Brian Blair has it out for HARTline. And he has previously made some reasonable arguments in support of killing the agency. But the study Brian Blair recently requested does not back him up. Although he swears it does.
As we all know, statistics can be used to fight either side of any battle. The key is to only use those numbers that back up your story. To find the truth, you have to use ALL the available information and ask logical questions. Consider this:
Fact #1: Tampa residents account for 36% of the taxes HARTline uses, and non Tampa Hillsborough County residents cover almost 62%. The county has 400,000 more residents than the city.
Fact #2: In Hillsborough County, 50% of the businesses are in Tampa.
Fact #3: HARTline drives more miles in Tampa (61%) than in unincorporated Hillsborough County.
Killer B Logic: Since the number of businesses are the same, it’s obvious that the city gets more benefit while the county pays more in taxes.
Truth #1: Of the 1,000,000 in Hillsborough, approximately 322,000 are in tampa (2000 census, so 32.2% of the population is paying 36% of the taxes, more than their share based on population.
Truth #2: Due to bigger companies such as Busch Gardens, USF, and Tampa International Airport plus the huge business centers downtown and in Westshore, there are a much higher number of JOBS in Tampa.
Truth #3: Assuming county residents take the bus to Tampa businesses like those mentioned above, then HARTline miles should include all those used by those county residents, and not stop counting at the city limits.
Since he was elected, Blair has been pissing and moaning about the transit system. This is an attempt to use an invalid City vs. County argument to garner support from others on the commission. Once again Kathy Castor sees through the bullsh*t and remains as a glimmer of hope in a dysfunctional county commission.
tim
4 years ago
I knew HARTline was in trouble before I even moved here, as while I was speaking with a certain city councilperson at a tony Christmas party at a swank Ybor club, he referred to the acronym standing for a certain racist combination of terms I’m guessing everyone here already knows.
Bryan Otto
4 years ago
hmmm, never heard the racist acronym, but morbidly curious. I’d love to get an email as to what it is.
Ahem, anyway. aside from all the bickering about county vs city funding for the bus, I have a beef about hartline and psta.
Why can’t the 2 counties just get along? Hillsborough and pinellas are part of the same big metro area (yes, I know some people consider other surrounding counties too (sprawl), but the core is Pinellas, Hillsborough)
Case in point: Orlando has an excellent bus system (at least, as excellent as a bus system can be, not having light rail, and not running 24 hours).
LYNX is a cooperative effort from the 3 major counties in the Orlando MSA: Orange, Seminole, and Osceola. It works. One can seamlessly cross the county lines from suburbs to city to attractions, with many well planned routes to most destinations.
In the Tampa bay area, you have 2 separate systems , with only 3 express conectors from hartline to St pete, largo, and clearwater psta systems. Wouldn’t it make more since to integrate the 2 systems to facilitate better interaction and transfers, and have only 1 bus pass or ticket to buy for commuters between the 2 counties?
Better yet, an interurban monorail system would be sweet.
thegax
4 years ago
Bus Rapid Transit anyone….
Until Hillsborough and Pinellas put their collective wangs back in their pants with regards to which one is the “better” county we’ll never see anything like this occur. Sorry to be the wet blanket.
The Orlando area has an incentive to do what they did; link everyone to the attractions. Over here, no such motivator.
Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog » “…first-degree democracy.”
4 years ago
[...] So for quite awhile the south county communities of Apollo Beach and Ruskin have made noises that they might want to incorporate as cities and keep and big slice of the lucrative property taxes that currently flow into the county. Predictably the county commission, with the exception of Kathy Castor, just hates the idea. Well now it looks like Ruskin might actually do it. With promises of lower taxes and better service the people of Ruskin are going to vote on it in November. It is somewhat ironic that the argument the pro-incorporation camp uses is that they feel they don’t get service commensurate with the amount of tax they pay to the county. This is the exact same argument that Commissioners Brian Blair and Ronda Storms use to justify their attempt to force HARTline to provide more service to the county. I guess their opinion was changed when the hand in the cookie jar belonged to them? [...]