Now that Tampa City Council member Linda Saul-Sena has kissed and made up with Big Swedish over the design of its Ybor City mega-furniture store, it's worth looking at what the little dust-up was really about — and what it means for our future.
To recap:
Last summer, Saul-Sena sent a letter to IKEA's real estate chieftain, Michael Maier, after she ended up on the losing end of a 6-1 vote that approved the site plan for IKEA's new building on the outskirts of Ybor City. The 353,000-square-foot box is set to open on Adamo Drive in summer 2009, no doubt accompanied by great fanfare and camped-out-in-line shoppers.
"The design for Tampa is unacceptably boring and energy-inefficient," Saul-Sena wrote in an otherwise polite and upbeat letter. "I am confident you can do better!" Her letter went unanswered, so a few weeks later, she sent it again.
On Dec. 12, IKEA responded — with three pages of platitudes and environmental accomplishments, ending with "Thank you for your time and consideration. IKEA is thrilled with the reception afforded us in the Tampa Bay area and by the City of Tampa."
Saul-Sena really didn't like that answer, so she ratcheted her efforts up a notch. Or two. Or maybe 10. She wrote to IKEA's president of North American operations, comparing the Ybor City store design to a Wal-Mart and threatening to "take this case to the public via YouTube videos of your site and embarrass you if you are unwilling to come up with a better plan."
The response was immediate — not from IKEA, however, but from the guardians of the local status quo, the Tampa Tribune's editorial board. It wrote, "Tampa City Councilwoman Linda Saul-Sena is stomping her feet, threatening to embarrass the company that plans to build a store on Adamo Drive near Ybor City" and added she was "embarrassing herself."
A top city development official likewise sent a love letter to IKEA distancing the city from Saul-Sena. Critics of her tactic likewise weighed in on my blog, with one person commenting, "What an idiot! Why don't you just hold your breath until they do what you want, Saul-Sena!" and another writing, "She's starting to become the Ronda Storms of the City Council."
By the end of last week, Saul-Sena had caved and sent a letter of abject apology to the IKEA president.
There's a lesson here (beyond the dubious political wisdom of threatening a YouTube attack): It's time for Tampa government to start raising the bar on design and green-building requirements and aesthetics. The city can start right in its own shop. A new parks and recreation center being built on Columbus Drive isn't green; neither is the new Tampa Museum of Art.
I asked Saul-Sena (who, in full disclosure, was once a client of my former political consulting firm) why neither of those buildings is green, and she had a simple answer: "It's because we didn't ask." And when I inquired of an IKEA spokesman as to why its Ybor City store isn't more green and more innovative, he said, "The burden shouldn't be on IKEA to proactively guess what those higher standards should be. If [City Council members] want the rules to be different from what we went through, then they need to change the rules."
You see, we get to make the rules that everyone has to play by. And in Tampa Bay (and most of Florida, quote honestly), aesthetics and the environment get short shrift.
A commenter named Bill Peak said this on my blog: "Our area bar is set so very, very low that it is resting on the ground. In poll after poll, Tampa is tied with Detroit, yet the local press falls over themselves trying to find fault with the polls, to disprove them. The local press is part of the problem!
"The finest cities in America (Austin, San Diego, Boston, etc.) are livable and have a great quality of life because their residents have made them that way. The smart, sophisticated inhabitants of these cities tell any corporation that wants to be part of their community which hoops to jump through, and when. Either the corporations jump, or they can 'get lost.' THAT is how great cities and communities are created; not by sitting back and accepting whatever the stockholder-driven corporation is willing to offer. It's a lot of work, and it takes smart, sophisticated inhabitants electing smart, sophisticated politicians to steer the community."
I couldn't have said it better myself.
This article appears in Jan 30 – Feb 5, 2008.