Running for Tampa City Council is changing Kelly Benjamin. He knows it himself but doesn't seem to know how much. For one thing, he's wearing what looks like a brand-new suit over his rumpled red-and-white gingham shirt. And in one of the inside coat pockets is a shiny new cell phone. The interview takes place on a rainy Sunday night in the game room of a coffee shop on East Busch Boulevard near 50th Street. The shop's website is announcing a town hall meeting with Benjamin ("the only candidate for City Council who's never made more than $11,000 a year in his life!") and the place is filling up with mostly young people, some of them voters, some of them Benjamin volunteers. One man sticks his head into the room. It's a new face and Kelly spots it immediately.
"Hi," he says, "Kelly Benjamin! Candidate for City Council!" The arm glides precisely forward. The movement is eye catching. This is from handshake training camp. This is early professional work from a promising rookie politician.
"This isn't a career move for me," insists Benjamin, 27. "It's an extension of activism to run for public office … (But) I don't have these higher ambitions to be mayor of Tampa like my opponent does."
Back in the day, Benjamin was known as Kelly Kombat. He was briefly a media phenom, starting on Nov. 19, 1997, when federal marshals raided and shut down 87X, the pirate radio station he ran from an upstairs bedroom in a ramshackle Seminole Heights apartment.
Newspaper accounts of the bust described him as a "21-year-old college dropout" and dwelt on the marijuana possession charge filed when agents found seven grams of pot ($30 worth) in his possession. Since then, the FCC has begun to license low-power stations like the one he ran as a pirate. And Benjamin has served three months of probation, earned an anthropology degree at the University of South Florida and studied planning and urban issues, including a stint in Croatia with a David L. Boren scholarship from the National Security Education Program. He's a member of the Tampa Heights Neighborhood Citizen Advisory Board.
Also, he got attacked by two black guys one night on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard about three blocks from home. It was an educational mugging. It connected him with economic determinism and the roots of crime.
"I went through the cycle," he recalled. "I was pissed and furious, I called the police, I had this adrenaline rush. I went looking for them. Stupid things. But it forced me to reflect more on the issues. I started thinking, wow, here I am, a young white college kid who's living in a neighborhood that's predominantly Hispanic and black. Am I part of this? An unwilling part of this capitalist system of gentrification, of white-flight return from the suburbs? And are people getting displaced because of this?"
The short answer, he concluded, was yes. White folks who had fled the inner city for the safe suburbs were now abandoning their lawns and remote control garage openers and coming back to Seminole Heights, Tampa Heights and Ybor City with their Starbucks, their cineplexes, their trolley cars.
"In a lot of ways, we're already seeing that mentality is not paying off. I think we're going to see projects like Channelside fail." Benjamin said his role on the council would be to see that these "misguided decisions don't get passed unanimously without the big picture being looked at."
District 2, where Benjamin is running against well-financed incumbent Rose Ferlita, is one of three at-large council seats, meaning the candidates must campaign throughout the city. In his last finance report, Benjamin listed $3,344 in total contributions. Ferlita, a pharmacist seeking her second term, has raised more than $96,000.
Ferlita is 57 with deep Tampa roots, an entrepreneurial spirit and a gift for retail politics. She presides over the spartan aisles of Rose Drugs at 4810 N Nebraska Ave., a store she once sold to CVS and then reclaimed when the chain wanted to close it.
"It would have left people in the lurch like this lady here," Ferlita recounted, as an elderly Latina picked up her prescription at the counter. "Violet, how long have you been a customer of mine? Thirty-four years, maybe?"
"Longer than that!"
To Rose Ferlita, the people are not great competing tides of gentrification and displacement, sculpting the bedrock of the city. They are a bunch of folks who want to make sure their neighbors keep their houses cleaned up and painted. Who don't want to find broken glass in the medians of city streets. Who want their tax money properly spent and accounted for.
So her record is a collection of small-scale victories. "It was my motion that was approved for outlawing open glass containers on city rights-of-way," Ferlita said, "and that certainly protects public safety in terms of broken glass."
