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Clearwater commissioners discuss everything from skate parks to promoting the arts in a session designed to help craft a vision for the city.
By CHRISTINA HEADRICK, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 7, 2002
CLEARWATER -- City commissioners have dreams for the future that include building a monorail to Clearwater Beach and offering grants to pay for neighborhood entryway signs.
They agree that the city should stop providing services such as recreational facilities to county residents -- unless the county begins paying for its residents' impact on the city.
They are willing to talk about getting rid of the Harborview Center and putting a cap on the police department's growth.
These were just a few thoughts in a wide assortment of issues that commissioners discussed during a four-hour brainstorming session Monday afternoon. The meeting was the first in the city's latest "visioning" process, a series of discussions geared to help the new City Commission define a vision for the city's next 20 years.
The session was moderated by David G. Kelley, who works for the University of South Florida's Institute of Government. The city is paying the institute $3,500 to help craft the city's new vision. Kelley asked commissioners to be creative and open-minded as they tried to generate ideas for the future.
"You are planting trees under whose shade you will not sit," he said.
As you might expect in a visioning session, terms such as "win-win" and "partnering" were tossed around. There also was talk of "elevating," "diversifying" and "balancing diverse agendas."
In the end, commissioners had a list of 19 priorities for the city to address.
Commissioner Whitney Gray and Mayor Brian Aungst suggested boosting efforts to work with neighborhoods, such as handing out grants to help them on their grass roots projects. Commissioner Bill Jonson's ideas included focusing on the beautification of the city.
Commissioner Hoyt Hamilton said the city should create an "extreme" sports skate park, a senior center and an entertainment district with a movie theater, restaurants and night clubs to address various age groups' needs in the city. He also proposed expanding service hours for city recreation centers and libraries.
Commissioner Frank Hibbard emphasized diversifying the city's economy to be less dependent on tourism and creating a better industrial park. He suggested trying to find ways to improve local schools and even threw out the idea of creating a city-sponsored charter school.
Aungst championed the idea of trying to create a monorail to the beach.
"That's something I'd at least like to have on the drawing boards before my time here is done," he said.
Commissioners also listed addressing beach parking needs, widening Coronado Drive and attracting more affluent tourists to the beach, as well as doing more to promote the arts and to rejuvenate downtown.
There will be at least one more meeting this month at which commissioners will sort through their diffuse thoughts, flesh them out and rank them in priority.
At that point, they are expected to revise a proposed vision statement that City Manager Bill Horne drafted recently to describe their view of Clearwater's future.
Commissioners also spent an hour Monday talking about what parts of government they would like to cut. They all agreed to stop providing "free" services to nonresidents who don't pay city taxes. Other suggestions varied widely.
Hibbard mentioned demolishing Harborview Center someday and looking to cut some neighborhood recreation centers in favor of fewer, larger, better centers.
Gray suggested that the city "stop gold-plating" the Police Department's budget at the expense of the Fire Department's basic needs. Another of Gray's ideas was to cut some city advisory boards if they don't have a clear mission.
Jonson said the city needs to limit the growth of city positions, as the city's tax base is no longer growing fast enough to support a lot of new city jobs.
Before commissioners began discussing priorities and cuts, they reviewed the results of a recent survey that rated residents' desires.
Commissioners seemed to agree with residents on many issues, except that the commission did not list "traffic calming" as one of its priorities. More "traffic calming" measures, such as the creation of speed humps, was the No. 5 priority for residents in the recent survey.
Commissioners, overall, were happy with what they said was a good discussion Monday.
"This was very valuable, but now we need to follow up," Hibbard said. "We're not through yet."
Read the text of City Manager Bill Horne's vision for the city's next 20 years on the St. Petersburg Times Web site at www.sptimes.com/2002/05/07/NorthPinellas/vision.shtml.