Tuesday, March 27, 2012

How Mayor Bill Foster Will Raise Taxes Without It Being "His Idea"

Candidate Bill Foster campaigned for Mayor on his "no new taxes" and "lowering the tax rate" voting record while he was a city councilman, and he has consistently said he wouldn't raise taxes(keep in mind that in his opinion "fees" aren't "taxes", since Mayor Foster hasn't met a new or raised fee that he didn't like). But now it seems like he may be executing an elaborate plan to make a property tax rate increase almost inevitable. So how is he doing it?

The first step is to get his good friend and ally, Councilman James "Jim" Kennedy, to take one for the team by suggesting a property tax rate increase, that way it's not Foster's idea, and he can place the blame squarely on City Council and keep his "no new taxes" image clean(at least in his own mind) for his re-election campaign next year. Now why would Kennedy do this? Because he is Foster's buddy, he eats breakfast with him regularly, has private meetings with him frequently, appears at local functions and meetings with Foster all the time, almost always votes for what Foster wants in City Council, and even pitches Foster's ideas to council. That very close relationship gives Kennedy the inside track to what is going on with the city, as well as a leg up on the other city council members for his pet projects. And just maybe, 5 years from now, Foster may pay Kennedy back by campaigning hard for Mayoral Candidate Jim Kennedy.

The second step is to give a low-ball estimate of the budget deficit early on, then raise it, then raise it again, then hint that it may be even higher(Thanks to Doc Webb over on SaintPetersBlog for the in-depth account of this one). If the anticipated budget shortfall for 2013 has changed 3 times in less than 2 months (ending up more than double it's original estimate) then someone wasn't doing their job very well, or someone knew exactly what they were doing. As Doc Webb puts it, "Foster is teeing up, serving or pitching – pick your metaphor – the high end number to set up the City Council for a property tax increase".

The third step is to not stand in the way of City Council in deciding to raise taxes, or even to guide it from behind the scenes, through his top administrators suggesting a tax rate increase as a good idea, and offer options in the proposed budget for raising the property tax rate, and give no threat of a veto anywhere along on the process. While far from being a true "no new taxes" Mayor, it allows Bill Foster to keep his hands clean by not openly advocating for raising taxes, while getting what he wanted all along in a higher property tax rate to work with.

So what happens after he gets his property tax rate increase? Will it solve all of St Petersburg's short term financial problems? Probably not, after all Mayor Bill Foster isn't really that good at math. After being questioned on his inaccurate budget claims while running for Mayor he said "I could be wrong. I went to school to be a lawyer, not a mathematician." Just what you want to hear from the man in charge of our city's $199 million budget, especially now that the position of Budget Director is empty again.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

City Will Pay For Some of Foster's Party's Party

In a Tampa Bay Times article posted yesterday, Mayor Bill Foster admitted that "he expected that the city would end up covering some of the costs" of the Republican party's pre-conference party that is scheduled to take place at Tropicana Field. In our previous coverage of this issue, Foster had said that security costs could go "well into six figures", meaning that our city will most likely be on the hook for at least tens of thousands of dollars in security costs, if not more. But Mayor Foster doesn't seem to be pushing for an answer on how much we will have to pay for his party's party, since it has been two and a half months since the subject was last brought up, that he still hadn't "heard a thing" about plans to pay for security at the event. Tampa police Chief Jane Castor was asked about the Trop party and was also non-committal about any budgeting for security for the event.

In a related ABC Tampa report, Mayor Foster tries to be more upbeat about not having any official convention events in St Pete by saying "I think those who want to disrupt the business will remain over here (in Tampa)", and that "the partying" will be in St Pete. So get ready for St Petersburg to be Bill Foster's "Party Central" this summer, maybe he will even DJ the party.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

The New "Lens" Pier: Foster's Folly

The Tampa Bay Times article on Sunday about "the Reef" portion of the new Pier got us thinking about how the whole pier design process. The article spells it out pretty clearly that the reef is not a viable option for the deep tidal current waters of the pier area, and that the designers(Michael Maltzan Architecture) didn't even bother to see what was under and around the current Pier, or figure out if it would be feasible to put this feature in the new pier. So in the end, we will have either some kind of strange in-water stagnant aquarium that loosely resembles the images in the Lens sales pitch, or we will have the normal murky tidal water with almost no view to the nearly $1 million wasted trying to construct a crystal-clear "rich marine habitat" where there was none before.

