Two things distinguish the political line on the map known as St. Petersburg's District 6.
First, it contains many of St. Pete's high-profile, newsworthy sites, from downtown's skyscrapers and condos to USF's Bayboro campus to Tropicana Field to Albert Whitted airport to the Mahaffey Theater to the Dali Museum to part of the economically depressed (and occasionally riot-torn) Midtown neighborhood. Throw in the "Tower of Power," the St. Petersburg Times' offices, for good measure.
Second, the district also arguably contains the most left-leaning, Democrat-voting, progressive and integrated neighborhoods in all of Tampa Bay, with names like Old Southeast, Roser Park, Lakeview Terrace, Coquina Key, Driftwood and Tropical Shores. It has a thin African-American majority with solidly Democratic voting patterns. Outside of the poor and black Midtown, its neighborhoods are mostly integrated, mostly gentrified, mostly gay-friendly and very, very liberal. Those that aren't tend to be dominated by blue-collar, working-class families inclined to vote for the party of labor.
Just how much so? Well, in 2004, St. Pete's District 6 went for Kerry/Edwards over President Bush by a margin of 80 percent to 20 percent.
"There's really not a conservative neighborhood in the batch," said Karl Nurse, an Old Southeast resident and president of the umbrella Council of Neighborhood Associations, or CONA.
The district is the most contested in St. Petersburg in this fall's off-year elections, and the primary on Sept. 27 figures to be the most interesting race. Its candidates represent the various shades of belief in the Democratic Party, from centrist/moderate to progressive to socialist, and the outcome could determine the future of the local party.
Incumbent Councilman Earnest Williams has drawn four challengers: Cassandra Jackson, a former Pinellas County Housing Authority board member; Darden Rice, a Sierra Club organizer and the only candidate who is white; Maria Scruggs-Weston, a former Florida Department of Law Enforcement special agent making her third attempt for public office; and Dwight "Chimurenga" Waller, the outspoken president of the Uhuru movement in St. Petersburg who is running against Williams for the second time.
Of the five, Williams, Rice and Waller are clearly the contenders.
Williams was first elected to the City Council in 2000, at a time when it was a fractious board in a fractious city. Long a favorite of the Times' powerful editorial board without being a lackey for the newspaper, Williams operates his State Farm Insurance agency in an office on Fourth Street N., just one block into the northern end of District 6. Its irregular boundaries are, roughly, 22nd Street S. on the west; the southern tip of Lake Maggiore on the south; Tampa Bay on the east; and Central Avenue on the north, although the district does jog as far as Seventh Avenue N. for some blocks near downtown.
For many incumbents, having four challengers would be a sign of extreme weakness. In District 6, which has a history of turning incumbents out of office, it's just par for the course.
"I had five people [running against me] last time," Williams, 58, says. "This is not unusual for this district. It's very progressive. It's very diverse."
For Williams, the campaign is about the progress that St. Petersburg has made since he took office.
"There's not a single area that a candidate has raised that we have not already addressed," Williams says. More cops on the streets? We've added them, plus given the police chief the OK to hire more, he said. Affordable housing? The city gave 70 lots for Habitat for Humanity homes, he points out, not the mention the 314 new housing starts in District 6. The environment? St. Pete meets 14 of 19 standards for being designated a "green" city.
"I'm running to continue that kind of progress," he says. "We have a great record to run on. Our record is: Just look around and see."
The Rice candidacy has drawn the attention of progressives desperate to find an outlet for the energy created during the doomed Kerry campaign.
As for the poor heart of the district, in Midtown, Williams said he sees "real progress" with new infill homes.
But despite that stance he denies his candidacy represents a status quo approach for voters. "When I came into office, none of that was there," he said. "How is that status quo?"
Williams comes into the race strong, his profile that of a moderate supporter of Mayor Rick Baker that plays OK in his district and even better in the runoff, which is held citywide. In 2001, Williams got more votes — 31,813 — than any other candidate on the St. Pete ballot, including Mayor Baker, mainly because of the majority-white voters' disdain for his opponent, Waller.
For some in District 6, especially the impoverished, Williams' tie to Baker could hurt. His other big liability in the race is his early gaffe in announcing that he would simultaneously seek a seat in the Florida House of Representatives. Williams backed down from the House race, vowing not to run in 2006 and to serve out his term on the City Council. That indecision — and the arrogance that some claimed it showed — clearly opened the door for some of his challengers, he admits.
One of those who took advantage of that door is Rice. Except in Midtown, Rice's plain-looking blue-and-white yard signs dot District 6, the only political signs to be found at this point in the election. They call the 35-year-old Rice "Our Neighbor." If yard signs were an indicator (and they are not), Rice would be solidly ahead in the campaign.
The genesis of her City Council race was the 2004 presidential campaign, in which she ran the Sierra Club's 527 political group alongside the MoveOn.org folks to mobilize grassroots support for John Kerry. In south St. Petersburg, the movement was strong and large.
Rice, who has wanted to run for public office since she was a kid, wondered: "Can you drop this grassroots machine into a local election?" She decided to run and find out. It's an interesting test, one that has drawn the attention of progressives desperate to find a winning formula and a positive outlet for the energy created during the doomed Kerry campaign.
