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Temple Terrace City Council

In the nonpartisan race, the top three vote-getters of four will help oversee the city's redevelopment projects.

By BILL VARIAN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published October 31, 2002

The city of Temple Terrace is undergoing a major redevelopment effort with the aim of creating a downtown where none exists.

Each of the four candidates seeking three seats on the City Council is hoping to play a role in bringing it to fruition in what they consider the best interest of the city's 22,000 residents.

The race features two incumbents: truck repair business owner Joe Affronti Sr. and Jerry M. King, who is retired from the U.S. Army and an environmental consulting business. They face Ken Halloway, a citizen activist and accountant who also is retired from the Army, and Linda H. Shattles, who works for a title insurance company.

In Temple Terrace, candidates for the council all run in the same nonpartisan race. The top three vote-getters will secure four-year terms as commissioners making $1 a year.

Affronti, 70, who owns All American Sleeper, a truck repair business, said he wants to help carry out the redevelopment plan birthed in his first term.

It calls for rebuilding much of the area around the intersection of 56th Street and Busch Boulevard, particularly the southeast corner, as an area of mixed development. A new City Hall and civic center would also be built there.

"Our goal is to level it and start from scratch in that area," Affronti said. "There's a lot of things we've started, and I just want to finish them."

Like Affronti, King, 65, who formerly had a company specializing in lead paint removal and other environmental consulting, said his work isn't done.

"This city is at a point of transition," King said. "We're either going to become something or we're going to stay the same."

Clearly, he wants the city to become something. At the same time, he said he wants to make sure neighborhood interests aren't left behind.

Halloway said he believes his accounting background will allow him to better analyze the decisions the council makes. He said he has championed the redevelopment plan now under way. Now, he wants to help it take shape.

"We finally got their attention," Halloway said. "Now I want to get in on the action."

He has other concerns: that garbage pickup isn't scaled back and that a better financial analysis is done of the city's annexations.

Shattles, an executive with Fidelity National Title Insurance Co., is a past president of the Temple Terrace Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club. She was the Temple Terrace Citizen of the Year in 2001.

She, too, wants to make sure the redevelopment plan is carried out properly.

"It's time for me to come out of the trenches, take a shovel and start filling in the holes," Shattles said.