While we were all busy making onion dip, icing down beers and filling out squares for the office pool, here are a few non-Super Bowl developments you might have missed last week:
St. Pete mayor's race less murky: Two big names lurking around the race to succeed Mayor Rick Baker said this week that they wouldn't run. Pinellas County Commissioner Ken Welch and state Rep. Rick Kriseman both announced they would not leave their safe seats to run for the highest office in St. Petersburg. The field now seems set, and the major players are real-estate broker and philanthropist Scott Wagman, City Councilman Jamie Bennett, Amscot Veep and St. Pete College trustees Chairman Deveron Gibbons and former City Council members Bill Foster and Kathleen Ford.
Same-sex benefits at University of Tampa: After a decade of debate on the issue, UT leaders now say they will offer domestic-partner benefits to same-sex partners of university employees starting April 1. "It's about time," Matt Gould, president of the UT student Gay Lesbian Transgender Straight Bisexual Alliance, told the campus newspaper, The Minaret. "I think it's great that UT is implementing [benefits], but I think it's wrong that the entire county won't." He's talking about how UT's move follows a smackdown of domestic-partner benefits at the Hillsborough County Commission. One omission in the new UT policy: non-married straight couples aren't included. Administrators said those folks are able to get married in Florida, where gay couples are not.
Redrawing redistricting: For decades, both political parties in Florida have used their legislative stranglehold on the redistricting process to attempt to keep their party in power, even wildly gerrymandering some congressional or legislative districts to make all Republican, or all Democrat, or all African-American, or all whatever. A previous effort to correct the system came up short in 2007, but now a group attempting to create an independent commission to draw those lines every 10 years has passed its first big hurdle: getting ballot language for two referenda questions (one for Congress and one for the Florida Legislature) approved by the Florida Supreme Court. The next hurdle: Fair Districts Florida (a coalition of unions and former Democratic leaders being run by former county judge Thom Rumberger) has to collect 677,000 by Feb. 2010 to get its two measures in front of voters. Its goal is to be on the 2010 ballot.
Quick hits: Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, who ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, said he won't run again in 2010. He would have been the Republican frontrunner, according to early polls … Bartow Congressman Adam Putnam will, however, run for the state Agriculture Commissioner's job (Charles Bronson is retiring in 2010) … Mayor Pam Iorio was all verklempt during a brief meeting with Bruce Springsteen in the week leading up to the Super Bowl. She gave him a book about Tampa … State Farm said it will pull out of the Florida property insurance market altogether after being denied a huge rate hike, and Gov. Charlie Crist earned conservative scorn after telling the company "Good riddance" … and former Bucs DE Simeon Rice told Sirius Radio that his Tampa Bay coach, Jon Gruden, was "a scumbag."
—Wayne Garcia
This article appears in Feb 4-10, 2009.