Googlemap user johnray2 created a map of Plant City Places of Interest.
Now you can easily find your way to Dinosaur World, the 1914 Community Center, the Whistle Stop Cafe, the Plant City Skate Park, and Knott’s Hardware Store.
Crime in Drew Park? That’s how it goes.
Crime in Suitcase City? What do you expect?
Crime in Ybor City? Such is life.
Crime in South Tampa? OMG! This is horrible! Send in more cops! Raise my taxes!
Tampa Tribune Community Columnist Buzz Kelly writes an opinion piece that is sure to be well-received outside of Palma Ceia. Buzzy K says crime is out of control in South Tampa, and your Tampa Police Department needs to increase patrols:
…it’s increasingly clear we need more protection. The weekly crime reports are rising - vandalism, robberies, car thefts, home invasions. This once idyllic part of Tampa is changing. We need marked cars cruising the streets, patrolling, watching, checking. I’ll say this: If South Tampa is becoming Baghdad, and if my taxes have to go up so Humvees can guard us, I’ll pay it.
Good Grief! The last thing we need is a bunch of cops driving Hummers. But what about this rising crime in South Tampa? I haven’t read that anywhere. It must be true, because his victimized friend agrees:
Telling me about it later, she said, “This is South Tampa, a safe neighborhood … things like that aren’t supposed to happen here!
How many stories do you read in the papers and see on the news on a daily basis? But Buzzy K is not concerned with crime until a personal friend of his is a victim. The best part is that he already is convinced that TPD prefers South Tampa anyway:
“South Tampa has the fastest police response time in the city, usually less than 10 minutes…
C’mon, now Buzzy! That’s ridiculous. Do you really believe that TPD pays more attention to SOK than the rest of the city?
I asked TPD PIO Andrea Davis about that. She told me that there are no statistics to back up Buzzy’s claims, and suggested Mr. Kelly check out the TPD website.
We did it for him.
A quick glance at the Tampa police crime activity maps shows steady crime rates throughout South Tampa (priority 1 and priority 2 crimes) across the last six months - no rise in sight.
As for response time, according to the 2008 budget, TPD has an average response time of under 7 minutes for priority 2 crimes. For the entire city.
This is the sort of thing that feeds the reputation that those who live in South Tampa are nothing but selfish brats. But we know plenty of South Tampa folks who do not feel this way. Based on this and a couple of his previous columns,
perhaps this is the closest his posh life has been to crime, and he’s just a little freaked out.
Dr. Beach came out with his top beaches for this year, and the Tampa Bay area can once again claim the best beach in the United States. Fort DeSoto was named the top beach in the US for 2005, and this year Caladesi Island ranks as America’s Best Beach. Caladesi Island is just off the coast of Dunedin.
Not only that, but Sarasota’s Siesta Public Beach ranked number three in the nation for 2008. You can find that beach on Siesta Key, just an hour south of Tampa or St. Pete.
They both look pretty good, huh?
Past Florida winners of Dr. Beach’s list include:
If you’re looking for something a bit different to do over the next week, I highly recommend taking in the Young Dramatists’ Project at the Gorilla Theatre. It consists of five short plays written by local teenagers and directed by some of the area’s best local theater professionals, including David O’Hara, Ami Sallee Corley and Karla Hartley.
Now in its eighth year, the project is a gift to the local artistic community from Susan Hussey and Aubrey Hampton, who own the Gorilla. The competition is open to all Bay area middle and high school students. Winners get their plays produced along with mentoring from the project’s dramaturge (and very talented playwright) James Rayfield, as well as royalties for the production and paid membership into the Dramatist Guild. It’s really a great way to discover and nurture new talent, and the talent I saw in these plays is pretty impressive.
I went Wednesday night, which was a dress rehearsal and fundraiser for another good karma and very worthy organization, Sierra Club Inner City Outings, which introduces city kids to nature through guided hikes, kayaking, camping trips and other stuff. The whole evening, including a 15-minute intermission is about an hour and a half long and costs a mere $15. For that, you will see five very different and compelling short plays.
To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to be impressed, or even terribly entertained. I’ve been to plenty of kid-written performances over the years and usually they fall on the pleasure scale somewhere between watching bowling on tv and mowing the lawn at noon in July.
