The Hillsborough County Commission voted on Wednesday 5-2 for a resolution that allows for public hearings and workshops to take place on the Board placing a penny sales tax increase that would go before County voters next November.
With pressure building on Republican board members to vote against the proposal, both they and Republicans who spoke during the public hearing portion of the meeting said that it wasn't sacrilegious to support a tax for a worthy cause, like light rail.
Actually, GOP board members Ken Hagen and Rose Ferlita expressed less support for the measure per se than in espousing the democratic value of allowing members of the public to decide for themselves on the measure next year.
Marcella O'Steen praised the 5 Commissioners – Democrat and Republican – who supported the first vote on the measure last month (and did again on Wednesday). Honoring them for having the guts to buck parts of their party, she said in speaking about Hagen, Ferlita and Mark Sharpe that " I realize that a target is on all of your backs."
Then to demonstrate her own GOP bona fides, O'Steen unveiled a t-shirt that she said her husband brought back from a "Tea-Party" held in Washington in September. "Not all Republicans are anti-tax, not for a worthy cause."
The Florida Family Association's David Caton, last seen at a public meeting thinking he'd made a deal with Tampa City Council Chairman Thomas Scott to reject the proposal to include transgender people in the city's Human Rights Ordinance, blasted a forecast from the Hillsborough County Metropolitan Organization that the light rail system would have 24,000 daily riders. "These numbers are greatly overstated," he claimed.
During the debate itself, Commissioner Al Higginbotham pressed County budget officials Mike Merrill and Eric Johnson hard, trying to get them to guarantee that there would never be cost overruns on the project, a prediction that obviously neither man could guarantee, and so they didn't try.
That prompted rail critic Jim Norman to harumph that, "we're saying trust me? " He then said he was 'very surprised' at Budget Director Johnson for saying that all of the facts and figures that they've seen on the proposal look solid.
At the end of the discussion, Commissioner Norman looked fit to be tied, saying he had had enough, and said that in fact, if Commissioners were voting for the measure to get on the ballot, that yes indeed, they were voting for a tax increase.
Afterwards, CL asked Mayor Iorio her comments on Norman's parting shot.
She said, " Well, I mean, that’s how he wants to frame it, and so everybody’s going to frame it the way they best think it serves their purpose, the fact is is that the voters ultimately decide. And the Commissioners, the 5 of them that are honoring the voters in that way , are basically telling them: ‘we trust you'. What’s wrong with that? That’s what representative government’s all about. And I used to sit right there (pointing towards the dais), and we’ve done that a couple of times when I was on the County Commmission, so there’s s nothing wrong with that. In fact, that’s how the process oughta work."
There will be at least one more vote before the measure officially makes it on the November ballot.
(We intend to write more about today's meeting and the issue in next week's issue of CL).
This article appears in Dec 2-8, 2009.
