Joe Henderson
If you’re weary of Hillsborough traffic and believe it is way past the time to meaningfully address this stifling mess, Wednesday was a good day.
The Hillsborough County Commission voted 4-3 to adopt the project spending allocations originally set in the All For Transportation charter amendment. Voters overwhelmingly approved the 1-cent sales tax hike last November to pay for desperately needed road and other transit upgrades.
The result wasn’t a surprise. Democrats took control of the Commission last November, largely based on this issue. There was a roadblock at the finish line, though.
Commissioner Stacy White filed a lawsuit to block part of the amendment, though.
The amendment divided specific percentages of the revenue among various parts of the country. A judge ruled that the tax was legal but agreed with White that a governing body should not be bound by the spending requirements voters approved. Hence the need for Wednesday’s vote.
So, that’s what will happen. The Commission passed the recommendation from Chairman Les Miller to follow the original allocations set out in the amendment. Eight months after 57 percent of county voters approved the tax hike, the issue finally seems settled.
Something else was settled, too.
The core of the argument for the Commissioners who voted against this was that voters didn’t know what they were approving.
Poppycock.
That’s the argument from opponents every time voters take matters into their own hands. It’s simple why this amendment passed, but it still seems lost on the three Commissioners — White, Ken Hagan, and Sandy Murman — who voted no.
For years, the County Commission took actions that created the choking sprawl we see today in Hillsborough. It approved massive developments, big box stores, and so on without providing the infrastructure to support any of that.
It even kept a proposed tax amendment for Hillsborough traffic relief off the ballot in 2016.
Its solution after that was to allocate more than $800 million for that issue. Sounds like a lot, right?
It wasn’t.
That money, spread over ten years, would have done little more than fill potholes.
It took a petition drive by the All For Transportation crowd to get the sales tax hike on the ballot last year. Voters strongly responded that they’d had enough of this gridlock.
So yes, Commissioners White, Hagan, and Murman, voters knew what they were doing.
More to the point, they knew what you weren’t doing.
The Commission had plenty of time to take meaningful steps to curb sprawl and address Hillsborough traffic. It abdicated that responsibility, though, and voters didn’t trust the lawmakers to get serious about traffic relief.
That’s why the original amendment passed. That’s why they voted for pro-transportation Commissioners.
Voters knew what they were doing. Shame on anyone for saying they didn’t.
4 comments
Sharon Calvert
July 18, 2019 at 2:27 pm
Really?? http://www.eyeontampabay.com/2019/07/rewarding-big-mess-makers.html
tom gaitens
July 18, 2019 at 3:13 pm
Joe, was it terrible is that you support a crony system that purposely misled the voters. They lied to the voters in both the language on the ballot and in their direct mail/call/tv campaign. You are better than this, I hope, yet I have seen very little evidence to have such faith in your integrity.
You cannot deny that the back-room, smoke filled deal to deceive the voters into believing the Roads in the County would be widened, added to, improved and that new roads would be built to ease congestion the BOCC, themselves, cause by over development for decades. Failure to increase impact fees, failure to require road expansion etc.
You cannot deny that the AD campaign that Vinik funded was corporatism at it’s worst. It was not grassroots it was not community led.
AFT, nor the BOCC held meetings to discuss, get community feedback or listen to the people’s concerns, desires.
Furthermore, No listening tour occurred to judge what the people wanted or needed. It was a forced feeding of Transit designed to appeal to the wants but to only deliver the product of Light Rail for the City and main corridor for expansion via key City wants.
Had the People been told honestly that their roads, their traffic and their commutes would not be improved during this 30 year, 16B theft from their wallets to feed the City wants, everyone knows they would not have voted for it.
The Tribune is a tool for special interets and nothing more these days. It is a rag. Has lost any sense of journalistic standards by working tirelessly to campaign for Rail, Vinik and AFT.
The 2045 Plan itself listed projects that needed to be funded to improve traffic throughout the county, but AFT ignored it, and now so has, the Democrat crony led BOCC.
History will be the judge, but you cannot refute the facts. They are crystal clear…you are a tool and hack.
Jerry Lane
July 19, 2019 at 7:38 am
The Judge’s ruing that threw out All for Transportation’s unlawful and illegal spending appropriations but somehow just left the tax standing, has been appealed. It is going to the Florida Supreme Court. Unlike Judge Barbas, an elected judge who wants to run for office again and wanted to somehow, though somewhat incoherently, split his decision, Tallahassee appointed Supreme Court justices do not care about crony insiders and wealthy special interests in HC who decided to put an unlawful transit tax on the ballot. Once again Joe supports a crony massive transit tax. He just hasn’t found a transit tax he doesn’t like and support no matter how fraudulent, crony or even how illegal and unlawful it is.
Chris W
July 19, 2019 at 10:35 am
Sorry. With the spending committee kaput, what’s left is a local option sales tax (of which there are many in Florida). This sounds like sour grapes from people who wanted the sales tax money as a slush fund for road builders rather than what the voters wanted; if the commission had responded the way you seem to wish they had it would have been another “stadium tax”.
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