Props to Janet Zink in today's St. Petersburg Times for following up and doing the research about how new Tampa City Council member Curtis Stokes defaulted on a loan from Progress Bank totaling $847,381.
Stokes and Yolie Capin became the two newest members of the City Council on Monday when they were selected out of 66 applicants to fill the District 3 and District 4 seats, respectively, that became vacant with the sudden departures of John Dingfelder and Linda Saul-Sena last month.
As Zink reports, if it had been a regular election, and not a situation where the Council had all of a month to find two candidates that they directly would select to fill the two seats, Stokes (and Capin and the 64 other applicants) would have been required to complete financial disclosure forms. But that was not part of the application process.
Apparently, the information about Stokes was pretty accessible. We're not sure where the Times got their lead, but we received this e-mail Tuesday afternoon:
Has anybody done any research on this Curtis Stokes character who was recently appointed to the Tampa City Council?
Just looking at the available property appraisers screen, the tax collectors screens and others, you would find that he has foreclosure proceedings on properties that will be completed on July 29, 2010. It would be one thing if it was a small portion or small dollar amount, but looking at the court document filed under the Clerks's page, a total of $847,381.65 is being foreclosed on. Just what the citizens of the City of Tampa need…
We can already hear current Council members say that to remedy this in the future, they will require such candidates to provide financial data. But that's not good enough. As we've written about in this space in the past couple of weeks, the Tampa City Charter must be revised, with the elections no longer taking place in March of the odd year (2007, 2011, 2015).
As Tampa attorney Seth Nelson, who lost out to Stokes on Monday but is still running for the seat next year suggested in a post we wrote a few weeks ago proposed, the City Elections should be changed so that we don't keep on returning to this pattern of Councilmembers leaving early to run for the Hillsborough County Commission, and then the current Council, and not the citizenry of Tampa, chooses their replacements.
We've heard people say that this is an overreaction, but we don't think so. Some say the situation has been excessively highlighted this year by the fact that these two interim members will serve for a longer time (7 months) than the 3 that they would have if Dingfelder and Saul-Sena hadn't had to resign until November, when they either won or lost their races for County Commissioner.
This article appears in Jul 22-28, 2010.