As City Council gets ready for another vacation, leaving work on the budget and Tampa's down turning economy on the table, angry citizens in Drew Park met to discuss eliminating the city’s hastily and completely backward proposed land-use changes. With citizens sick and tired of a city working against them at every turn, the voices had one common thread: the city needs to get out of our way, handle the basics of government (which they can’t get right) and leave the rest up to us.
For those of you unfamiliar with the drew park economic development plan here is a quick rundown, drew park the area west of Raymond James stadium, north of Columbus Ave, south of Hillsborough Ave. and east of the airport, is a CRA (community redevelopment area) and it has a TIF (tax increment financing district), which means that the area gets to keep all of it’s tax revenue over a base year to spend solely in the area, but the money can’t be used for traditional city services. Every time the city creates one of these areas they then go out and hire a consultant costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to tell them how to spend the money. (You could figure this out by walking the neighborhood and asking a few people, but who needs the exercise?)
The city then adopts the plans that often include land-use changes. In the case of drew park, a mostly industrial area, the city consultants decided that jamming residents into the neighborhood and forcing business out was a great way to start. Then in traditional city fashion, instead of carefully studying the plan, the city quickly adopted it because they wanted the plan adopted before councilwoman Alvarez retired from council. So basically they shoved through with no thought a plan affecting thousands of businesses, and turning a neighborhood on its head for over a year because they wanted a nice going away present. What everyone quickly discovered is that businesses could not borrow money because lenders were afraid of losing money if the property lost its zoning, business could not expand and the area quickly ground to a halt. Then the city suspended the land use change part of the plan and discussed it for over a year.
Now, finally having enough, the people have spoken and voted to tell council to stick the plan where it deserves to go, in the trash!Just a few weeks later when the business of Drew Park thought their voices had been heard; city council showed just how out of touch they really are. To add insult to injury the city council so eager to get finished with its meeting because the hour was late — 11:00 in the morning. They decided they just did not have the time to deal with the suffering of hundreds of businesses. Now remember this is the elected body that pushed through this land use change as a present to one of their fellow council members as a retirement present [needs link to newspaper story] in just one week, and that has spent more than a year trying to undo the damage, the whole time with not a peep from Mayor Pam Iorio. Oh that's right she is out of town riding the rails in other cities, after all what is of real concern to these businesses that can’t expand or grow is mass transit. But don’t worry, Drew Park, they will take the matter up at their next meeting in 30 days, WOOPS my mistake, it will have to wait 60 days, council is going on vacation. Apparently the world stops this month: people don’t have to worry about their mortgage payments, or putting food on the table, or paying their exorbitant city property taxes. And don’t count on 60 days, either; from what I hear, council's schedule is so packed already with unfinished and new business that it is not going to have time to discuss it then either, so tack on another 30 days to that at least. So only another quarter of a year until council discusses how it stuck it real good to this neighborhood. I won’t hold my breath waiting for the outcome.
Here is an idea; council should cancel its vacation, and start meeting every day until all city business is finished. That way we can get our local economy moving again. Now for full disclosure, I was one of only a handful of people to originally object to the plan when it was being considered. I informed city council that the land changes would make lending impossible and my companies could not lend money under the conditions they were imposing. I have repeatedly been at council asking that the changes be eliminated. While I appreciate that some members want to carefully deliberate any changes one has to ask where the thought was when this plan was passed.
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2008.