Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

A lot of people see Tampa Bay as a whole comprised of many parts.  That’s a nice thought, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate that all the parts have any affection for each other.  There’s plenty of dysfunction between the general public, the media and especially our local governments.  So as the area quickly grows into an uber-suburb, how do we get each distinct piece thinking together as one?

We’ll play with toys, of course.

The Tampa Bay Partnership wants to put 300 or so people into a room, split them into groups of ten, and let them do some urban planning.  With LEGOs.

Lots of LEGOs.  I mean lots & lots & lots of LEGOs.  How many, you ask?  Well, you can buy an 805-piece bucket of LEGOs for $19.99.  TBP plans to spend $400,000 - that’s amounts to about 16 million blocks.  It took only 500,000 blocks to build the world’s largest LEGO tower. This guy built the whole world with LEGOs all by himself.  With 16 million blocks, I bet we could build a life-size replica of the Sulphur Springs Tower.

Apparently the Urban Land Institute has helped promote the idea in other cities, though even they admit results have not always been so great.

The District of Columbia region, a quagmire of growth and traffic, hasn’t seen many tangible results from its early 2005 exercise…

But the Southern California and North Texas regions emerged with emboldened leadership, particularly in the way they spend federal transportation dollars…

I wonder if they learned how to share and play well with others.

But it’s not all silly ideas in the article. Both SoCal and North Central Texas have organizations that bring area communities together and oversee things like spending of federal transportation money. We’re still not sure about the county mayor idea, but a group like this in our area may not be such a bad thing.

Of course Hillsborough would have to agree to join the others - prior experience tells us that may not happen. But if the county insists on acting like children, maybe the LEGO idea is just what we need.