For all that is wonderful about Tampa Bay — the beaches, the air, the storied neighborhoods — we’re glaringly deficient in one significant respect: public transit.
In other cities, revelers who over-imbibe during a raucous night downtown can take a train instead of paying 35 bucks for a cab ride, or — yikes — getting behind the wheel. Single moms who work 10 miles from home can hop on a bus that runs every 15 minutes — not once every hour or half hour. Young professionals can bike to work without worrying about some preoccupied driver plowing into them mid-text.
Most other cities, you see, have invested in trains, buses, bike paths, and pedestrian trails.
“It’s a given in all those major metropolitan areas,” Indian Rocks Beach mayor and former Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority board chair R.B. Johnson said of passenger rail. “All of those other cities are, frankly, our competition.”
The big question that we as a region have to face is whether we think decent transit is worth the investment.
Hillsborough County asked the question in 2010, proposing that the county increase its sales tax slightly to fund transit. Tea Party activists lumped the measure together with President Obama’s “socialist” agenda, and the voters answered with a resounding “no way.”
But that’s not the end of the discussion. Now Pinellas County is attempting to get a sales tax-funded transit initiative on the ballot.
Can it pass?
Should it?
The forces of opposition are already gathering to make sure the answer is, once again, no.
Pinellas voters won’t be seeing a proposal on the ballot until 2013 at the very earliest. But, just as in Hillsborough in 2010, signs are already appearing along main thoroughfares with the message “No Tax for Tracks.”
Transit officials say these signs are premature; that while rail seems like it’ll probably be part of an all-encompassing transit overhaul strategy, it’s not set in stone. Rail is not in the ballot language for a transit referendum because, frankly, there isn’t any ballot language for a transit referendum — and there probably won’t be for many months.
“We really want to have a comprehensive transit plan,” Johnson said.
Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority (PSTA), the county’s public transit agency, recently finished its Alternatives Analysis. That’s a study that looks at economic, sociological and physical factors to determine the best alternative to widening roads in a given area. Such an analysis is required for federal matching dollars.
That study identified light rail as a key component. It determined the ideal route would run from Downtown Clearwater to the Gateway area to Downtown St. Pete. If that component stays in the ballot language, it would represent just a part of a long-term overhaul of the entire transit system. This means more buses running more frequently and paths that make bicycle travel around here less perilous. Light rail has many fans, but transit officials don’t want to jump the gun.
“We’re trying to be deliberate,” said St. Petersburg City Councilman Jeff Danner, chair of the PSTA board.
They might be aiming to throw the tax question onto the ballot in a year when voters will be less hung up on what’s happening at the national level, and less likely to associate an issue like transit with party politics.
That may be one of several lessons Pinellas learned from the defeat in Hillsborough.
In 2010, many thought Hillsborough County was going to be the flagship for amped-up transit (including rail) in Tampa Bay.
“It kind of looked like we [Pinellas] would be right after them,” Danner said.
Instead, Hillsborough voters rejected the measure. Surveys attribute this to economics and, of course, the political climate in that volatile year, among other things.
“The number one issue was that it wasn’t the right time,” said Ray Chiaramonte, head of the Hillsborough County Metropolitan Planning Organization. “[Another] major issue was a lack of trust in government and public officials.”
The Hillsborough measure also coincided with the doomed stimulus-funded high-speed rail proposal, which seemed to confuse the shit out of people. You can still talk to people today who unwittingly refer to Hillsborough voters’ rejection of the transit sales tax as a rejection of high-speed rail.
Voters who were informed, Chiaramonte said, wanted “a more modest proposal” when it came to rail — a short demo line instead of miles and miles of track. They also wanted a more specific plan.
The county’s layout also appears to have been a major factor — outside Tampa’s city limits lies a mostly rural population. Voters in Tampa proper overwhelmingly approved the measure. Their distant neighbors in places like Lutz and Plant City and Wimauma didn’t.
“Asking someone in Sun City [Center] about the Tampa streetcar makes no sense,” Chiaramonte said.
Those in Pinellas who are pushing for the referendum say the situation is so different in the built-out county that a transit sales tax might actually have a better chance there.
