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This city outpost chafes at isolation

By MARLENE SOKOL
Published July 29, 2005

TAMPA PALMS - So I'm sitting in my nice house in Tampa Palms when one day a big old sofa shows up in the street.

There it is, junky old sofa, blocking the storm drain in rainy season, so I have to ruin my best shoes walking to the mailbox.

I call City Hall. You know, in downtown Tampa.

And they say, "Tough luck." Or "It's not our problem." Or "Go call your homeowner association. Heh heh. Your homeowner association."

And I'm starting to wonder why, oh why, I pay taxes anyway.

But I fail to write down the heckler's name. And months later, I have no evidence of the brush-off.

Sound plausible? To hear some New Tampa residents tell it, this type of thing (hypothetical, as I live in Carrollwood) happens all the time.

New Tampa is an outpost, a no-man's land, a Bermuda Triangle of city services.

That's why the now-famous PowerPoint ticked so many people off.

The idea - to clean up Tampa's litter-strewn streets - was a good one. Mayor Pam Iorio got on television and showed it off like a cuddly new puppy.

But check out the execution: four city sections, clearly described with through-streets and residential feeders.

Then, as an afterthought, this phrase about New Tampa: "Services will be provided upon request."

There they had it. The smoking gun. New Tampa doesn't really matter.

"This is one more piece of evidence that New Tampa is an also-ran," said Maggie Wilson, a Tampa Palms taxing district consultant. "Very seldom do we ever get documentation of this, in something that had the city seal, and was presented by the mayor."

As New Tampa continues to grow, and grow, and grow, such slights wear thin on people who, let's face it, pay a bucketload of taxes.

Nobody faults Iorio for asking 70 individuals from various departments to make the city look better. Overgrown lots? Trash lying around? Nobody wants it.

Nor does anybody think New Tampa is some festering stinkpot of a place. You can eat off the residential streets of Tampa Palms, where the uproar has occurred.

Still, it's the mind-set.

Tampa Palms homeowners have example after example of things that have gone wrong that the city should have fixed - a gaping hole in a busy road, a broken water pipe, that darned sofa. Too often, they say, people in city offices give them the runaround, or assume that their street is private, or that their homeowner association or taxing district will fix the problem. Sometimes they tell the callers, vaguely, to call the county.

City workers should know better, says William Shimer, a taxing district supervisor who flagged the PowerPoint gaffe.

"New Tampa isn't a new entry in the phone book," Shimer said. "It's probably been around longer than the length of service for most city employees."

So, smoking PowerPoint in hand, Shimer's board and the homeowner association penned an angry letter to Iorio, complaining about the Clean City presentation.

Was manager Jim Pinkney surprised?

"I kind of was, because all it took was, pick up the telephone," he said.

Since then, Pinkney has been out to New Tampa multiple times to meet with community leaders and assess the area's cleanup needs.

No, you won't find mounds of trash on Shimer's tidy cul-de-sac.

But you will find overgrown lots along Bruce B. Downs near Interstate 75. Illegal "snipe" signs sprout like weeds. And, while Tampa Palms has its own grounds crews for the residential-area medians, there is no comparable mowing between the sidewalks and the commercial roads. There is room for improvement if you look hard enough.

It's too soon to say who will do all this work. Pinkney suggests the county and the shopping centers shoulder some of the burden. Wilson has another idea: Get high school kids, who need service hours, to pitch in as well.

"We're trying to create a model city, a clean city," Pinkney said, adding, "I'm trying to make folks feel like the entire city is one city."

Clean City rests on three stated principles: enforcement, maintenance and education. "Education comes in many different forms," Pinkney said.

He just got a dose of it himself.

[Last modified July 28, 2005, 08:19:13]