Monday, April 30, 2012

Our St. Petersburg Race For Mayor 2013 Potential Candidates

Peter Schorsch from SaintPetersBlog posted Friday about his list of potential candidates for the race for Mayor in 2013 and asked us who we would support. This got all kinds of gears turning in our heads, and we asked around to see what other people thought, as well as doing some searching to see what past St. Petersburg political contenders have been up to lately.

Unfortunately, Bill Foster announced in February that he would be running for reelection next year. It would really be sadly funny how hopelessly bad Bill Foster is at being Mayor, if we didn't have to live with him being OUR Mayor that is. Even people we've talked to who live in other bay-area cities are baffled and amazed at just how bad he is doing the job. So taking into consideration his horrible performance so far, there is a very real chance that he could lose next year.

As for who we prefer in the 2013 race for Mayor? the short answer is "Anybody But Bill Foster", the city government has stagnated and needs change at the top(both elected and non-elected), and just about anybody else would be better than Foster. Someone who isn't afraid to fire incompetent, corrupt and/or lazy city employees would be a good start.


Here's a rundown of the possible contenders:

Rick Kriseman - A good guy, cares about the city, has called Foster out on several of his blunders, and seems to be preparing for the 2013 Mayor race by not running for the state legislature this year, but we're not sure he has the city-wide support needed to beat an incumbent in a city that has a strong history of reelecting incumbents, even with that in mind, he probably has the best chance out of all of those who will end up running against Foster next year.

Kathleen Ford - She had her chance, and would not win in a rematch of the 2009 race. She also seems more bitter and divisive now than she did 3 years ago.

Leslie Curran - Currently trying to take charge in City Council and fill the leadership gap left by Foster, not sure how good a manager she is though with being sued by her landlord, and we don't think she has "the left" supporting her enough to get out the vote and beat a standing Mayor from the same Republican party that she is in.

Karl Nurse - Seems a bit too far to the left for St Petersburg, and besides, he has another term to go on council.

Charlie Gerdes - He just got on council, he would wait at least another 4 years before he even thinks about running for Mayor.

Jim Kennedy - Too much of a Foster-buddy to run against him, and he's looking for Foster's support when HE runs for Mayor in 2017.

Steve Kornell - Very smart, knows the system and how to run a good campaign, would be a good Mayor. Don't think the city is quite ready for a gay Mayor, although it would be a great race.

Jeff Danner - Let's face it, judging from his committee meeting behavior, he can kind of come off as a jerk, although we don't think he'd have a problem firing people, his lack of people-skills alone will keep him out of the Mayor's office.

Bill Dudley - No way does he run for Mayor, especially against Foster.

Wengay Newton - The "voice of the people" on City Council, is a great guy, very dedicated to St Pete, but hopefully he knows that managing a city with thousands of employees is not something he would enjoy or be very good at.

Ken Welch - He is very happy at the county level for now thank you very much.

Charlie Justice - If he loses his bid for Pinellas County Commission against incumbent Nancy Bostock this year, he may run for Mayor of St Petersburg next year. He is well liked, very active politically and depending on the field of candidates, he might do quite well in the primary.

Scott Wagman - He may have matured in the last 3 years, as Mr. Schorsch suggests, but we don't think he can win the race for Mayor without having any political experience unless he spends a lot more money this time.

Deveron Gibbons - Most people forget that he came in third place in the 2009 Mayor primary, but questions about his personal life and business life would most likely keep him from making it out of the primary once more.

Paul Congemi - The comic relief of our city's last race for Mayor has already declared he will run in 2013, even after he came in tenth out of ten candidates in the 2009 primary. The grumpy, pro-gambling, anti-gay candidate who has been banned from KFC and claims to have his own political party is sure to add to the entertainment value of the 2013 Mayor race.

Larry Williams - Was on the Charter Review Committee last year, still involved in the city political scene, but probably won't run for Mayor again after his fifth place finish in 2009.

Jamie Bennett - He continues to give back to the community by working as the Jobs and Housing Coach at the St. Petersburg Free Clinic's Beacon House, Bennett most likely wouldn't run again for Mayor after his sixth place finish in 2009.

