Finally, someone almost got a chance to use the “Taj Mahal” Regent in Brandon. That someone happens to be a five foot alligator. He was luckier than most Hillsborough citizens. He almost got inside the Regent. Unfortunately for him he was discovered before he made it through the doorway and was captured and taken away. If he was looking to rent the ballroom for a gator event he should have known, looking inside is by appointment only, and it’s frightfully expensive.
He may have gotten tired of waiting, like the rest of us, to enjoy the Regent as a community center. His gator relatives over in Carrollwood probably bragged about their community center, the Carrollwood Cultural Center, which offers concerts, theatre shows, children’s programs, art shows and a whole host of community activities at little or no cost to residents.
When you compare what local residents got for the $7M spent to build the Regent vs. what the Carrollwood Community Center offers, it makes you want to snap at Hillsborough County Commissioner Al Higginbotham, who was instrumental in obtaining much of the county funding while he sat on both boards (the Board of County Commissioners and the Regent’s board), but has since done nothing to change it from a private catering palace to a real community center.
Here's a comparison of scheduled events at the Regent vs. the Carrollwood Center for the month of June 2012:
This article appears in Jun 21-27, 2012.
