During the course of the just concluded Tampa election campaign, one of the dominant themes by many of those running for mayor and city council was that Tampa had become a bad place to do business, with regulations running amok.
Vanquished mayoral candidate Rose Ferlita frequently said that she was asked all the time where she stood on the issue of businesses vs. neighborhoods. She said that was a false choice, and that you could be for both. But elected officials in Tampa today had to fall on one side or the other, as businesses were on the opposite side of where neighborhood activists stood on the issue that came before the outgoing City Council Tuesday morning. As Council Chairman Thomas Scott said about an earlier item that the Council discussed, "All I heard on the campaign trail was that small businesses were dying."
Whether that was all because of the city's codes and regulations are too rigorous might still be subject to debate, but it won't be an excuse going forward, as the the Council voted 4-3 to support a proposal that would eliminate the need for a special waiver from the council for certain businesses, such as gas stations, pharmacies and most restaurants, to sell liquor within a thousand feet of schools, churches and parks. Applications would be considered instead by the city's zoning administrator. The Council would still continue to review applications for more "alcohol intensive" businesses like bars, nightclubs, and some restaurants.
The fact that the Council regularly grants such waivers (90% of the time, according to Mark Bentley, who represents the Florida Petroleum Markets and Convenience Store Association) wasn't enough to dissuade the opponents of the law – Yolie Capin, Mary Mulhern and Charlie Miranda.
(A high profile example of this recently was last December, when the Council voted 4-3 to approve a tasting room for the popular Cigar City Brewing establishment in the Carver City/Lincoln Gardens neighborhood. Over the past 3 years, the brewery's requests to serve beer in at their facility was always approved by Council, despite the fact that it is located within 1,000 feet of homes in the neighborhood).
Catherine Coyle from the city's legal staff called this a special use permit – not wet zoning, which she says is not part of the city's nomenclature and hasn't been for years. Coyle also said that the long existing law – subject to criticism – was amongst the most restrictive, if not the most restrictive of its type -in all of Florida.
This article appears in Mar 24-30, 2011.
