Poor leadership hobbles county

By A TIMES EDITORIAL
Published August 21, 2007

There is a malaise in Hillsborough County, and it comes from poor leadership. On issue after issue this year, the County Commission has seemed almost paralyzed by the challenge of managing the fourth-largest county in the fourth-largest state. Members do not bring the right skill sets to the table, the policymaking process is closed and the commission resists looking for solutions that would stretch beyond the next election or the county line.

Last week's decision by commissioners to scuttle an earlier attempt to kill local rules protecting wetlands symbolized how they wing it on major policy decisions. Four of the seven members - Brian Blair, Jim Norman, Kevin White and Ken Hagan - reversed their votes in the face of heavy criticism. But political expediency routinely is the driving force for the commission instead of any long-term vision.

Pick any major issue: transportation, budget priorities, economic development, the environment. Rather than connect the dots, and marry, for example, growth with environmental policy, the commission treats these matters piecemeal. That invariably ensures that one step forward results in two steps back. A transportation plan Hagan conceived and the board approved this month will worsen sprawl in the very suburbs already crawling with traffic, and add stress to the environment in a county struggling to generate new water supplies.

Commissioners are caught up in their own pet projects or political frustrations, and they lose sight of the big picture because no one on the board or among the senior staff can articulate a vision. Hagan, who wants Pasco residents to pay for their impact on Hillsborough roads, floated an idea last week to put a toll booth on the county line. This is the commissioner who sits on a new regional transportation cooperative. Members talk up sports as a way to fill hotel rooms but then balk at repairing the convention center, Tampa's biggest hotel draw. Commissioner Mark Sharpe has had to beg his colleagues to invest in mass transit and help diversify the economy, even as road funds dwindle and incomes suffer in service-sector jobs. The public, seeing this disconnect, must wonder: Is anyone in charge?

The board's priorities are small potatoes. Sports, toll booths, nickel-and-diming the infrastructure - these are not the strategies for communities moving forward. This lack of vision is one reason why activists succeeded in putting a county mayor on the 2008 ballot. The public sees the board lacking not only leadership, but competence. It sees the administration as having settled into the role of an enabler. The wetlands debacle didn't help and illustrated once again that commissioners have no guiding principles beyond self-survival. A county of 1.2-million residents deserves better.

[Last modified August 20, 2007, 21:23:19]