Ed Montinari - We threw him on the list because of the massive man-crush Peter Schorsch seems to have on him, but Montinari most likely wouldn't try to take out a fellow Republican running for reelection(although we wish he would have run against Councilman Dudley last year, and we still don't know how he lost to Dudley in 2007).

Rick Baker - We already know he can do the job a lot better than Foster does, he is still very popular and he could beat Foster easily in a 1-on-1 match as Foster's supporters would flock to Baker once he announced his candidacy. It is unlikely he will run, but there are hints that he may, and the city would be better off with Baker at the helm once more instead of another stumbling Foster term.

Charlie Crist - Would be a wonderful Mayor of St. Petersburg, but only in our dreams would he run. And anyway we need him available to get Rick Scott out of Tallahassee in a couple years.

IBM Watson - We saw this article linked on facebook and immediately thought of St Petersburg, we might even be better off with a computer as Mayor. Heck, Mayor Foster likes automated cameras and computerized parking meters, so why not just replace HIM with a computer?


So there you have it, like it or not, a few of these people are the ones that will run against Bill Foster for Mayor next year. Hopefully a good one will come out of the primary strong enough to win against Foster.

Friday, April 27, 2012

Curbside Recycling Becomes Another Foster Failure

WSI(the company hired by the city to handle the curbside recycling program in St. Petersburg) told the city yesterday that they would not be renewing their contract in October, effectively ending what one CONA representative called "a half-hearted attempt to recycle". The program was pushed by Foster last year as the best option for offering curbside recycling in the city, but only a few months later it was clear that the program was not very popular and was not cost-effective for WSI.

So how did Mayor Foster manage to mess up something so simple and universally successful that every other community in the county does it at a higher participation rate?

The first problem is that the city made it voluntary so each resident had to sign up for it individually. In a process that could take over a month, residents wanting to sign up for the $2.75 a month program had to call in to a phone number during certain hours and wait on hold until they got to someone to take their registration(no web sign-up was allowed). Then they would have to wait a few weeks until the bins would show up at their house, hopefully. Most other local curbside recycling programs are community-wide, spreading the cost as well as making it easier for everyone to participate. In Foster's bid to nickle-and-dime us yet again, he took something that would have succeeded and not cost much money per resident, and made it optional and difficult to sign up for, so it failed.

The second problem is that it was not promoted very well by the city, an insert in the water bill and an advertisement on the city's website does not constitute proper promotion. Why not try putting stickers on the city-owned garbage cans that almost every resident has to use to throw away their trash? There is no better time than when people are throwing stuff away to remind them it can be recycled, but as the Mayor has made painfully clear, he has a hard time thinking outside the box, and public outreach is not his strong suit.

The third problem is that they chose the lowest bidder which offered a substandard service. Complaints of difficulty signing up, bad service and poorly-designed recycling bins dogged the program from the beginning. The low price of $2.75 per month also made it so that WSI would have to have a large number of residents sign up before they would make any money on the program. It seems like the Mayor didn't really take all of the details of how the program would be implemented into consideration before he just chose the cheapest option.

In the end the "green", "tree city" of St. Petersburg, Florida could soon be left without any curbside recycling program again, due to yet another stumble by our incompetent Mayor Bill Foster.

UPDATE: Another quote from CONA member Tim Martin: "I think it is a little bit of a black eye on the city.  I think it is a little bit of an embarrassment".
 

Monday, April 23, 2012

Mayor Bill Foster Advocates For More Taxes, I Mean "Fees"

Only in the warped reality that Mayor Foster lives in are "taxes" and "fees" two completely separate and disconnected ideas. One(taxes) are to be avoided at all costs(even the cost of having to go to a judge to get a new "fee" approved instead of just raising the existing property tax millage rate which would not require judicial approval). The other(fees) are to be embraced in all ways, raising existing fees and created new ones that never existed(like doubling parking meter rates, adding hundreds of new meters, raising activity fees for recreational activities and the dozens of new and raised building fees in the city). Mayor Foster has spent his first two years in office creating all kinds of new fee-based revenue streams in order to avoid touching the dreaded "taxation" third rail of politics. He even got his buddy and co-Mayor on the City Council Jim Kennedy into the act by praising his "bold idea" for a new "fee" for property owners: "Mayor, let me commend you (for saying) that we actually need to raise revenue...".

