In 2008, the Florida Legislature voted to vastly cut funding to the various Clerks of the Courts offices throughout Florida.  As the #2 person behind Pat Frank in Hillsborough’s office, Harry Cohen said he learned then and there what it takes  to find a way for a government agency to do the same amount of work with fewer resources, and he says that knowledge will aid him if he’s elected to the Tampa City Council this coming March.

“It forced us to really re-examine our budget in a very different way, line by line, much more closely taking every assumption about spending and sort of backing out from it, and figuring out ‘hey, we can find a way to provide these services with 15% less money, and that exercise which was both comprehensive and wrenching, really opened my eyes to a lot of creative solutions that can be found when you’re facing the kinds of economic challenges that the city is going to be facing in the coming years,” the District 4 (South Tampa) told CL last week.  “Everyone can talk about layoffs, and everyone can talk about cutting pensions and things like that, but the questions are much more nuanced than that,” he says.

The 40-year-old Cohen , a Tampa native who after attending law school in New York worked for star Tampa attorney Barry Cohen (no relation) for several years before agreeing to work with Frank at the Clerk of the Courts, will step down from the position he’s held for six years at the end of January, as he intends to campaign full time to win his first attempt at elected office.

But he’s no newbie to politics, having been involved in several Democratic campaigns for years, including John Kerry’s bid to win Florida in 2004.

Cohen is opinionated and knowledgeable on the issues. On transportation for example, he says it’s critical to make the streets of Tampa safer for pedestrians and cyclists, and that bus service in the city needs to be improved.  On the issue of the transit tax defeat (which did get a majority in the city of Tampa), Cohen said he was always apprehensive about its chances of passage because of the lack of faith in government that the public was  voicing in 2010.  “I think the idea of giving the government a one-cent sales tax and having faith that it was going to be spent in a certain way, I don’t think the public was there.”

This article appears in Dec 30, 2010 – Jan 5, 2011.