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By JANET ZINK, Times Staff WriterA last-minute request by the county for more say on the long-awaited city effort to redevelop Central Park Village jeopardizes the Tampa project.
TAMPA - The future of a redevelopment plan for a crumbling public housing project remained uncertain Wednesday as city and county attorneys butted heads on a key issue.
City Attorney David Smith said Wednesday it would be unconstitutional to give county commissioners a say over special taxing districts inside Tampa, despite a new state law that seems to allow it.
Commissioners approved a taxing district last week that's vital to the redevelopment of Central Park Village near downtown Tampa. But the board added a requirement that two commissioners be appointed to serve on the city's Community Redevelopment Agency, which oversees the districts.
"The city cannot agree to this requirement," Smith argued in an 11-page memo to Tampa City Council members, who are scheduled to vote on the matter today.
Agreeing to include commissioners could ultimately force the city to relinquish to the county all power over Tampa's redevelopment areas, he said.
"This risk is huge," Smith said in an interview. "If this were the private sector and I recommended my clients do it, I'd be guilty of malpractice."
Smith said the request violates a 2003 city-county agreement regarding the Community Redevelopment Agency, which currently consists only of City Council members.
But County Attorney Renee Lee said Smith's concerns "are not insurmountable." The city's control over redevelopment areas could be preserved, she said.
The Legislature covered the constitutionality issue when it passed the law in the spring that appears to allow county commissioners on community redevelopment agencies, she said. Regardless, it's not for Smith to say whether the law passes muster, she said.
"Something is not unconstitutional just because you say it is," Lee said. "That's what courts are for."
The Central Park community redevelopment area requires approval by the Hillsborough County Commission and the City Council, because it would funnel county property tax dollars back into a city neighborhood.
Commissioners on June 7 voted in support of the plan but attached a list of demands from Commissioner Tom Scott.
In addition to putting two county commissioners on the Community Redevelopment Agency, Scott wants a guarantee that minorities will be involved in the remaking of Central Park Village.
His demands and the city's response to them raised concerns that the two governments won't agree on the district, which could jeopardize plans by Bank of America to rebuild Central Park Village.
Bank of America officials have said they need the taxing district approved by June 30 to capture the most potential revenue for reinvestment.
If the City Council today rejects the county's proposal, which appears likely, Scott's colleagues will be in the position Wednesday of either voting against a redevelopment that's been batted around for years or backing away from Scott.
The commission's support for Scott last week prompted a flurry of phone calls and meetings at City Hall and County Center and conversation at community meetings.
Scott, a preacher, gave the invocation at a Tampa Downtown Partnership meeting on Tuesday, and prayed for togetherness.
At the same meeting, Mayor Pam Iorio gave an overview of downtown development, skimming quickly over a blue circle highlighting Central Park Village.
"I'll skip over that for now," she said.
The crowd of 500 burst into laughter.
Later in the day, Scott backed off a stipulation that the city rezone the Tampa Park Apartments adjacent to Central Park Village so the two could be redeveloped with the same density, a request that Smith said is "illegal on its face."
And criticism lingered that Scott made his demands at the last minute instead of discussing them in recent weeks with city officials.
"Eleventh-hour issues shouldn't get in the way of doing what's right," said City Council member Rose Ferlita. "It's nonsense. It's inappropriate, and it's politically motivated."
Scott defended his timing.
He said he didn't see the plan for Central Park Village until less than a week before the County Commission was scheduled to vote on the taxing district.
Representatives from the city and the Tampa Housing Authority, he said, weren't able to answer key questions about how many public housing units would be built in place of the 482-units in Central Park Village.
The plan also doesn't include detailed provisions for job creation in the neighborhood or minority-owned business participation in the redevelopment.
"I'm not talking about giving out just a few contracts to a few minorities. You've got to have African-Americans at every part of the way part of your team. Part of the planning, part of construction, part of the management," he said.
Those were elements included in a proposal from a group called Civitas, an ambitious plan for redeveloping the Central Park Village area that failed two years ago.
Similar provisions were also part of a plan put forward in August by a development group that included Bank of America.
The Tampa Housing Authority board gave that team the right to redevelop Central Park Village.
But in the past 10 months, Bank of America lost some of its development partners and the size of the project shrank significantly.
Scott points out that the current proposal for Central Park Village bears little resemblance to the one approved by the Housing Authority board last year.
At a town hall meeting Saturday to discuss the city's poor record of contracting with minority businesses on large projects, people lauded Scott for taking a stand on the issue and called for more black leaders in city and county government.
"We don't have a culture in this town of inclusion," said Clinton Paris, a Tampa lawyer who attended the town hall meeting.
The African-American community has been particularly hard hit, he said.
"If you cannot do business with government, you cannot survive in the private sector," he said. "Every viable business is involved in government work. It's stable. It's unaffected by inflation, and they pay their bills."
But Curtis Stokes, acting president of the Hillsborough chapter of the NAACP, said he's confident that the Central Park Village plan as proposed would be fair to minorities.
"Given Bank of America's track record when it comes to promoting and hiring minorities and their philanthropic contributions, I think they'd do a good job," Stokes said.
He wondered why Scott brought up minority business participation in a city project at all.
"He's fishing for negatives," Stokes said. "Why hasn't he called into question the county's minority participation? I'm sure the county pays as much money as the city does on contracts and spending. Why apply it to this?"
Only the Central Park taxing district was before the County Commission last week.
But Scott said it offered the only opportunity for him to have a say in Central Park Village because the city makes specific rezoning and redevelopment decisions.
"You have to use what you have as leverage," he said. "And that's what I did, because I couldn't get answers."
In the days before last week's commission vote, a developer alerted Scott to the new state law regarding the expanded makeup of community redevelopment agencies.
Seeing that as an opportunity for lasting leverage for the county, he added it to his list of demands.
"At the end of the day, they can say what they want," said Scott, whose commission district includes Central Park Village. "I have no regrets. I'm doing what I believe is right and fair to my constituents."
Janet Zink can be reached at jzink@sptimes.com or 813 226-3401.