of incentive for a portion of the electorate to reject the referendum, saying to him, "You are 10o% correct. What reason would they have to support this? There's no advantage to this."
Garsys said that she and Metropolitan Planning Organization head Ray Chiaramonte will attend a meeting in SouthShore on Thursday afternoon to discuss other road projects with the community that might qualify for funding.
This article appears in Mar 3-9, 2010.