But each one of these five plays was good. The first was Order by Sierra Almengual, a junior at Shorecrest. It’s a short, dark piece about two brothers that reminded me a little bit of Sam Shepard’s True Grit. Next was Aftershots by Blake HS sophomore Elizabeth Klette, which takes place after a Colombine-style shooting at a high school and explores the way various subcultures react. I was especially impressed with the way Ms. Klette captured the distinct voices and perspectives of a nerd, an emo girl, a black kid, an overachiever, a skater, a prep and a jock. Fable de Veras by Eric Davis (senior at Palm Harbor UHS) was an artistically ambitious look at a young girl born in the US to Mexican parents. Shorecrest junior Alexander Nunnelly’s Red Cross was a polished gem featuring a Red Cross rescue worker with a secret and the woman he is trying to save against her will.
Gabriel Neustadt’s Destruction Room ends the evening with a bang–literally. Actually several bangs. It’s a sophisticated and wry satire that takes on the power and commercialization of violence, and if you didn’t know it had been written by a junior at Shorecrest high school, you might well imagine an older, more experienced playwright had written it.
If you have ever complained that Tampa is a cultural wasteland, you owe it to yourself and to the cultural life of this area to support the Gorilla Theatre, the Young Dramatists’ Project, and these young talents (and the actors are just as impressive as the directors and playwrights, btw). It’s only fifteen bucks and less than two hours of your time. Plus, you can have a glass of wine, a beer or a brownie while you’re watching the show in a cool, dark, air conditioned place. What have you got to lose?
Gorilla Theatre is in Drew Park, and the production runs through June 8.
Tomorrow Matters! is working hard to get thousands of people to participate in the public phase of One Bay’s regional visioning project (“VoiceIt”), which will be kicked off at 5 locations simultaneously on June 2, then continued at smaller meetings and in an online survey throughout the next 6 weeks.
Because I’ve been working with the Tomorrow Matters! (TM!) committee hosting the event, I was allowed to attend a private preview of the four scenarios. I was disappointed to see that the survey form (against all my fabulous, free advice!) was basically just a series of multiple-choice questions asking participants to simply vote for one of the 4 scenarios. I complained about this to everyone I could corner, and I’ve suggested some questions that would encourage participants not just to rubber-stamp one scenario or another, but to provide meaningful input that can be used to shape the final vision. Dena Leavengood (TM! leader) is also suggesting better questions.
As I briefly explained in a previous post, the scenarios have been developed by the One Bay Tech Team which includes a lot of very well-intentioned expert planners, but also includes an awful lot of developers, and NO community activists, environmentalists, bicycle advocates, nor just plain folks. The Tech Team includes no environmental protection agencies besides water-based agencies — did they account for all the upland habitat and other green space besides the wetlands in the scenarios?
Let’s keep that process in mind as we review these 4 scenarios:
Note that Scenarios B, C, & D incorporate the Reality Check results as their starting point. Is that why Scenario D looks so sprawly? Are we expected to believe that protecting our natural resources (D) leads inevitably to more sprawl than transit-oriented development (C)? Why should we have to choose between Scenario C’s goal of promoting transit and Scenario D’s goal of protecting natural resources? Good planning should be able to accomplish both of these goals—and then some.
If we weren’t tied to the Reality Check “data” (a skewed sampling of opinions gathered under contrived conditions), could we come up with a future scenario that accomplishes more of what we want the future to look like? What if we started with professional planners and without special interests?
But whether One Bay offers you a thought-provoking survey form or not, it’s up to you to think outside the four corners of their scenarios and—no matter what questions are asked—tell them what you want to say. Write your ideas on their form in the margins if you have to, or hand in a piece of paper with your thoughts. Pretend every multiple choice question has a write-in blank for “other.”
If none of the 4 scenarios matches your vision, don’t just choose the closest one. Describe your ideal future scenario. Combine parts of the 4 scenarios, or take one scenario and change it, or just explain what’s important to you. Tell them what you like and dislike about all the scenarios. Point out any important elements that are not addressed by the scenarios. You might also step back and comment on the process and suggest ways we might come up with a better vision.
Finally, don’t hesitate to question the underlying assumptions, including the growth projections. Note this point in an Orlando Sentinel commentary about Florida’s recent over development and the vacant suburban slums left in its wake:
“If we didn’t build another house in the suburbs, we still would have too many of them 17 years from now.”
Aside from our local glut of newly built, empty condos & houses, we also have over 50,000 unbuilt homes already approved just in south Hillsborough County. 50,000 homes. Even if we didn’t rezone another farm field we could accommodate much of the growth projected for decades.
