[Editor's Note: Jim Harper, a former editor of the Weekly Planet (now Creative Loafing), covered St. Petersburg government, politics and racial issues from 1996 to 2000 for the St. Petersburg Times.]
I've been following the St. Pete mayor's race fairly closely. Even though I don't especially like either candidate, they are who you've got. And you have to make a choice.
Let me start by saying that I have never really liked Kathleen Ford. I covered her first race for City Council for the Times a dozen years ago, and caused her great grief by quoting her as saying something like "the reason the Old Northeast is important is because it provides a buffer for Snell Isle." What Snell Isle should be buffered from, she didn't say.
I sat in her Old Northeast living room — with a prim, severe portrait of some white woman from an earlier century glaring down from the mantel — and I listened to her talk about how tattoo parlors did not belong in downtown St. Petersburg. She also criticized retro clothing stores and anything else that might represent a messy creative revival in downtown St. Pete.
I mentioned all this in my coverage. (Well, maybe not the severe WASP ancestor portrait; I've got some of those in my own family, and I'm not sure what they mean.)
Her council opponent was weak. She won.
Fast-forward 10 years. I've read a lot about the current Ford model from sources other than the St. Petersburg Times, which seems to be carrying my old torch in looking for ways to discredit her. And from what I can tell — despite her new, more user-friendly veneer: "Ford 2.0," as she calls it — she seems still to be ill-tempered, snide, prone to say weird and prejudiced things when she speaks off the top of her head.
But — and this is a big but — she also has an impressive command of the details of city government — including the balance of power that the City Charter prescribes between the mayor and the City Council. (Read her interview in last week's Creative Loafing, where she applies that knowledge to the baseball question. Sounds like a reasonable position to me, and I'm a die-hard Rays fan. Gave my left nut to attend division and ACLS playoffs last year, and I've never missed an Opening Day.)
Ford also has a keen sense of what many St. Petersburg residents mistrust about their municipal government:
This article appears in Oct 29 – Nov 4, 2009.