No friends of HART
A Times EditorialPublished August 20, 2005
With Hillsborough Area Regional Transit moving people in record numbers and gas nearing $3 a gallon, the county ought to be trying to strengthen the bus system instead of trying to kill it. A path to ruin hatched by Commissioners Ronda Storms and Brian Blair was averted only after two of their Republican colleagues, Mark Sharpe and Jim Norman, brought perspective and restraint to the debate over a service that residents increasingly rely on and is crucial to the local economy.
Storms wanted commissioners to approve a referendum that could have obliterated the biggest chunk of HART's funding base. Blair complained that because the buses log most of their miles in the city of Tampa but county taxes pay most of the bills, county residents should have a vote on cutting their property taxes for HART. That is a ridiculous argument. Buses run into the urban core because that it is home to the jobs, colleges, hospitals, airports, courthouses and other major facilities. Buses only make sense in densely populated areas - conditions that residents move to the suburbs to avoid.
But never mind. Storms hardly posed the idea as a catalyst for a policy debate on mass transit. And Blair was equally transparent in pandering to suburbanites by grossly inflating HART's expenses and failing to cite an operations problem. Such recklessness with a system that has 32,000 boardings every weekday is alarming, particularly when it is from two commissioners who also sit on HART's governing board.
For too long, Storms and Blair have gotten away with perpetuating the myth that the county does not need a strong city to survive. As the agency reported recently: "A main focus of HART's service is employment destinations because the majority of our riders use transit to go to and from work." While the city has less than half the population of unincorporated Hillsborough, it accounts for the largest chunk - 50 percent - of all jobs within HART's jurisdiction.
Sharpe and Norman deserve credit for recognizing how much residents, the service industry and other sectors rely on buses to keep personal lives and businesses afloat. Blair, a countywide commissioner, needs to think before selling out his 330,000 constituents in the city of Tampa. Adding county routes is fine - but they were already on the way. This ill-fated attempt at least revealed who has the credibility on the commission to talk about transit.