“You don’t really have much of a rural/urban debate there,” said Chiaramonte, who believes Hillsborough’s rural residents felt they were subsidizing urban dwellers. “The dynamic is different.”
The economic makeup in Pinellas County is also substantially different from that of Hillsborough.
“The tourist industry plays a bigger role in Pinellas than it does in Hillsborough,” Danner said.
Pinellas may be totally different from Hillsborough in terms of transit needs, but it’s already seeing the same tough opposition to the transit sales tax. Opponents have already set up the website railtaxfacts.com to try to derail the county’s efforts.
They claim the county is trying to save an ailing transit system (which by some estimates is expected to run out of money by 2014) with big promises and a hefty tax levy. State Representative Jeff “Woodshed” Brandes wrote in a guest saintpetersblog.com post that “light rail in Pinellas is a 19th century answer to a 21st century concern.” Brandes, who did not return a request for comment by deadline, wrote that public transit needs to be more flexible than rail. He cited South Florida’s TriRail as proof that light rail in Florida is doomed to be financially insolvent.
Transit advocates say the opposition is all about setting up straw men solely for the sake of souring voters on the plan before it officially becomes a question.
“You’re putting the cart before the horse, when it’s not even on the ballot yet,” Danner said.
Though the Pinellas Alternatives Analysis suggests that light rail run between Clearwater, Feather Sound, and Downtown St. Pete, county commissioners don’t really have to propose that to voters, especially if over months of public hearings it becomes clear that residents really don’t want rail.
Transit officials even went so far as to say they would do away with PSTA’s current primary revenue stream — ad valorem tax dollars — if voters agreed to a 1 percent sales tax increase. House Bill 865 would have done just that, but Governor Rick Scott vetoed it earlier this month. To Tea Partiers, this was a victory of sorts, but transit advocates say the governor’s veto was political at heart.
The tax swap “was to limit the possibility of double taxation,” Johnson said. Plus, the sales tax is spread over more people.
“A conservative governor would realize that this would end multiple taxation,” he said. “Maybe this was a Machiavellian way to dampen enthusiasm for the referendum. I feel like what he’s saying is, ‘How dare they vote to tax themselves to improve their transit options?’ It seems awfully autocratic.”
Even without H.B. 865, PSTA could still lower its ad valorem levy to zero if it wanted to.
“We will adjust,” said Pinellas County Commissioner Ken Welch. “We didn’t need legislation from Tallahassee to do it.”
The bill would have permanently kept that number at zero despite the intentions of future boards.
Questioning the wisdom of light rail in Pinellas is not an activity solely limited to Tea Partiers. Peter Schorsch, proprietor of saintpetersblog.com, is a progressive and a St. Petersburg native. He said the pro-rail/transit campaign on which officials in Pinellas are about to embark will be a massive “time-waster”; that planners will devote all their time on this “while tea partiers sit on the sidelines and poke holes in it for literally the next two years.”
One of the biggest holes has to do with dollars and cents.
“I just don’t see the light rail thing working without a huge government subsidy.” he said.
“Transit’s never going to make money, depending on what you count,” Chiaramonte said. “They usually analyze it from a ridership perspective.”
He said the benefit comes from attracting more college-educated people to the region as well as the redevelopment that advocates think would occur along transit routes.
Schorsch says a better-educated population would certainly help an area thrive, but that means nothing if transit routes are laid out in the wrong direction. Schorsch said most people go from St. Pete to Tampa or from Clearwater to Tampa — not from St. Pete to Clearwater. He wonders who, if anyone, would need to catch a north-south train regularly.
“No one I know would do that,” he said. “It goes counter to everything we all know about daily life in Pinellas County.”
Transit advocates stress that rail might not ever be in the picture — that PSTA’s record ridership and dwindling coffers alone speak to the agency’s need to retool the way it gets funded.
“This is not simply about a particular mode of transit,” Commissioner Welch wrote in a recent editorial. “But it’s about job creation, smart growth management, regional connectivity, and our ability to compete with other counties and regions for jobs, tourism, and strategically planned development.”
This article appears in Apr 26 – May 2, 2012.