But in this most recent case that came up just last week, it's time for Foster to face reality, the old proverb "If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it must be a duck" clearly applies here to his proposed "fire readiness fee": it looks like a tax, sounds like a tax, and it appears on a tax bill, so it IS a tax, stop calling it a "fee". It's akin to the Mayor putting a plastic trunk on Petey, the city's "First Dog", and calling him an elephant, we just aren't that dumb Mr. Mayor.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Mayor Bill Foster Avoids External Audit Again

The saga of the many-years-long impact fee underestimation problem(which we've covered before), that Mayor Bill Foster seems to be working hard to try to sweep under the rug by doing yet another incomplete internal-only audit, popped up again today. There is a great editorial by Jim Morin appearing in the Tampa Bay Times that does a wonderful job of condensing what is going on into a few short paragraphs, we would highly suggest that you take a few minutes to read it, but here's a summary if you can't wait: Mayor Foster(and a few council members) seem to have amnesia about the external audit that was voted for by council a few months ago(sadly similar to City employee Don Tyre's amnesia of who ordered him to reduce the impact fees so drastically, causing this issue to come out in the first place), and ended up reversing course and voting to wait for an internal audit to be done first.

Another thing that has changed apparently was how much the external audit would have cost. Mayor Foster said back in January that it should "cost about $25,000", yet months later, audit-opponent and Foster-ally Councilman Dudley is saying "$50,000", and the number "$40,000" was mentioned in the workshop. Now we know that Foster "went to school to be a lawyer, not a mathematician", but this kind of math error is ridiculous, even for a lawyer.

One issue we didn't see raised in today's editorial is that back on March 29th, Councilman Nurse said "we're two weeks away from the internal audit", if that is true, where is it? It's been over 3 weeks, meaning it's been over a week since it was supposed to be completed, and we haven't heard a peep about the internal audit report.

So here are the questions we still have no answers for:

    Why are the Mayor and certain city council members now so afraid of what an external audit will show?
    What happened between the time the council voted for an external audit and last month's workshop to change their minds?
    How much would an external audit really cost?
    Where is the internal audit report that was supposed to be finished over a week ago?

The end result of all of this posturing and flip flopping on an external audit is the continued erosion of the public trust in St Petersburg City government. The fact that all of the above questions remain unanswered means that our government is not being transparent and open. Hopefully the voters of St Petersburg will remember this sad episode when these city officials are up for reelection next year.

As a final note, we would like to applaud Councilman Steve Kornell for his integrity and perseverance in pushing for this audit for the last several months, and not trying to sweep this under the rug like several others in city government seem to be trying to do.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

CISPA: The End of Internet Privacy, Unless We Stop It

(While this subject is not directly "Mayor Bill Foster related", it is related to the erosion of our privacy, which politicians like Mayor Foster seem too eager to do, and since we don't want these politicians to have even more power over us, we thought it was important to post this alert).

We ran across this article through a link on Facebook of all places, that talks about the new CISPA(Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act HR-3523) bill that is making its way through the US Congress right now. If you didn't like SOPA or ACTA, you really won't like CISPA, which could potentially lead to the sharing of all private Internet activity with the government without the need for a court order, or even notification to you that the government has requested the information. The type of information would include: all of the web sites you go to on your Verizon FIOS connection or your Brighthouse Cable connection as well as all of the emails you send and all of your facebook activity, to name a few.

You can only imagine what government officials that aspire to be Big Brother, like our very own Mayor Bill Foster, would do with this kind of unchecked power. Any governmental law enforcement organization could make these information requests based upon no evidence of wrong-doing, and without having to convince a judge to issue a court order. And what happens if the request was made in error, or there is a case of mistaken identity? Nothing, this bill absolves the companies of all liability for violations of privacy.

So what can you do to prevent this bill from becoming law? Call, write and email your US Congress person and tell them to vote NO on HR 3523, and spread the word on facebook, twitter and the blogosphere about CISPA, and why it needs to be defeated.

