Seminole Heights candidate forum a lengthy affair

Trying to make it more exciting for himself and others who may be growing tired of the rap of his colleagues (there's still five weeks to go before the election), Ed Turanchik said that he was making news, prompting the reporters in the room to take notice.  What was it?  He called it "Places and Spaces."  He said there's a good reason why streets like Howard, Armenia, Florida, Tampa, Nebraska have struggled.  City codes and regulations "make it all but impossible except in rare circumstances for small businesses to grow and invest."

Tuesday night was the first time we saw District 2 candidate Scott Strepina in action, who said it was critical that the city address its pension issue with city workers.  A former executive at Coca-Cola, Strepina said that gave him a better perspective on how to read a budget, implying that others on the current board simply don't have that talent.  "If we don't have the appropriate financial horsepower on the city council, city council members are going to be swayed which ever fancy individual comes in there and sells them on this, and sells them on that. If you can't look at the data, if you can't understand the financial statements, you're not going to make important decisions."

Curtis Stokes, who has served as an interim member of City Council since the summer and is running again in District 1, took umbrage to the criticisms of the council made by Strepina.  "I take offense when they say that when we begin the budget...that we vote on it 3 weeks later.  I take offense at that, because we're very competent."

Though the panhandling discussion has gotten an absurd amount of attention in this race, virtually every candidate save a few had to make sure to throw in their few minutes that they'd ban the practice.  District 3 candidate Michael Ciftci said he'd not only ban it in Tampa, work with state legislators to ban it in all of Florida.  And District 2 candidate Susan Long, who has been explicit that it was the city council's refusal to enact a panhandling ordinance that compelled her to run this year, said simply of panhandlers: "We have to get rid of them."

Kelly Benjamin has longtime roots and discussed that yes, he too wants to ban panhandling, which theoretically puts him to the right against his opponent, Charlie Miranda in the District 6 on that issue.  But he said more important than that was the fact that Tampa annually leads the nation in being considered the worst in the country for pedestrians, and noted the slew of deaths of cyclists in 2010.

We'll also say that we hadn't seen Mike Suarez, candidate in District 1, speak at a candidates' forum.  The dude's got great presence.  Mary Mulhern surprised us when she said that she would read off a top 10 list of her accomplishments (vs. speaking impromptu).  However, she seemed to overcome that with the substance of her list of accomplishments, beginning by saying how she had met over the years with all types of neighborhood activists, including one of her District 2 opponents, Susan Long (Long nodded her head as she said that).  Interim council member Yolie Capin, running in District 3, unfortunately was not as successful reading from her crib notes, as her presentation was stilted and hard to follow.