Wouldn't it be fun to slash Hillsborough County commissioners" pay to $20,000 a year and see who runs in the next election? Not as many hard-up job seekers as this year, we"d guess.Each winner of the five commission races on the Nov. 5 ballot gets a cool $82,562 for their part-time toil in 2003. That’s right, they get to keep their other job — if they have one. We’re not sure that applies to many of this year’s candidates.
County commissioners are among the privileged elected officials in Florida who don’t have to vote for their own raises. Legislative staffers take that heat. Every year, the staffers whip out their spreadsheets in Tallahassee and adjust county salaries — typically upward for growing places like Hillsborough — based on population.
In a sense, Hillsborough commissioners do vote themselves a raise, about every other week. With each new subdivision, commission pay climbs ever skyward.
Remember that, neighborhood leaders, the next time commissioners rubberstamp another 1,000-house plat map for their favorite zoning lawyer, over your objections.
We bring all this up only because we haven’t seen this many ne’r-do-wells pretending to be politicians since Tricky Dick Nixon masks were in for Halloween.
Surveying the remaining 2002 general election contenders, we’re not going to lie to you. There isn’t anybody left after the District 2 primary who would be worth a damn as county commissioner. North Hillsborough voters, you’re on your own.
District 1: Like Mother, Like Daughter?Thirty years ago, Hillsborough voters elected Betty Castor to the county commission to rescue them from a development steamroller. Will Kathy Castor follow her mother’s splendid example or help hand the county back to the construction industry?
The younger Castor, a Democratic land-use lawyer, has collected more than $130,000 for her campaign. You don’t raise that kind of cash in Tampa by holding bake sales with the Sierra Club.
But Castor says she keeps her distance from the builders" lobby. We"ll take her word on that, for now. That’s because she’s up against the Hamlet of Hillsborough, Chris Hart III.
The 8-year commissioner, who has to give up his countywide seat due to term limits, finally deigned to compete in a mere single-member district covering Town N Country, shoreline south Hillsborough and his own south Tampa back yard. Continuing to cash those checks for 82K looked pretty good after it dawned on Hart there was zero chance he could replace Tampa’s Mayor Dick Greco or Congressman Jim Davis.
So what does Castor propose? Let’s require term-limited commissioners to sit out an election cycle before they run for another seat, as Jan Platt did in the 1990s but Hart and Jim Norman aren’t doing this year.
For good measure, let’s also make it easier for the public to find out who is busting the commission’s travel budget, another dig at the frequently flying Hart.
Best of all, Castor wants to create a county ethics office to enforce greater disclosure of contacts between commissioners and those influencing county policy. Sam Rashid and Dick Mandt, the reputed Republican powers behind Hart, must have gulped when they heard that. (Mandt sits on the board of Weekly Planet‘s corporate parent.)
We can see we’re going to like this Castor.District 3: Left is RightWhen Jeb Bush came to Tampa this year to speak to a group of black Republicans, it was Democrat Thomas Scott who gave the invocation.
Jacqui Knight, his Republican opponent, was in the audience. Her presence, however, wasn’t acknowledged along with other Republican candidates.
Knight and Scott offer voters an interesting contrast.
District 3 covers the largely low-income, black inner city neighborhoods of Seminole Heights, College Hill and part of an area of transients near the University of South Florida campus known as Suitcase City. The district is traditionally Democratic, but voting along party lines in this election would be a mistake. In spite of Knight’s party affiliation, she sounds more like a Democrat than Scott.
Like Scott, she wants to see more money spent on the county’s indigent health care program. Like Scott, she is supportive of the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce’s plan to raise money for transportation issues, even if it means raising taxes.
But, unlike Scott, Knight believes there’s more to improving the area than gentrification.
Scott is working to bring businesses into College Hill, where a HOPE VI grant paid for demolition of public housing projects that will be replaced with mixed-income housing. Another housing project in District 3, Riverview Terrace, is also slated for demolition.
While the idea is to get rid of blighted housing projects, HOPE VI also gets rid of economically disadvantaged people. Property values go up and the poor people are displaced in favor of middle class homebuyers who can afford higher prices.