St. Petersburg US Congress Representative Websites:
C.W. Bill Young - Florida's 10th congressional district
Kathy Castor - Florida's 11th congressional district

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Mayor Bill Foster's "Weekly" Failure

We have been subscribed to the City's of St Petersburg's Events E-Newsletter for a while now. It is a very thorough (but exhaustively long) email sent out every week through the mass-email company Constant Contact with a list of the upcoming events in the city. It's a good resource that helps to remind you of what's going on in the city and what events are coming up, but it is REALLY long and repetitive from week to week. So, we were pleasantly surprised on October 14, 2011 when we started getting "Foster's Weekly Forecast" emails, which are much more brief and mostly contain details on a few of the events happening in the next 7 days. (click to see the archive of Foster's Weekly Forecasts here)

Of course it didn't take long for Mayor Foster to stumble on this one, he missed a week in November(which we can understand, with the Thanksgiving holiday and all), then he missed a week in December, and then things really got bad in the new year where he would skip multiple weeks in a row and then he only sent out one "Forecast" email for the entire month of February(so much for St Petersburg's "first black mayor" making us aware of the various events going on during Black History Month in the city). In all, the Mayor's "Weekly" emails have only gone out 15 out of the last 27 weeks, a pretty bad record for a Mayor that promised to "sweat the small stuff".

This might just be another example of Mayor Bill Foster's broken PR machine, but with the sheer number of stumbles being made by Mayor Foster lately, it has unfortunately come to be what we should expect from him.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Mayor Bill Foster's Broken PR Machine

So we saw these postings tonight about Mayor Foster and U.S. Congressman Bill Young at a groundbreaking for a new therapeutic playground yesterday at All Children's Hospital. That's strange, we thought, this seems like a pretty important event, with local elected officials and lots of business and hospital leaders attending, and there was no mention of it anywhere on the city's weekly schedule or the press releases page about it, and we thought it had to be at least as important as the opening of a barber shop.

That got us to thinking about how poorly Mayor Bill Foster relates with the press, and his broken PR machine certainly doesn't help(just take a look at this PR posting from two weeks ago, it's blank, that's right, nothing there when you click on the link. We even emailed the contact listed on the city's PR web-page about it and it's still not fixed, and we received no response two weeks later). UPDATE: their posting was fixed within 24 hours of this post, guess somebody at city hall is reading our blog.

In addition to his public relations department problem, it doesn't help Mayor Foster much that he has openly admitted his discomfort with the press, and wonderful quotes like these certainly don't help his image:

     "We have little pockets of little tiny cancers that create undesirable activities"

     "I feel that our council members are getting beat up in the community and I haven't properly given them all of the bullets to defend themselves"

     "Unless manna falls from heaven, we are unlikely to see any future phases in our lifetime"

and we could go on and on with his awkward quotes, but I think you get the idea.

We finish this posting with one of the best examples of a PR blunder by Mayor Bill Foster: the time when he had T-shirts printed with "Don't TABOR me bro!" emblazoned on them to try to influence lawmakers to reject the taxpayers' bill of rights, but in the end the only thing that they rejected was Mayor Foster(and his T-shirts).

So another of Foster's stumbles is added to our growing list.

Monday, April 9, 2012

Mayor Bill Foster's Treatment of The Rays May Lead To Him Losing Reelection Next Year

What Rays' owner Stu Sternberg said in an interview on Rays opening day last week made us think about the 2013 St Petersburg election for Mayor next year. Here's what he said:

     Business people, he suggested, were the ones who would extract him from his current
     standoff with St. Petersburg's elected officials.

     "You know, the political people, they come, they go. I'm into my second mayor now."

     He's spoken with Foster a few times by phone since then, but Sternberg still
     describes relations with St. Petersburg as lukewarm.

So let's think about what he said for a minute: "political people" aren't around for very long, business people will break the impasse, relations with St Pete are lukewarm.

Stu(or more appropriately the business people wanting a new Rays stadium in Tampa) could play a big role in next year's election for Mayor of St Petersburg if they could find someone to back that would be willing to do a deal with the Rays' current lease with the city.

During just two years in office, Bill Foster has given a potential challenger a lot of ammunition to use against him through his many stumbles as Mayor, and with current election laws allowing almost limitless anonymous donations to political groups, just a little money from people who have millions could launch a torrent of negative ads directed at Foster that could very well lose him the election. It also hurts Foster that the recently re-branded Tampa Bay Times is openly at war with him, and would be more than happy to see Foster leave office and the Rays move to Tampa.

