One month ago, the dream of Tampa Bay as transit utopia took a licking, but it's not going anywhere. In the minds of transit true believers, Tampa Bay residents do want better options. The question is how to implement them.
The answer, increasingly, is: Think regional. That sentiment surfaced recently in meetings of officials on both sides of the bay, along with the more pragmatic response to Nov. 2: It's a tough time to raise taxes.
At a meeting of the Tampa Bay Area Regional Transportation Authority (TBARTA) board earlier this month, consultant Ben Kelly, citing a post-election poll, told board members what they already knew: Hillsborough voters rejected the penny tax transit primarily because of the economy.
"It's not just Hillsborough County, but coast to coast, it's [an] extraordinarily challenging climate to grow support for a tax measure," Kelly said. "Whether it was for schools, parks and rec, water treatment, I mean you name it. It was extraordinarily tough."
The penny-per-dollar sales tax would have funded a multi-billion-dollar transit overhaul in Hillsborough County. With the help of state and federal monies, officials hoped, the decades-long project would likely have included road improvements, amped-up bus service and light rail.
When Hillsborough County Commissioners were fine-tuning the wording for that ballot measure earlier this year, a venomous anti-government and anti-tax sentiment had already overtaken the public discourse.
Plus, while TBARTA's transit master plan and the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority's alternatives analysis loosely mapped out the transit overhaul, critics said they wanted to see a more detailed plan of exactly where the penny tax money — which would have made Hillsborough's sales tax the highest in the state — was going. They wanted specifics that just weren't delivered, says TBARTA chair Ronnie Duncan.
"It's hard for me to sell you on something when I can't [say what exactly it is]: here's a bag, and I want to sell you this bag, and I want you to give me 50 bucks for it, but I can't quite tell you what's in the bag," Duncan said at a recent transit forum. "[If] I tell you that it's got a tube of toothpaste in there and you get home, and you open the bag up, and you've already given me 50 bucks and, oh, by the way, it's not toothpaste. It's deodorant."
At the TBARTA meeting, Kelly told the board to take heart.
"I would describe this electorate, despite the result on November 2nd, as still pro-transit, but frugal on tax spending for it," he said.
Buoyed by metro areas like Phoenix, which saw transit referenda fail before one finally passed, business and transit leaders want to press on.
In the wake of the November 2 vote, the Pinellas County transportation task force recently elected to continue with its own transit initiative while supporting a regional approach to Tampa Bay's transit woes.
"The citizens and community leaders who are part of my transportation task force in Pinellas County strongly supported and advocated for looking at a regional approach to solving the transportation problems," said Pinellas County Commissioner Karen Seel, also a TBARTA board member. "Moreover, they were supportive of doing interlocal agreements with various counties in the TBARTA membership, to see if we could move together as a region towards passing some kind of funding source, and then by interlocal agreement, agree to what projects would be accomplished."
While the TBARTA transit master plan comprises seven counties, Seel says the approach would probably initially include three of them — Pinellas, Pasco and Hillsborough.
Some TBARTA officials seem to like the idea.
"We already have Tampa Bay Water," said Pasco County Commissioner and TBARTA board member Ann Hildebrand. "And that is a perfect example of regionalism. That is [a] six-member government; the three-county area and the three major cities…If we could come together as a region for water, we sure as heck could come together as a region for transportation."
Hildebrand says public transportation systems should transcend county lines, and that a regional approach would probably result in a tri-county ballot initiative — but only when the mood of the electorate improves.
"Obviously, Hillsborough's just failed," she said. "The timing is not right in the election of 2010, but you have to plan for tomorrow beginning today."
But some officials are reluctant to start taking on transit so soon after the Hillsborough initiative got trounced in the polls by a 58-42 margin.
Hillsborough County Commissioner and HART board member Mark Sharpe, a Republican, campaigned heavily for the Hillsborough ballot initiative — risking his own reelection in doing so. He said at a recent HART board meeting that it'd be wise to let the dust settle before heading back to the drawing board.
"My sense is that before we go charging forward as if we are just tone deaf to what occurred that we would need to at least have a public conversation to begin to discuss what and why we are doing the things that you're recommending that we do," Sharpe said. "I would prefer far more time."
As for the regional approach, Sharpe said it might be tricky to convince a majority of voters to tax themselves for light rail and other transit projects, given that those living in outlying areas probably wouldn't see the use in it.
"The small counties will say 'Why do I want to build a rail system that I'm never going to see?'" he said. "Voters in the eastern part of our own county said 'Wait a minute' because the anti-rail folks were very effective at making this 'a tax for rail in Tampa.' And they are the ones that really drilled down 'It's us versus them,' which I've never bought into."
While most supporters of the overhaul say it's all about timing, anti-rail activists say transit officials are insensitive to the will of the voters.
At the same TBARTA meeting where the poll results were discussed, No Tax for Tracks member Karen Jaroch said any way you spin it, the voters don't want this plan.
"They saw the plan, and they rejected the plan," Jaroch said. "Don't be fooled by polls with leading questions that leave ample room for spin doctors. Don't be tone deaf to the mood of the voters in this county, of the state, and, well, of the nation, who sent a message at every level of government that we want to stop the wasteful government spending on a plan that we will not use and we do not want."
In any case, the transit plan outlined in the alternatives analysis before the election may be obsolete.
Take rail. Ahead of the vote, HART had two main options for corridors in which to lay down passenger rail for its USF-to-Downtown Tampa line. One was the strip of land on which CSX's freight lines run; the other was along the I-275 corridor. CSX had reportedly said that if HART wanted to buy its track for the route, it would have to purchase 97 miles of track throughout the region — except a strip in Ybor that would have been ideal for the route — for some $679 million.
HART instead favored the I-275 option, saying that when the purchase of all that track was factored in, the highway option was cheaper. Now, TBARTA officials are touting CSX as a potentially key partner. The Tampa Tribune reported that TBARTA and CSX have been talking for at least six months about a regional rail partnership.
"One of the key factors that's in this region — it's not just passenger rail, it's also freight rail, and understanding what their needs are and the connectivity of our ports, both in Manatee and Tampa," TBARTA Executive Director Bob Clifford said. "One of the things that CSX asked us was, 'We're looking for partners. We want to understand what's happening in the regional context.'"
In a guest column published in the St. Petersburg Times, Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority head R.B. Johnson wrote that there will likely be a transit initiative on the ballot in the fall of 2012. Johnson, who is also the mayor of Indian Rocks Beach, doesn't mention CSX or a three-county referendum. But he writes it would be ideal if Hillsborough passed a simultaneous transit tax with Pinellas. And he seems to agree with many local leaders that revamping Tampa Bay transit will help prevent looming economic and cultural stagnation in the region.
The question is, will voters ever be willing to pay for it?
The next TBARTA Board meeting takes place 9:30 a.m. Fri., Dec. 10, at the FDOT building, 11201 McKinley Drive, Tampa. Kate Bradshaw is senior reporter/producer in the news department at 88.5/WMNF-FM.
This article appears in Dec 2-8, 2010.