‘that’s just what happens," said Scott. Which is why District 3 residents need a commissioner who is less beholden to developers.
Scott was one of two commissioners who would have allowed the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to build a large office and three practice fields in the middle of a wildlife preserve. Other commissioners were concerned with sprawl, traffic and the environment, but not Scott.
Scott voted in favor of impact-fee free zones and enterprise zones that are supposed to encourage developers to build in blighted areas. Ybor City is an enterprise zone that has chased out low-income people who used to live there.
The incumbent seems to represent plots of land better than the people who live on them. Scott touts his creation of Clean Sweep, which pretties up abandoned lots and sends police into high crime areas to arrest mostly low-level criminals. Where are the programs that actually improve lives instead of just property values?
Perhaps it’s time to give a Republican like Knight a chance.District 5: Odds against the NoviceSusan Valdes is Phyllis Busansky’s revenge.
Two years ago, Jim Norman made the mistake of resisting a sales tax hike for the county’s health plan for the poor. Mess with the plan and expect to hear from Busansky, who started the plan while she was a Hillsborough commissioner.
Norman has heard the message from Busansky, whose family has given to the Valdes campaign. Norman, after dispatching Rashid drone Stacey Lyn Easterling in a brutal primary, has had to regroup to put away Valdes for a countywide commission seat. But he can handle it.
Valdes manages a St. Joseph’s Hospital clinic subsidized by the sales tax and is running almost entirely on a platform of open-ended funding for indigent health care. That’s not real smart, given the program’s record of sloppy and indifferent mismanagement.
But a Democratic spendthrift learning about water and other county issues as she campaigns is preferable to a Republican with Norman’s baggage. The scandal-tainted, Vegas-loving Ralph Hughes disciple should"ve obeyed the spirit of term limits in the county charter and not slithered over into another commission seat.
We"ll take Valdes, lost cause and all. (That’s not a bet, Jim, by the way.)
Norman complains that the Planet never says anything nice about him. Well, let’s see. He likes kids who play football. That’s the best we can do.District 7: County Commission SmackdownRepublican Brian Blair was recently inducted into a pro wrestling hall of fame. Imagine the possibilities if he is elected:
Say, Commissioner Tom Scott calls him a name. Blair could leap from his seat, knock over the dais and cause Chris Hart to flee in search of another political office.
Jim Norman would immediately call his bookie to put down a wager on Blair, who could tear off his breakaway pants to reveal a wrestling Speedo that Ronda Storms would barely glimpse before shielding her eyes and screaming, "I’m blind!"
Blair’s tag-team partner, Hulk Hogan, might then strut in and pass out Slim Jims. Jan Platt would roll her eyes and check with county attorneys to see if any of the combatants might be prosecuted.
See, things could always get worse at Hillsborough commission meetings.
Call us killjoys, but somehow we don’t think adding a former wrestler and gym owner to the already combustible mix at the County Center would be wise. If they picked county commissioners based on who runs the best health club, Joe Redner would be chairman by now.
Blair’s actual tag-team partner is impact-fee hater Ralph Hughes, who used to fight in the ring for real — as a boxer. So Blair is all for fee-free zones for developers, even though they haven’t produced much more than a new way to stick it to taxpayers. But won’t that balance out when Blair refuses to raise our taxes to pay for even the most basic services?
The only entertainment that incumbent Pat Frank has offered lately was her petty attempt to cut funding for the chamber of commerce after the group endorsed her opponent in the primaries.
Other than that, the Democrat has more than 20 years of experience in state and county politics, and no interest in making taxpayers subsidize developers. Frank also has no interest in protecting people with free will and constitutional rights from the evils of public access on the idiot box.
She’s responsible and trustworthy, and we suspect she is going to deprive the county of this opportunity to turn commission meetings into episodes of WWF Smackdown. Damn her!Contact News Editor Francis X. Gilpin at 813-248-8888, ext. 130, or frangilpin@weeklyplanet.com and Staff Writer Rochelle Renford at 813-248-8888, ext. 163, or e-mail her at rochelle.renford@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2002.