Occasionally, when a neighborhood home gets trashy and overgrown, she personally responds to the code enforcement complaint, sometimes bringing the city's code enforcement chief with her. She calls it the Rose Patrol.
As a council member, the one-voter-at-a-time approach has made her all but unassailable.
"People come at (me) from a tone that (I) should apologize because I've been collecting a lot of money," Ferlita said. "I'm not apologizing. I'm proud of it. If you have your record to defend and people still want to contribute to what I'm about, it's my pleasure to continue doing that and using the money they give me to put my message out."Other Citywide DistrictsTwo other at-large council districts are technically open seats since the incumbents, Charlie Miranda and Bob Buckhorn, are leaving them to run for mayor. But the races are dominated by serving council members Gwen Miller and Linda Saul-Sena, who have been term-limited out of their old neighborhood seats and are now running citywide as pseudo-incumbents.
In District 1, Miller, a 68-year-old school teacher and wife of State Sen. Les Miller, D-Tampa, is challenged by banker Curtis Stokes, activist lawyer Carole Mehlman and public access TV guy Charles "White Chocolate" Perkins, who didn't return our phone calls.
Stokes, 34, manages the portfolios of 240 business clients at Bank of America and has worked with the Tampa Palms Community Development District and the University Area Community Development Corp. Prominent Republicans are supporting him, and he says Miller's record shows she would be "ineffective" citywide. His campaign has raised $31,300, $9,000 from his own pocket. Miller's latest report lists $43,325.
Mehlman, a liberal ("If you say that, I'm dead!") with a lengthy service record in Tampa, has little more than the $5,000 that she put up herself. She says it's because the air is being sucked out of her campaign. According to Mehlman, her natural constituencies — labor unions and nonprofits, for instance — are letting her twist in the wind rather than offend the powerful minority whip of the Florida Senate.
"Gwen is a formidable opponent," says Mehlman, 67, "because I'm really running against Les Miller."
"No," says councilwoman Miller. "It's because of me. It's because of Gwen Miller. All these people have been knowing me for eight years and that's why I'm doing a good job." Asked recently to name the accomplishments of her two terms, Miller listed two community centers and two supermarkets in her old district.
In District 1, Saul-Sena, a 51-year-old urban planner devoted to art and beautiful spaces, is up against activist and licensed professional engineer Joe Robinson, who ran unsuccessfully for council twice before and hoped to be appointed Supervisor of Elections when Pam Iorio resigned to run for mayor. Robinson, 48, calls Saul-Sena a South Tampa aristocrat who doesn't get the "inner city blues" that he's using as a campaign theme.
Responds Saul-Sena, "That is so incorrect."District 4: South TampaSouth Tampa's district seat is being sought by three white men in their 40s with remarkably similar resumes.
Two of them, John Dingfelder and Clay Phillips, are lawyers with experience in the Public Defender's office. Gene Wells owns a computer parts company. All three have been active in neighborhood and civic associations in Ballast Point, Palma Ceia, Davis Islands and Bayshore. All are for neighborhood preservation and rational growth management.
In 1997, Dingfelder cast one of three Hillsborough County Hospital Authority votes against privatizing Tampa General Hospital. "There is an old-line, old-time power base in Tampa … and that power base said it's time to privatize the hospital. I have an independent streak and I didn't like the process," Dingfelder said. "That was a several-hundred-million-dollar asset of the community."
Stormwater drainage is a huge issue in South Tampa. The city is proposing a $12-a-year tax on homeowners for drainage projects. Dingfelder and Phillips support the tax; Gene Wells does not. "I just don't think that the property owner should have to bail out the city for its neglect of this problem," he said. "We commit funds to public arts, to beautify roadways. There's no reason we could not create a funding mechanism for stormwater improvement."
Clay Phillips served for a time as district director in the office of U.S. Rep. Jim Davis, D-Tampa, where he answered a thousand calls from troubled constituents a year. It was training for a life on the City Council. "We talk about big issues and we'll have to deal with that," Phillips said, "but people calling in about potholes and street flooding, that's what you do every day."
