Column

Politics, parks and how to use $40M

By SUE CARLTON
Published November 7, 2007

Even by the standards of the Hillsborough County Commission - a board that can stir up drama like an episode of Desperate Housewives - this could be one intriguing week, politics-wise.

The commission is scheduled to support (or alternately backstab) each other over their assignments to various boards and leadership positions. And they're expected to noodle over what to do with that forty million bucks Commissioner Jim Norman so hoped would build his dream sports complex-o-rama.

First, on those big bucks.

You say "Championship Park," the rest of the world says "colossal boondoggle."

Norman's dream was so soundly trounced by the outraged, budget-battered citizenry that not a single fellow commissioner risked voting with him last month.

And so Championship Park died a lonely death before the first patch of artificial turf hit the ground.

Fast forward to today's meeting.

Now if I were a commissioner about to use the words "sports" and "$40-million" in the same sentence, I'd be tossing a pinch of grass in the air like a nervous placekicker checking to see which way the wind was blowing.

Today, Commissioner Brian Blair is expected to - how do I put this - try to make chicken salad, so to speak, with a plan of his own.

Blair hopes to earmark the half-cent Community Investment Tax money to improve existing parks and build new ones rather than building a new complex out in the hinterlands.

(Note to Blair: "Jim Norman's Scaled-Down Field of Dreams" would not be a good name for a new park.)

In truth, this is not the worst idea ever to come out of a county commissioner (see: Attempt to kill the wetlands division of the Environmental Protection Commission. Also, Championship Park.) Parks and fields are overburdened, and what kind of person is against giving kids places to play?

Also, it's nice to be able to speak earnestly about keeping kids off the streets when you're up for re-election and haven't had your best year, publicity-wise.

But in our current climate of budget cuts, this will likely prove too big a pill to swallow.

What's more, fellow commissioners have talked about their own worker-ant plan for putting the money away for a rainy day. Which sounds like just the sort of thing voters want to hear right now.

In other business, the board decides Thursday who among them gets assigned to which local boards and leadership positions, including county commission chairman and vice chairman.

While this should be boring, inside-baseball sort of stuff, based on things like experience, ability and constituency, it's also likely to include politicking, jockeying, payoff and payback.

Who becomes commission chairman? Will Norman keep his choice assignment on the Tampa Sports Authority?

Will Commissioner Rose Ferlita, the lone woman on the board who has made a habit of speaking up and refusing to go along to get along, find herself ousted from her position on the Port Authority?

And what of Blair, rumored to want a board leadership position but garnering less than stellar reviews for how he ran the Environmental Protection Commission?

As they say in all the good dramas, stay tuned.

[Last modified November 6, 2007, 23:47:28]