So, the end result of Mayor Bill Foster's treatment of the Rays could very well be the Rays leaving town before their lease is up, and Foster leaving office at the end of only one term.

Another Casualty of Mayor Bill Foster's Lack of Leadership: Codes Enforcement

Doc Webb over at SaintPetersBlog has posted about how Mayor Bill Foster's tragic inability to lead has resulted in the codes enforcement department suffering from mismanagement. Another example of a competent administrator(Todd Yost) being driven away by an "intolerable work environment" in Bill Foster's administration. This sheds some light on why Matthew Spoor might have left after only one month as Foster's Budget Administrator earlier this year.

Friday, April 6, 2012

Everyone (Except Mayor Bill Foster) and A New Rays Stadium

We thought what better time than on the Tampa Bay Rays opening day for us to cover the slew of articles and editorials about how everyone but Mayor Bill Foster wants to talk to the Rays about a new stadium. There are two recent Tampa Bay Times editorials(the latest one in print today) continuing their open war on Bill Foster by saying things like "stadium discussions stalled by St. Petersburg Mayor Bill Foster's petty parochialism and lack of vision", and "serious discussions have yet to start for a new Rays stadium because of Foster's intransigence" as well as "Mayor Bill Foster's failure to lead" and "Foster buries his head in the sand". Of course we couldn't agree more with these assessments of our stumbling Mayor, we previously covered how Foster was outmatched and unprepared during the meeting with Rays management in January, and ended up the loser in that meeting. But the real losers in the end are the people who want the Rays to stay in the Tampa Bay area. Mayor Foster has no new stadium plans, he is content to sit, do nothing and prevent anyone from talking to the Rays about keeping them in the region throughout his term in office, and then let the next Mayor deal with a much more volatile situation than he inherited. St. Petersburg can't afford to build a new stadium without regional financial help, and it makes no sense to alienate everyone around us all the while the Rays buyout amount gets smaller and smaller every year, and they will remember how inflexible St. Pete was, resulting in even less chance that a new stadium would be built in our city.

As a result of this, some Hillsborough and Pinellas county commissioners at least want SOMEONE to be talking to the Rays about a new stadium so the region doesn't lose the franchise. And Tampa's more charismatic Mayor Bob Buckhorn is not bothered about other people trying to get a stadium discussion going, as long as he's not in the middle of it.

Even Foster ally Bill Dudley on the St Pete City Council brought up the subject of state funding for a new stadium with the city's lobbyist a couple weeks ago, and he was bluntly shot down, being told that at the state level where they are debating cutting funding for children's programs, the disabled and senior health care, there is no will for new stadium funding at the state level.

And what do we hear from Mayor Bill Foster on all of this? Snarky comments like "I wish him well with his endeavor" or "Maybe we'll see each other and embrace." or "We'll just chalk it up to Mr. Hagan having a bad day", and that he would expect a "courtesy phone call" before a county official would discuss this in public. As usual he really doesn't have anything useful to say or any kind of real plan for the long term future, and so continues the leadership vacuum here in St Pete.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Mayor Bill Foster Attacks Pier Initiative Group

In an open attack on the voteonthepier.com group attempting to get an initiative on the ballot to ask the voters if they want to keep the inverted pyramid structure at the end of the Pier, Mayor Bill Foster said in a Tampa Bay Times article: "The voteonthepier people are doing a great job getting a lot of information out, and none of it is correct". Really Mr. Mayor? NONE of the information that the group is distributing is correct? Are you going to offer up any specific examples of how they are wrong about everything they are saying? Well, no, he's not going to do that, but we are just supposed to trust him on that I guess.