This along with the revelation earlier this year that all we would be getting out of the total Lens design would be the pier itself, and nothing else, or in the words of Mayor Bill Foster, "what we're building now is a standalone pier" and "For $50 million, people will get a Pier" then there's my favorite quote "Unless manna falls from heaven, we are unlikely to see any future phases in our lifetime". We wanted to illustrate exactly what this means using Maltzan's own images as a basis, showing you what we were sold, and what we will actually get(see below, click to magnify).

And now to the "Bill Foster specific" side of this, because it would be impossible for him not to mess this up in some way. Back in the St Petersburg Times archives we found this article that says Mayoral Candidate Bill Foster would "give voters final say on the Pier's future", yet after he won the election and only one year later it was revealed that "he doesn't support a referendum", and that the inverted pyramid will hardly be missed. Another campaign promise broken from stumbling Mayor Foster who has been pushing to secure his legacy by building a flashy new pier, whether it's a good idea or not.

WHAT'S MISSING:


Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Mr. Foster Goes To Washington, As a "Mold Breaker"?

This weekend Mayor Bill Foster is heading to Washington D.C. to give a presentation next Monday afternoon at the America's Promise Alliance: Building a Grad Nation Summit. He will be on a lunchtime general session panel of "mold breakers" that "disrupted the status quo". I'm sorry, but are they sure they have the right guy? Mayor Foster is hardly one that would be described as disrupting the status quo, almost always going for the small change instead of big changes, keeping on almost all of his predecessor's staff(except for the ones that quit of course), and always being afraid of lawsuits.

We assume that since this is a conference about education and boosting graduation rates, that Foster will be talking about the Mayor's Mentors and More Doorways Scholarship Program, which wasn't even set up by him, it was set up by his predecessor Rick Baker(yet again, Foster is in Baker's shadow). Foster even managed to tarnish the program through his "heavy handed fundraising" by pushing City employees to donate to the charity. Now don't think that we are saying it's a bad charity, giving scholarships to younger children to give them an incentive to achieve knowing that they have a path to college is a great idea, but like so many things that Bill Foster touches, he managed to stumble his way into messing this one up in some way. I guess that Rick Baker wasn't available to speak at this conference, since he was the real force behind the program, so they had to settle for Bill Foster.

Another interesting side note to this story is that Bill Foster doesn't even really like the Public School system, his own children attended private christian schools, and before he was Mayor he wrote a letter to the school board against teaching evolution because of all of the evil it has caused in history.

At least we aren't paying for Bill Foster's little ego trip up to Washington D.C., the conference organizers are footing the bill for his travel expenses(confirmed through Foster's assistant, Ellen P. McDowell).


UPDATE: this story just got picked up by SaintPetersBlog

UPDATE 2: The City finally put out a press release on this

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Mayor Bill Foster's Growing Self-Importance

Back when Bill Foster was on the City Council he always attracted a lot of attention, which he even admits resulted in a lot of criticism of him. But when he became Mayor, that self-promotion was supposed to be a thing of the past, with quotes like "It isn't about me." on election night, and saying that attention makes him feel "embarrassed" after one year in office. Well, Mayor Bill Foster seems to have forgotten, or changed his mind, as his drive to self-promote swung into full gear recently with his trying to take all of the credit for saving the St. Petersburg postmark, which in truth was an effort that had a whole cast of dedicated St Petersburg citizens working towards it. Also, he even went so far as to claim that he is St Petersburg with this dozy of a quote when talking about the Pier: "I am not going to be the only major city in Tampa Bay without a Columbia restaurant", Does he really think that much of himself now that he believes that he is the city? Has his ego really gotten that bad?

Friday, March 9, 2012

The Rift Between Rick Baker and Bill Foster

We recently saw this posting on the Tampa Bay Times about former Mayor Rick Baker endorsing Everett Rice for Pinellas County Sheriff, while current Mayor Bill Foster has endorsed Bob Gualtieri, and this got us to thinking about all of the little disagreements and rumors of a rift between the two mayors that we decided to put them all together into a single posting to show that there are a lot of differences between the two, and that there is not a solid connection between the two, leading us to believe there really may be a chance of Baker running for Mayor against Foster in 2013.

