Last November, before the Rays’ new stadium proposal towered over St. Petersburg politics, neighborhood activists, among them some of Mayor Rick Baker’s most vocal critics, watched the local city council elections intently.
Two of their own — Westminster Heights Neighborhood Association president Wengay Newton and former Northeast High School coach Bill Dudley — were facing off against well-heeled candidates backed by Baker.
When Election Day results came in, and the two self-styled “outsiders†(narrowly) won, disaffected neighborhood leaders heralded the vote as a mandate for City Council to address issues of fiscal responsibility and public safety that had long been ignored.
Yet Newton and Dudley would represent only two votes on a seven-member council that has invariably supported Baker for years. Then, in March, one of the mayor’s strongest allies left the council to run for state House district 55. (Earnest Williams, a two-term councilmember, lost to Darryl Rouson.) Neighborhood leaders saw another chance: Karl Nurse, former three-term president of the Council of Neighborhood Associations, suggested he’d apply for the open council seat.
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2008.