Just kidding! =P Well, about why we have civic knowledge, I mean, I love my country and my troops and … well, never mind.

That was me, and it was a joke about the country club and the old TT crowd which is more than a little WASPish. To be fair I also said they don’t like Catholics.

1) None of the current designs, or any LEVEL of the designs even come close to resembling the original 1922 plan. There is absolutely nothing in the original plans for the city that resembles a low-volume street connected to a roundabout at the southern portion of the city limits. There is nothing in the original 1922 plans that call for high density, mixed-use development, which is what has been a part of every incarnation of the current redevelopment plans. In fact, the ONLY thing that is similar is the location, which marks it as the center part of the town. And sorry, that isn’t enough to say that it is based, or even INFLUENCED, by the original plan.

Give them all the plans you want … but to say that just because you gave one of the planners a copy of an 84-year-old town plan makes it no more based on it than saying that I gave them a book on landscaping, and now I’ve had a tremendous influence on the plan.

2) All excellent points, and none that I can disagree with there.

3) Who brought up the town being racially biased? And how does someone who is a minority running for a seat (and losing by a landslide) prove racial diversity? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not the one who characterized the town as racist by any stretch of the imagination, but if you’re going to defend against it, use something other than a process that anyone can enter.

3(b) — The “public charettes” contained, at most, 300 different people. For a city of 30,000, that means that each person represented 10,000 people. Not exactly public …

3(d) So the city manager lives outside the city limits? I thought I read somewhere where Sami lived right next to the city manager?

And it seems that the Tampa Tribune, the St. Pete Times, and other papers seem to report on the shenanigans there a lot, most of which have ended up on Sticks, which has produced some highly entertaining reading!

1) The current Temple Terrace redevelopment plan is indeed based on Temple Terrace’s superlative 1922 Town Plan created by Dwight James Baum, architect of the Ca d’Zan. I know because I gave a copy of the plan (which showed a downtown in the location we’re currently redeveloping) planner Neal Payton of Torti Gallas and I also assisted in the development of the master plan and design guidelines. In the 1922 plan there was not a roundabout at 56th Street and the downtown of the 1922 plan was based on the downtown area of our 1920s sister city Coral Gables.

2) The entire Bay area is easy to poke fun at based on it being the planning and architecture backwater of Florida—I could go on and on about the County and Tampa—Ronda Storms tearing down the oldest building in Brandon to build an overflow parking lot for her 10,000 member church; the City of Tampa unable to create a master plan for their own downtown (as Temple Terrace has done) because developers don’t want to be told what to do with their land; Tampa being tied with Detroit as the two cities in the US with over 250,000 people that have no mass transit to speak of, I could go on and on

3) The city can’t be that racially biased as Temple Terrace resident and African American Eddie Adams just ran against Kathy Castor for the US Senate District 11 seat.

A few facts about Temple Terrace you may not be aware of: a) the city wisely purchased 90% of the 55 acre site for the new downtown so it can control what gets built there, b) the city is going the planner-first route and has hired nationally known planners Torti Gallas to create a master plan and design guidelines via a year of public charrettes, the city is now looking for a mixed-use developer that will build our plan (we would be further along if we had just handed the land off to any old developer so he can build what makes them money), c) we have the highest percentage of college educated residents (Bachelor and Masters) in central Florida d) the city is only 6 square miles and is the smallest of the 3 cities in the county—neither USF, Busch Gardens or East nor New Tampa are in our city limits and no, Sami Al Arian did not live in TT e) lastly, we have the lowest crime rate of the three cities in the county

Of course we have had some fiascos (such as the $100,000 lease buyout already mentioned) but we are years ahead of Tampa in terms of city planning. You will be holding your breath a while if you are waiting for Tampa to hire an expensive out-of-town planning firm to create a master plan and new code for its downtown area via a year of public charrettes or workshops. Temple Terrace’s goal is to create a walkable, mixed-use, medium-density New Urban downtown that matches our existing 1920s planned residential areas in quality and character. Our current top developer for the project has hired David Kitchens of Cooper Carry (Mizner Place, CityPlace) to tweak the Torti Gallas created master plan. Our master plan is also transit oriented and allows for such things as light rail and other mass transit. True, our tax referendum was defeated that was for redevelopment infrastructure but we’ve proceeded on with State and County Grants and have $500,000 so far for the restructuring of 56th Street alone (narrower lanes, landscaping, street lighting). We’ve learned that in Florida it’s best not to ask citizens to raise their taxes for any reason.

Temple Terrace’s strength is that the Tampa Tribune doesn’t report what we’re up to so the Tampa and the County good ‘ol boys can’t screw it up.:)

Cordially,
Grant Rimbey AIA

While it is a similar area, this actual development process in Temple Terrace is really about seven years old, not 80.