As Phillips sees it, preserving South Tampa may call for work elsewhere in the city. "One of the ways to relieve pressure on South Tampa is to make other parts of Tampa safer and more attractive," he says.District 5: East TampaThis is the region that includes much of downtown, the Channel District, Ybor City and also the surrounding blighted neighborhoods. "Such a hodgepodge!" marvels candidate Bernadine White-King. "Channelside, the aquarium, the Museum of Art, all downtown. But spread your wings north and east and you start coming into third-world conditions."
White-King, 51, a veteran of inner city poverty programs and Hillsborough County's social services bureaucracy, is one of four candidates for the seat that Gwen Miller held for eight years. She's a USF graduate, "happily" divorced with one son and, like most of her rivals, she sees the neighborhoods' drug problems as the central obstacle to economic development.
For White-King, economic revival would begin with drug treatment centers in the neighborhoods, projects that would challenge wills, budgets and ingenuity. "We have the talent and resources to get grants and donations," she says. "Are you serious about curing the drug problem or do you want to be a prisoner in your own house the rest of your life?"
Candidate Kevin White has drug experience. As a member of the Tampa Police Department's Yankee Squad, he used to bust dealers and users in the neighborhoods where he now seeks votes. That was then; now, he's the finance director at St. Petersburg Jeep Chrysler. Car dealers and peripheral auto businesses have contributed to his campaign and, according to the most recent campaign finance reports, only Rose Ferlita has more money.
White's plan for the district includes youth programs to channel young people away from crime. He'd also like to see the city selling reclaimed water outside of its borders. "The city of Tampa pumps 40-million gallons of water a day into the bay. That's giving away free money," says White, 38. "Pasco and others would pay us for our reclaimed water."
Andrew Baker is a self-employed planning consultant who travels to Florida cities, developing revitalization plans. In Tampa, he's the assistant program manager for the HOPE VI project, the federally funded program to replace aging public housing complexes, such as College Hill and Ponce de Leon, with new apartments and single family homes.
According to Baker, some obvious crime-fighting tools have not been used by the city. For instance, he says, the city has been seizing cars from men arrested for soliciting prostitutes and then charging impound fees to give them back. He says the city raised $1.5-million but spent none of it on the original problem.
"They spent the money on office furniture, computers, the downtown parking garage and the Police Athletic League," he says. "We are subsidizing a slush fund for the police department."
Ali Jimmy Jackson Akbar is also looking for economic development in District 5. He, too, has been active in neighborhood associations and appointed advisory boards and he says he has some direct experience with economic disenfranchisement.
Akbar, 52, who has run a steel fabrication business for 26 years, says he wasn't even allowed to bid on contracts for downtown parking garages or the trolley car stations. "The city has ignored District 5," Akbar said. "Not Seventh Avenue, not Channelside Drive, but the inner core of District 5. District 6: West TampaIn West Tampa, incumbent Mary Alvarez is losing little sleep over the fact that she's running against Joe Redner. "I don't want to get into details," she says. "But the fact is, I have a record of achievement and he's got a record."
Alvarez is proud of her neighborhood and cultural service, the speed bumps that made residential streets safe, the Casitas Project that rescued the historic little wood frame homes from Interstate-4 expansion. She's in favor of a light rail line to New Tampa and expanding the trolley car.
Redner, who owns Mons Venus as well as non-adult businesses including Xtreme Total Health and Fitness, is making his fourth run for office and can't understand why he's still not getting any traction. His platform is progressive, based on environmental concerns and responsive government. He has endorsed Kelly Benjamin.
But he owns a strip club.
"I don't get it," Redner says. "There are people who concede that I'm honest and more reasonable than the people who are in office and I have a grasp of what the city does. But because I'm in an adult business, they won't vote for me. That doesn't say much for the voters if they'd rather have dishonest people who don't own adult businesses."
This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 4, 2003.