Part 1 of 2 By Jim Bleyer Attracting Millennials to Tampa Bay has been at or near the top of the “to do” list of Tampa Bay’s movers and shakers for years. Achieving that goal to any meaningful degree has remained elusive. The reason? A failure to accurately define …
By Jim Bleyer With Florida voters gaining the capability to vote on increasing the homestead exemption next year, Florida’s counties and cities are in full panic mode painting doomsday scenarios should the constitutional amendment pass in November 2018. Florida voters will be asked whether or not the non-schools …
By Tom Rask (Reprinted from the Tampa Bay Guardian) At today’s monthly PSTA board meeting, a flawed resolution that was “approved in form” by its top attorney was before the board for approval. The flawed resolution passed unanimously, as written. As explained below, there are also signs that efforts …
By Jim Bleyer The first step on the road to success is defining success at the outset, not during the effort or at its completion. By any professional transportation yardstick, the Tampa Bay ferry experiment is a failure. The fact that politicians, the ethically-corrupt Tampa Bay Times, and Ed Turanchik, …
By Sharon Calvert The Tampa Bay rail cartel is back, with their media accomplices attached. And this time it is for regional power and regional taxing. Our skepticism of the $1.3 million taxpayer funded Go Hillsborough campaign was right on. We speculated it would end up with another unnecessary …
By Jim Bleyer The Poynter Institute, self-anointed watchdog of journalistic ethics and the public trust, has declared Apr. 2 as International Fact-Checking Day. Billed as a “global initiative,” the effort is aimed at heightening awareness about misinformation, “especially online.” But before holding itself up as the epitome of trustworthiness …
By Sharon Calvert Regional bureaucracies an arms length away from voters and taxpayers are not more efficient, especially over time. They become less accountable and more powerful, arrogant, crony and wasteful. We posted here about Latvala’s Senate bill 1672 and its companion House bill 1243 that grows the size and …
By Jim Bleyer Improved mass transit is the top priority of the 238 businesses that comprise Innovation Place, the economic district anchored by the University of South Florida, the organization’s Executive Director Mark Sharpe said Friday. Speaking at Cafe con Tampa’s weekly community forum, Sharpe conceded that Hillsborough County …
A Latvala Power Trip To Seasons 52 in Tampa By Jim Bleyer The aura of power, if not power itself, was on full display Monday at a workshop for the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority (HART) board of directors. Senate Bill 1672, which would create an umbrella transit authority over …
Mark Aesch By Jim Bleyer The Tampa Bay Times characterization of Tampa Bay as having “one of the worst transit systems in America” is not only “silly and misleading” but 180 degress from the truth, according to nationally-recognized transportation expert Mark Aesch. If the article, published Feb. 16, underwent …
By Sharon Calvert (Reprinted from Eye on Tampa Bay) Watch these two companion bills filed in this legislative session affecting transportation in Tampa Bay. SB1672 was filed by Senator Appropriations Chair Senator Latvala and it’s identical House companion bill HB1243 was filed by Representative Dan Raulerson who is not a …
By Jim Bleyer Until recently, conventional wisdom dictated that one should never pick a fight with people that buy ink by the barrelful. That precept no longer applies, especially in Tampa Bay. Two public figures, whose incompetence and backroom wheeling and dealing have been shielded from public view under the …
By Jim Bleyer Political winners of the week: Florida voters who will not be subjected to the campaign puffery, hyperbole, and mendacity emanating from the yap of Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn. The term-limited two-t̶i̶m̶e̶r̶ termer Thursday declared himself out of the gubernatorial race because t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶’̶s̶ ̶z̶e̶r̶o̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶w̶i̶n̶ …
By Jim Bleyer In outlining her vision for Hillsborough County’s mass transit future Friday, Pat Kemp found herself in the trenches alongside activists on the opposite side of the political spectrum. The rookie county commissioner, a Democrat, shares many of the same views as self-styled conservatives who during the past …
By Jim Bleyer The Tampa Bay Times this month forfeited its right to be perceived as a fair, serious journalistic entity. The newspaper sent its designated first-string political writer to a well-publicized forum last Friday on mass transit featuring three high-profile opponents of light rail. The overflowing Cafe con Tampa …
By Jim Bleyer Timothy Leary would have riffed, “Drop in, turn off, tune out.” The three citizen activists most instrumental in defeating Greenlight Pinellas and Go Hillsborough, the most recent ill-fated local transit proposals calling for higher sales taxes, spoke Friday morning to an SRO, mostly pro-transit crowd at Cafe con …
Donald Trump L. Ron Hubbard By Jim Bleyer Donald Trump does not believe in science-but he does believe in Scientology, its tactics, truth twisting, and totalitarianism, if not its tenets. He cavorts regularly with its followers and sympathizers, utilizes the …
By Jim Bleyer The Florida Department of Transportation plan to widen Interstate-275 with an express toll lane, known as TBX, faces burgeoning opposition from social and environmental activists as well as those who believe it is poor transportation policy. The DOT’s …
By Jim Bleyer Tallahassee’s lightning-rod mayor, Andrew Gillum, calmly continued to lead his city back to normalcy Wednesday, five days after Hurricane Hermine unleashed her fury on Florida’s Big Bend. With work crews deployed around the clock, electricity was restored to 92 percent of residences as of 11 a.m. …
By Jim Bleyer When Hurricane Hermine roared through Tallahassee last week, trees, roofs, and power lines weren’t the only casualties. Bipartisanship and the truth took a lashing as well. Mayor Andrew Gillum, a rising star in the Democrat party who took charge of the recovery and restoration effort in the …
