It's all about time.
The time Tampa Bay drivers are delayed in traffic on the way to and from work every day (46 hours a year on average).
The time it takes to design, engineer, purchase right-of-way and construct a new highway (measured in years and decades).
The time the region has spent building its transportation system wrong or inadequately (at least 40 years).
The first chairman of the new Tampa Bay Area Regional Transportation Authority (TBARTA), however, understands better another sort of clock: The time it takes to drop back in coverage and catch up with a tight end streaking toward the post (just seconds). Or the time it takes a wide receiver to run the 40-yard dash (the gold standard is 4.3 seconds).
That's because Shelton Quarles, Gov. Charlie Crist's choice for the job, isn't known for his understanding of roads and rail; a defensive star for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers until his retirement after the 2006 season, he's famous for wearing pewter and red on Sundays.
At 36, Quarles suddenly finds himself in the decidedly unsexy world of road-building, transit-dreaming and precise engineering in the United States' fourth most expensive metro area for commuting.
So what does a linebacker know about the future of regional transit?
"I definitely have a strong interest in transportation," he said in an interview with Creative Loafing. Why? Because on the mornings he drove his daughter to school across town from their Westchase neighborhood home, the 10-mile journey took one hour.
Maybe there's something comforting in the knowledge that even a hard-hitting linebacker gets stuck in traffic just like everyone else. But maybe that's not enough to qualify him to run the agency that is our latest, best hope at solving the problem.
The Vanderbilt University graduate is facing a big challenge at TBARTA. He'll have to pull together all the agencies, plans, political egos and geographical turf warriors to agree on a larger solution that will include new highways, rail systems and buses. But even though Quarles has no background in any of those areas, he does see a way his football experience can help. The solution to creating a working transportation system, he says, is analogous to leading the Bucs' defense to a Super Bowl.
"What we have to do is no different," Quarles said. "The main thing is to get everybody on the same page. For the most part, I think everybody is."
He concludes: "It will be a big effort on our part."
TBARTA was created this year and given a two-year deadline to create a plan for moving people daily from Sarasota County in the south to as far north as Citrus County. (Polk County legislators opted out of the alliance, removing an important piece of the puzzle before TBARTA was even born. Some powerful interests in that county didn't want to curtail their ability to build new highways and open new lands to development.)
Political and business leaders hope TBARTA succeeds at creating a workable mass-transit and toll-road system where the state Department of Transportation, the Expressway Authority and dozens of others have failed. The history of Tampa Bay is dotted with the wreckage of such plans and dreams (see related story, "Boulevards of Broken Dreams" on this page). TBARTA's supporters, which include the regional business group Tampa Bay Partnership, especially want to see it create a transit strategy that voters will approve and agree to fund with (in all likelihood) their tax dollars.
Given the enormity of that task, Quarles' appointment has been roundly criticized in some quarters. Bloggers said it looked like Crist was trying to kill the new transportation board. Crist, after all, vetoed a $1 million appropriation for the agency, hamstringing its first year plans. Then he appointed Quarles, not only to the 15-member board, but as its chairman. The St. Petersburg Times' called him "an odd pick" but added, "he deserves a chance to show that he is up to the job."
The Governor's Office defended the outside-the-box selection.
"Shelton Quarles brings a fresh perspective to the Tampa Bay Area Regional Transportation Authority," wrote Crist's deputy press secretary Thomas Philpot in response to CL's questions about the appointment. "Governor Crist appointed a candidate whose leadership will be independent of engineering, legal or development groups."
Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio also thinks that Quarles' status as a transportation outsider could be a big advantage, especially when it comes to selling the plan (and its cost) to the voting public.
"He's going to be someone who has real appeal with people, who has name recognition, who comes at it from a different angle," she said. "I view it in a positive way."
For his part, Quarles said he hasn't read any criticism and addressed it with another gridiron analogy.
"One of the things we say all the time in football is put it on tape," Quarles said of the practice of watching game film to judge performance after each weekend's game. "That will let you know that I am doing my job."
Quarles seems uncomfortable with the change from football star to public official. Employed as a scout for the football team since his retirement, he routes interview requests about TBARTA through the Bucs' PR office, uncertain of how to deal with the non-sports news media. In trying to gain access to him for this story, CL was assisted by a team publicist, who called to inform us that Quarles had "about five minutes" to talk about transportation by telephone.
How will the linebacker mesh with the 14 political and business leaders on the TBARTA board? Quarles the football player was not a political fixture, although he is the head of his own foundation that works with at-risk children. His only public political action seems to have been a $500 campaign contribution to Crist in 2006. For the most part, other TBARTA board members say they've only watched him play on Sundays.
"I don't know Shelton Quarles, never met him," said Shawn Harrison, a Tampa City Council member who lost a re-election bid earlier this year before Crist appointed him to TBARTA. "He brings some star power that doesn't exist on the board, and that may well turn out to be a good thing."
Harrison defended Quarles' selection. "Being a board chairman is a skill unto itself," he said, "but that doesn't mean you have to know everything about a certain subject."
The larger challenge could be convincing Citrus County residents, for instance, that their transportation taxes should go to build a train system between Tampa and St. Pete before they go to fixing their own local roads.
"We have to be a united, seven-county region with no little picket fences around any jurisdiction to make that work," said Ann Hildebrand, a board member who is also a Pasco County commissioner. "It's a challenge."
In the seven counties covered by TBARTA, there are dozens of city and county government and hundreds of elected officials, transportation planners and urban experts with whom to contend. Each county has its own road-planning agency, and the state has a regional transportation office that plans and builds highways.
The scope is dizzying. There are no shortages of ideas, only shortfalls of funding. Which of the myriad plans, studies or visions should take precedence? Who is in charge?
Until the formation of TBARTA, no one was. TBARTA will only be as good as its board members want it to be, or as good as its politicians. Hildebrand acknowledges: "We're the one group that's going to have to get it done right."
It's important because clogged and inadequate highways are more than just frustrating: They sap personal time, diminish business productivity, depress the local economy, cost jobs and take lives.
Quarles' strategy falls back on something he knows a lot more about than transportation: teamwork.
"Once you have a defined goal," he explained, "and you make sure that everybody has the same passion, I think you can make it happen."
Because, after all, there's no "I" in team.
Just like there's no "I" in transportation or light rail or transit or highway funding …
Tackling Transit
This article appears in Oct 10-16, 2007.