Here's a man who dares to think: big picture

MELONE E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 30, 2001

Secretly, Ed Turanchik must be loving it.

One day he's moaning about how the U.S. Olympic Committee didn't understand Tampa.

Next day he's fending off everybody who wants him for mayor of Tampa.

And the election is a year and a half away.

That's plenty of time to put a campaign together. And Turanchik does need work, now that Tampa's Olympic committee, which he headed, is about to fold.

But no, no, no, not now, Turanchik said Monday. He has better things to do than run for mayor. He wants to find a way to build some of the sports facilities that were going to be built for the Olympics, so they can be used by the public.

"You get a Final Four every 10 years and a Super Bowl every 10 years, and an Olympics once in a hundred years," he said.

The new plan is a way to turn defeat into victory, and doing so is an essential skill in politics. Turanchik, a former member of the Hillsborough County Commission, has other strengths, and they are why he is being asked to run for mayor, and why he ought to.

I'll borrow his word.

Vision.

He knows our roads are crowded and crummy. He believes that urban sprawl -- the right to live in a new house as far from downtown as possible -- hurts far more than it helps us. When he says these things he speaks of Tampa Bay, not several cities and towns fighting one another.

"Do you have any idea how far apart the international community thinks Tampa and St. Petersburg are? This much," he said, holding his thumb and index finger together.

This is not what you hear from the two candidates who have been running more or less throughout their tenure on Tampa City Council. The big picture has largely escaped them.

Bob Buckhorn made a name for himself campaigning against Joe Redner's lap-dancing ladies.

Rose Ferlita owns a drugstore. She goes through the neighborhoods she represents, trying to see what people need, on her self-styled Rose Patrol.

These things are not wrong. But politics and decisionmaking in Tampa are not just about Tampa.

Nobody expresses an understanding of that better than Turanchik. In fact, he used the Olympic planning as a way to express his vision -- as events would have been held not just in Tampa but St. Petersburg, as well as Orlando.

Turanchik is a big and broad shouldered man, the perfect image of a middle-aged yuppie. He has said elsewhere he would run once his children are grown, several years from now. But Monday he was talking like never.

I am inclined to believe him. He has been disillusioned by government once, when he was on the county commission, and the disillusion remains.

For a Democrat, he talks remarkably like a Republican.

Turanchik believes government can't get the job done. It is too big, too slow, too susceptible to public pressure.

"Government for the most plays to the lowest common denominator," he said. "It is risk averse."

And Turanchik is all about risk. He is driven by ideas, new ones -- like the Olympic committee he led -- and by the prospect of being the architect who readjusts the big picture.

You get a hint of what he's about by looking at the sculpture, made of long flattened nails, that hangs on the wall above his desk. STEEL IDEAS, it declares.

When you talk to Turanchik, words tumble out of him fast as flash cards. He is a very smart man, although sometimes this comes across as arrogance, as though he knows he is the brightest boy in the class.

He is.

Which is why the bay area needs him.

-- Mary Jo Melone can be reached at mjmelone@sptimes.com or at (813) 226-3402.

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