Rice comes from a political family, her mother directing her to public service and exposing her to her heroes such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Wellstone. Rice's uncle is Everett Rice, the former sheriff, current Republican state legislator and candidate for Florida Attorney General.
That relationship hasn't always translated into a benefit for her. First and foremost, she is a progressive Democrat, unlike her moderate Republican uncle. Second, her distant relations to the Sheriff's Office are not a plus among some in the district, where the fatal shooting of a 19-year-old African-American man earlier this year by a sheriff's undercover drug agents remains a very sore point.
Rice was confronted with that issue last week at a forum sponsored by Waller's International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement at the Enoch Davis Center. She was criticized for not repudiating her uncle for his role as sheriff when another teen — a 17-year-old African-American — was killed in St. Petersburg in May 2004.
Rice stood her ground, telling the group that she is not responsible for the actions of anyone in her family except herself. (In contrast, Williams skipped the forum, and his campaign consultant Peter Schorsch wrote online in his SaintPetersblog, "Is it any wonder that incumbent Earnest Williams did not attend this circus? This forum was nothing but a set-up by the Uhurus and their candidate to take potshots at the progress that is being made in Midtown.") It won her some grudging respect, if no votes.
Days later, she acknowledges the meeting was bruising but hopes it is the worst beating she will take in the campaign. She is also firm in her assessment that her campaign has nothing to do with her uncle's politics, career or successes.
"I stand on my own two feet," she says. "I cut my own path."
She does, and she's already won some powerful supporters of her own. CONA's Nurse is backing her, as is the Pinellas Realtors Organization, which recently endorsed her. She enjoys broad support in the gay and lesbian community in St. Petersburg, and among liberals and Democratic Party regulars, who show up in Pinellas Democrat T-shirts to stand behind her.
At several appearances a week, Rice is telling voters about her plans to expand the number of community-oriented police officers in the district. "They're overworked and we need more of them," she says. "This is something that is widely felt throughout the entire community in District 6."
Rice also talks a lot about affordable housing, and is worried about the impact of condo conversions and bigger, more expensive homes in the district. Her campaign platform is online at www.dardenrice.com.
Chimurenga Waller talks a lot about affordable housing, too. His solutions are far to the left of even a progressive like Rice. In fact, they are closer to socialist thought than anything else. (They're online at www.electwaller.com.)
Consider his platform: Rent control (Waller supports limiting rents to 25 percent of a family's income). Property tax relief for seniors, granting them an additional homestead exemption. Helping homeowners with code violations rather than fining them. And finally, creating a Community Control Housing Board with strong powers that would, in many cases, trump private property rights.
For Waller, who lost to Williams in spring 2001, the campaign continues 20 years of work in the poorest neighborhood in St. Petersburg, where he says 71 percent of the African-American families live at or below the poverty line.
Waller, 54, sits in his campaign headquarters along the 16th Street S. business district, a collection of small storefronts, beauty shops, restaurants and other community-owned businesses. He calls Williams "narrow in his views" and "pessimistic" about what can be done for the residents of Midtown. Waller also has been very critical of a project on which Williams dotes: the construction of a national-chain grocery store and shopping plaza on 22nd Avenue S. Williams says the Sweetbay grocery store will bring poor residents lower prices without forcing them to take a cab ride to the nearest large grocery.
Waller, on the other hand, calls it "capital extraction" that turns African-Americans not into business owners or entrepreneurs but into consumers. Why couldn't the city have worked with some existing mom-and-pop grocers in the district to enable them to pull together to open a larger grocery store instead of farming the job out to a white-owned national chain?
But all those issues are secondary for Waller, whose only real hope in gaining a seat on the City Council stands with a lawsuit he filed that challenges St. Pete's unusual primary election system. City voters chose to have their primary elections contested in single-member districts, but the final runoff elections are held citywide. The theory was to prevent ward politics by making each City Council member answer to all the voters.
That has the effect, Waller contends, of disenfranchising African-American voters and causes "rigged" elections.
"It doesn't make any sense to have two elections in a race that's nonpartisan," he says.
Here is how it works: In District 6, blacks make up 54 percent of the vote and could, conceivably, choose their candidate along racial lines. But the final two candidates in the race must then run citywide, an expensive proposition and one that forces many to adopt positions that play to the concerns of 71 percent-majority white voters and not necessarily the solutions that District 6 requires. (In Tampa, by comparison, four of the seven council members are elected entirely in single-member districts, while the other three run citywide.)
Waller has sued the city in federal court, alleging that this primary-runoff system violates the federal Voting Rights Act. He hopes to have a judge intervene in the elections this year, either forcing the Nov. 8 general election off the ballot or imposing a true single-member-district runoff plan. (Rice said she supports his lawsuit; Williams said he could live with either system and supports whatever the voters of the city choose.)
Without such an intervention, Waller knows he faces an almost insurmountable task to sell his "Taking Back the African Community" to a majority-white city.
"We're going to get the message out," he says, "but we do understand we have obstacles in front of us. I'm not afraid of fighting."
Political Whore disclosure time: As a political consultant, he worked for Karl Nurse's unsuccessful mayoral campaign and Everett Rice for Sheriff. He can be reached by e-mail at wayne.garcia@weeklyplanet.com or by telephone at 813-739-4805.
This article appears in Sep 7-13, 2005.