CL caught up with former Tampa City Councilman and now former Hillsborough County Commission candidate John Dingfelder last night at Mise en Place, the site of a fundraiser for Democratic Attorney General candidate Dan Gelber.
It was just hours after he had released a letter to his supporters and the media, in which he announced he was stepping down from his race for the district one County Commission seat that he has been working on for at least half a year on trying to win in November.
It was just a week ago that Dingfelder, who has served on the city council for over seven years, shockingly resigned after he had learned that he had failed to submit paperwork in sufficient time to the supervisor of elections office about the fact that he would be resigning in November.
The Hillsborough County Republican party has threatened litigation to get him tossed off the ballot. So yesterday he preemptively quit the race, though the expectation tonight is that the Hillsborough Democratic party will re-nominate him, which they are allowed to do.
"I didn't like where we were," Dingfelder said last night, clad in blue jeans and a dress shirt and tie after he wrote a check for Gelber's campaign. "I thought we were tainting the campaign."
Dingfelder's Democratic party colleague on the council who is also running for county commission and also had to suddenly resign last week, Linda Saul-Sena, is not taking the same route Dingfelder is. She's not taking her name out of nomination, as she told CL yesterday.
This article appears in Jun 24-30, 2010.