In the same article he also admits that he is letting the City Council take some of the heat for ignoring the initiative and the alternate plans from the voteonthepier group: "I feel that our council members are getting beat up in the community and I haven't properly given them all of the bullets to defend themselves". So you need to give the council bullets to defend themselves from a grassroots-based citizen initiative that you somehow consider a threat? How twisted is that? Watch out fellow citizens, if you oppose Mayor Foster's new Pier he may use Florida's stand-your-ground law against you! And what is the Mayor's excuse for procrastinating on defending his new Lens Pier plan from the onslaught of aggressive citizens asking annoying logical questions about this boondoggle? The voteonthepier organization has been around for almost as long as he's been Mayor, and even though everything they say is wrong according to the Mayor, he hasn't had any time to refute any of their contentions. Either Mayor Foster can't refute any of their points, or he is more incompetent than even we thought. After all, he made the new Pier project a priority above the new police station project which he just canceled.

We recently did a posting about Foster's Folly: The New Lens Pier Design, where we pointed out that mayoral candidate Bill Foster was in favor of a voter initiative on the Pier's future, at least until he took office, where just one year later he said that now he didn't support an initiative and that the inverted pyramid will hardly be missed. Way to flip-flop there Mayor Foster. Do the right thing Mr. Mayor, just put the Pier question on the ballot during the August 14th primary election, if you are right and the people want to build the Lens, then you can consider it a mandate to proceed without the dark cloud of a potential initiative over your head. If you are wrong then the city can stop wasting money on a plan that the voters don't want. Either way the citizens of St Petersburg will be heard loud and clear, the way it should be.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Another Hint At "Baker vs. Foster" For Mayor In 2013?

In an update to our previous posting on the rift between Mayor Bill Foster and former Mayor Rick Baker, we saw this interesting quote in an article about former Pinellas County Sheriff Everett Rice's run for sheriff from Rick Baker:
"I think he had a desire to serve, and I think when you have a desire to serve, you never run out of that".

The parallels in this race and the St Pete 2013 Mayor race are very interesting, the former sheriff running against the incumbent sheriff, the incumbent sheriff backed by the incumbent mayor, while the former mayor is backing the former sheriff. You can bet if Rice wins the race for Sheriff this year that Baker will be even more encouraged to run for his former position as Mayor of St Petersburg next year, especially seeing what his replacement has been doing to the police force recently.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Mayor Bill Foster Gives Up On New Police Station

Mayor Bill Foster announced this week that there will be no new police station in St Petersburg. In a failure of planning, prioritization and leadership, Foster has given up on the police and seems resigned to keep them working in a stinky, leaky, cramped facility that is over 60 years old in places. Maybe the Mayor is just bending to public will since the majority of residents didn't support spending $60 million on a new police station, but there are $32 million reserved from the pennies for Pinellas sales tax for a new police station, why not build a station that would fit that amount, you know, living within our means? No, Foster decided it's just better to give up, and offer no solution at all, a tragic, yet typical, lack of leadership from our stumbling Mayor, who has mostly ignored this project since he became Mayor even though he knew about it 10 years ago.

The simple solution is ironically to do what Foster himself has suggested for other city budget items and only go with needs, not wants: Cut the emergency call center, which has been suggested before by people like Doc Webb and would probably cut $10 million off the price of the new police station. Not only would it make responding to emergency calls faster(because Pinellas county receives every 9-1-1 call now anyway, then hands calls off to St Petersburg), but it would also save the city money on the yearly budget. Next, remove the 400-space hurricane-proof parking garage from the plan. We don't have one now and we've managed to survive as a city for over 100 years, so why do we need one? The third thing to look at is to distribute some police officers and staff to other facilities. Many other cities, even some much smaller, have police annex stations spread over their territory, which helps with police response times, and this means that the central police headquarters can be smaller, and cost less.

Those are not new suggestions, they have all been presented to Mayor Foster at some point, but for some reason he decided to scrap the whole project instead. As a result of this, the Tampa Bay Times' John Romano has written another anti-Foster editorial, and Doc Webb and Peter Schorsch from SaintPetersBlog have each written their own condemnations of Foster's decision to give up the project. In the end, another sad stumble is added to the list of Mayor Bill Foster's failures, how many more will the voters of St Petersburg allow before throwing him out of office?

UPDATE: Doc Webb over at the patch posted a new article arguing for a new police station.

UPDATE 2: The Patch posts an article describing the deterioration of the police station during a CONA tour last week(with pictures.

UPDATE 3: Some additional coverage from the Examiner.

UPDATE 4: CONA's first-hand account of the police station tour.