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So she's for fair elections; we'll soon know what else she stands for
© St. Petersburg Times Pam Iorio enjoys an above-the-fray, white-hat reputation as Hillsborough County's supervisor of elections. If she runs for mayor of Tampa, she might have to cash in some of it. It's been a great 10-year job for her. There's nothing controversial about the idea of smooth elections -- everybody is in favor of them. Smooth is what Iorio has delivered. She has been universally praised for it, and deservedly so. She has traveled the county in the name of voter education. Her life's cause above all other has been "good government," and who can be against that either? But now . . . Now Iorio, 43, appears to be on the verge of entering a mayor's race that a few months ago she said she would skip. She will announce her intentions Monday. In the instant that she declares, she will leave the greener grass on the other side of the fence and join the vote-grubbing politicians over on this side. She'll have to ask people for money. She'll have to take stands and say what she would do as mayor. She'll have to compete with the men -- men, all of them -- who have been in the running for months or even years. It is possible, sure, that Bob Buckhorn, Frank Sanchez and Charlie Miranda would greet Iorio's entry with surrender. "Whoa, she's too popular for us," they might get together and declare. "We're all quittin'." Or maybe they would try to ignore her. But I don't think so. I think they would have to run hard against her. For the first time in more than a decade, since she served on the Hillsborough County Commission, Pam Iorio would be back in the rough-and-tumble. Unfortunately for Buckhorn, Sanchez and Miranda, she did pretty well the first time around. They would be hard-pressed to find anything in her earlier incarnation to use as fodder against her. Because history in Florida is reinvented every 15 minutes, a lot of people don't know that Iorio was elected to the Hillsborough County Commission at the age of 26 in 1985, served two terms and even pulled a stint as the commission's youngest chairman ever. Iorio was one of the first commissioners elected under a new, post-scandal County Charter. She served with commissioners such as Phyllis Busansky, Ed Turanchik and Sylvia Kimbell, who, regardless of ideology, were a lot more forward-thinking than most of their more recent successors. Was Iorio a wild-eyed liberal? No. She did support a human-rights ordinance that prohibited discrimination against gays and lesbians. She did help create Hillsborough's then-visionary program for indigent health care. But she also was a giant pain in the neck to county bureaucrats. She cast a dissenting vote against the county's purchase of its big office tower downtown. She once took the county budget home with her on maternity leave and returned with millions of dollars she had "found" in the document -- and she was right. It was Iorio as much as anybody who forced the resignation of a county administrator, Larry Brown. "I don't think anybody would satisfy her," then-and-present Commissioner Jan Platt sniffed of Iorio, one of the rare words of criticism over the years. Certainly, the environmentalist Platt also was displeased by Iorio's votes on development, which were hardly doctrinaire in either direction. Turanchik and Platt were certified tree huggers. Not so Iorio. The Sierra Club in 1992 ranked her an unimpressive fifth of the seven commissioners, ahead only of the good-for-business Joe Chillura and the good-for-my-buddies Jim Selvey. If this were a County Commission race among suburban Republicans, I suppose somebody could demagogue over gay rights, or accuse her of being a big tax-and-spender. But how is anybody going to outflank her inside the city? The only way is for her to take her front-runner status too much for granted, and for one of the boys to win the old-fashioned way: with organization and sweat. Otherwise she waltzes in on star power.
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