Hillsborough's Fight for an Elected Mayor

Hillsborough's Fight for an Elected Mayor

By Francis X. Gilpin

Associate Editor

A young biotech company developing life-prolonging cancer drugs is a precious commodity in Tampa, where local officials hope their city will be the next national center for life sciences research.

Those officials moved quickly in January when 4-year-old Accentia Biopharmaceuticals Inc. made noises about putting a vaccine factory in St. Louis. Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio was part of a delegation offering tax and other incentives to keep the plant's potentially high-paying jobs in Accentia's headquarters city.

Hillsborough County Commissioner Mark Sharpe was in on the negotiations, too. But does Sharpe truly speak for county government? After all, Sharpe serves with six other commissioners.

"Mark is interested," says Brandon political consultant Mark Proctor. "But maybe some of the other commissioners are not."

That is why Proctor has signed on with a new political action committee called Taking Back Hillsborough County, which is pushing for a county mayor. "I'd like to see us speak with one voice," Proctor says.

The brainchild of Tampa attorney Mary Ann Stiles, the PAC believes a county of more than a million residents should be governed by an elected mayor instead of often-feuding commissioners.

"This county is not moving forward," Stiles said during a Jan. 17 debate with the commissioner who has become a lightning rod for some disenchanted with Hillsborough government, Ronda Storms of Valrico. "We can certainly do better than we're doing now."

Stiles is an unlikely leader of a local reform effort. Although her six-office law firm is based near downtown Tampa, Stiles spends much of her time in Tallahassee lobbying for the powerful Associated Industries of Florida on workers compensation and other issues.

During the debate, Storms portrayed Stiles as a tool of downtown business interests, whose influence over the county commission has waned during her eight years in office.

"I'm not carrying this battle for anybody else," Stiles told the Gulf Coast Business Review afterward. "People who think I'm doing this for other people don't know me. I am pissed."

HARTline an issue

Stiles, 61, fumes as the commute from her Avila home north of Tampa to her Hyde Park law office takes longer and longer. "I'm tired of sitting in traffic," she says, "no matter where I go in this city or this county."

The final straw came last fall when Hillsborough commissioners let their freshman colleague, Brian Blair, form a committee to study the county's transit agency. Tampa residents were excluded from the panel. To assist the committee, Blair also hired a consultant who sued the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority, better known as HARTline.

Stiles, who quit as HARTline's state lobbyist in protest, dismisses the Blair study as a hatchet job in the making. She claims it was ordered up by Blair's political mentor, Tampa industrialist Ralph W. Hughes, a HARTline critic. "It's not going to be anything in favor of HARTline," Stiles predicts. "Not as long as Ralph Hughes doesn't support it." Hughes couldn't be reached for comment.

Indeed, the Hillsborough mayoral issue appears to be as much about transportation and Hughes as it is about rewriting the county charter by referendum.

Hughes chairs one of the largest makers of pre-cast concrete products in the nation, Florida Engineered Construction Products Corp. in Seffner. The Republican activist has spent thousands of dollars helping to elect a majority of the county commission: Republicans Storms, Blair and Jim Norman, along with Democrat Thomas Scott.

The 75-year-old Temple Terrace resident was an attentive observer of the Stiles-Storms debate, sponsored by the local League of Women Voters, where Storms framed the mayoral question as Democratic Tampa versus its Republican suburbs.

"The reason that people have their nose bent about what the county is doing is because the county commissioners say 'no' so many times," Storms said. "There isn't enough money in the city of Tampa coffers to fund everything you want to fund and we won't give you our money, too."

Business has backed rail

Like Blair, Storms bore in on the $56 million streetcar line that HARTline started operating three years ago between the downtown convention center and Ybor City. The anti-HARTline faction sees the money-losing streetcar as the precursor to a regional mass transit system, which will suck more money from taxpayer wallets.

But business groups, including Tampa's chamber of commerce, have argued that the county needs to consider commuter rail now. Otherwise, the increasing gridlock on Tampa Bay area roads will deter busy entrepreneurs from starting businesses or keeping them here.

The business community's frustration with the stranglehold that the Hughes faction seems to have on commission policy - from starving mass transit to resisting school impact fee hikes - is fueling the movement for a county mayor, Storms says.

Stiles does expect Taking Back Hillsborough County to collect up to $750,000, much of it from Tampa businesses, to promote a mayoral referendum this year.

Storms urged Stiles to cut to the chase. "You want to do something about transportation, right?" Storms asked. "What are you willing to pay for it? Are you willing to pay for a half-cent sales tax? Those are really what the questions are that should be asked and answered by the voters."

Stiles won't deny that rail could result if county power shifts from the commission to a mayor. "Whether he likes it or not," Stiles says of Hughes, "when he and I are both dead, there will be transit in this city. We have to move into the new century."

On the other side of the spectrum, retired Democratic commissioner Jan Platt thinks a county mayor will accommodate developers too much.

Stiles is skeptical. Homebuilders were blindsided last month when Iorio sprang a water surcharge on them for new dwellings in Tampa. "With what Mayor Pam Iorio just did to the construction industry, I wonder if they really believe that today," says Stiles.

WHO'S INVOLVED TAKING BACK HILLSBOROUGH

More than two dozen local residents attended an organizational meeting of Taking Back Hillsborough County Political Committee Inc. at the Tampa law office of Stiles, Taylor & Grace PA last month. A partial list of attendees:

• Harry Costello, general manager of Hill & Knowlton Inc.'s Tampa office and former business editor at the Tampa Tribune

• Fred Karl, retired Florida Supreme Court justice and former Hillsborough County administrator

• Beth Leytham, former communications vice president for the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce

• Dottie Berger McKinnon, former Hillsborough County commissioner

• Barbara J. Newberger, lobbyist for the LifeLink Foundation, an organ-transplant facilitator in Tampa

• Mark Proctor, political consultant and former commercial real estate broker

• Bob Samuels, retired banker who serves on the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center board in Tampa

• L. Garry Smith, investment banker and former aide to U.S. Sen. Bob Graham

• Ed Turanchik, Tampa housing developer who used to be a Hillsborough County commissioner