Exhibit A: During Mayor Foster's campaign in an interview he said that Police Chief Harmon needed a new boss to be successful as Police Chief, his boss at the time was Mayor Rick Baker

Exhibit B: Mayor Baker did not endorse candidate Bill Foster until after the primary, when Foster came out on top with the most votes, showing that it may have been as much a strategic move as anything else

Exhibit C: Mayor Baker REALLY doesn't like Kathleen Ford, meaning an endorsement of Foster would be more a case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"

Exhibit D: After Bill Foster won the election, Mayor Rick Baker had Mayor-elect Foster's transition office set up in a roped-off area in the Municipal Services building, instead of City Hall, even though there was room available.

Exhibit E: Foster and Baker have different views on many subjects, from police chases, support for LGBT issues, red light cameras, extending bar open times and banning panhandlers to dealing with conflicts, and even on presenting projects to City Council, where Baker always had a plan to present to Council, Foster often offers no opinion.

Exhibit F: Rick Baker really liked Goliath Davis, meeting with him often and dedicating several pages in his book to Davis and his accomplishments. While Bill Foster met with Davis very rarely, didn't connect with him, and gathered up what little courage he had to clumsily fire Davis on Davis' 60th birthday over a year after taking office.

Exhibit G: According to SaintPetersBlog, "There is talk that Baker has grown disillusioned with his successor"

Exhibit H: Also according to SaintPetersBlog, "Rick Baker is also grateful for Foster because without him, the city would never have realized how good it had it under Baker's tenure.", we must agree with this one strongly, it's not likely that Foster is ever going to win Mayor-of-the-year like Baker did during his tenure as Mayor of St. Petersburg.

Exhibit I: Baker and Foster often endorse different candidates for the same races, from the recent Pinellas Sheriff example to the Republican presidential primary, they often find themselves on different sides of these same-party races

Given all of this evidence, it's pretty clear that Baker and Foster are not "best buds", and that Baker's support of Foster is more an alliance of convenience than it is one of loyalty.

So what does this all mean? It means that there is a very real possibility that former-Mayor Rick Baker wouldn't have a problem running against Bill Foster, and he may just run for Mayor of St. Petersburg again. He was Mayor for 9 years, and the city charter only has a restriction of two consecutive terms as Mayor, not a total of two terms as Mayor, so there is nothing legally stopping him from running. Also, his $225,000 job at USF may be in trouble due to the deep budget cuts handed down from Tallahassee this month(21% for USF Tampa), so he may be looking for a job again soon, and the Mayor's position might look even more appealing to him at that point.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

The Tampa Bay Times' About-Face on Mayor Bill Foster

You saw that right, I am no longer calling them the St Petersburg Tampa Bay Times. After re-reading their anti-Foster editorial as well as this very enlightening piece from SaintPetersBlog, I have a new-found respect for the Times and how they are willing to change their minds about supporting Mayor Bill Foster, and as such I will stop my small protest of putting their old name in strike-through when I cite them here on Bill Foster Watch(even though I am still disappointed with the name change). But enough about that, on to the subject at hand.

It seems that the Tampa Bay Times has admitted that they made a mistake when they endorsed Bill Foster for Mayor 3 years ago, and the editorial linked to above is a pretty strong turn around, which is a much bigger story than the editorial itself. They do a good job of pointing out most of Foster's stumbles, but they missed quite a few as well. Might we suggest they read our entire blog to get some ideas for future editorial content?

We hope that in the end this wasn't a one-off from the Times, but that they have truly come over to our side of the fence and realized that Bill Foster is an incompetent Mayor, and that he does not deserve a second term, since he has proven his inability to lead, which has harmed our city while he stumbles through trying to learn how to be Mayor.

Now all we need is a strong candidate to run against him next year, maybe we can talk Rick Baker into running for Mayor again?

Friday, March 2, 2012

Our Small-Town, Insecure Mayor Bill Foster

The St Petersburg Tampa Bay Times just posted a great opinion piece on the many shortcomings of our Mayor Bill Foster. There are so many great points they bring up about our stumbling Mayor, but I think this is my favorite:

"Halfway through his term, he has led on little of significance beyond replacing the Pier. He's secretive, and he seems suspicious of anyone whose family hasn't lived in St. Petersburg for generations. He's a probate lawyer who is quicker to threaten lawsuits than collaborate on creative solutions to public issues."