This is your turn to have a say in your region’s future. Don’t miss it. But don’t let them hand you a rubber stamp, and then claim that the public has spoken.
You might remember reading about One Bay’s Reality Check exercises, in which 300 hand-picked invitees, rushing against a 90-minute time limit, hurriedly heaped Legos on maps to depict their ideas for the 7-county region’s development over the next 50 years. When selecting the participants, One Bay had set an artificial ratio of 1/3 citizens to 2/3 business and government, which doesn’t reflect the ratio of unaffiliated citizens to moneyed interests in our community.
The exercise was just over a year ago, and at that time I encouraged you to claim a stake in this planning process by joining their mailing list.
The results of this exercise are now being called “data,” and this “data” is being used to inform the next stage of this visioning process. The One Bay Tech Team used this “data” to create 4 scenarios upon which you are now invited to comment.
We’ll get to those scenarios in a moment, but first, take a look at the makeup of the One Bay Tech Team which created the 4 scenarios:
27 Government
10 Development Industry
4 Economic Development
3 Private Consultants to Government
2 Academics
1 Event Facilitator
Notice there are NO unaffiliated citizens, but plenty of developers. Despite my requests to see the scenarios earlier, they’ve been kept a secret from citizens like you and I up until now. Meanwhile development industry insiders have been helping to shape those scenarios before we get our say.
But wait, there’s more insider influence. Recently, One Bay’s project manager was forced to resign due to serious conflicts of interest. While guiding our region’s vision for growth, Amy Maguire was also working for a coalition of large landowners in south Hillsborough pushing for a mega-development on 5,500 acres of rural farmland; she was an advocate of our detested Green-Swath-Sprawlway; and an employee of John Thrasher’s powerful lobbying company that represents giant developers and other special interests across the state.
Now, One Bay is finally inviting everyone to participate in shaping the vision for our region. The invitation proclaims
“One Bay is powered by the voice of the citizens who want to be heard and keep our region sustainable and an attractive place to live, work and play…”
Let’s make sure this comes true. As warped as all this has been so far, I strongly encourage you to participate in One Bay’s visioning process. One Bay is being embraced by our county commission, TBARTA, and other political and business leaders across the 7-county region. It will have great influence over the future of our region—right down to our neighborhoods and our daily quality of life—whether we participate or not.
Keep in mind that while the Tampa Bay Partnership and other One Bay partners are paying for the visioning process, we taxpayers will pay for the growth that is envisioned, and its infrastructure. Yes, new growth pays some impact fees, and the new residents pay new taxes, but that doesn’t begin to cover all the costs that we taxpayers must shell out. We pay even more when poorly planned growth lowers our quality of life, destroys our natural resources, and sucks our free time into the black hole of time wasted in traffic jams.
Citizens must demand—not just a seat at the table—enough seats to represent our numbers and our taxes. If there are 1,000 butchers, bakers & candlestick makers for every developer in this region, then we should have 1,000 seats at the table for every developer seat. After all, it’s our table.
We have 6 weeks, starting with the June 2 kickoff event, to make an honest program out of One Bay, and help make its claims of citizen participation come true. In the next post, I’ll spell out some details on the four scenarios, and how you can make a difference, but for now, PLEASE give serious consideration to taking an ACTIVE role in this.
Didn’t we see this in every sitcom over the past 3 decades? A couple of kids room together, but can’t get along, so they paint a line across, splitting the bedroom in two. Neither kid can cross the line to their brother’s side.
The Tampa Sports Authority has come up with a plan to paint a line across Raymond James Stadium, so Hillsborough Fire Rescue and Tampa Fire Rescue can both work during Bucs games.
Under a plan being worked out… both agencies would attend to fans and football players at games at Raymond James Stadium.
One agency would take the east and north end of the football complex; the other would take the south and west.
I can see it now:
City Guy: “Hey County! I just saw a fan fall down over there in your stands.”
County Guy: “Listen here, City. Why don’t you keep your eyes on your OWN sideline. I’ll know if someone over here needs help.”
City Guy: “We’ve been doing this a lot longer than you. I’m surprised you even found the stadium.”
County Guy: “You City Guys are jerks! You don’t know everything. In fact, some drunk guy just jumped the wall and is running across the field in your end zone - you better go catch him.”
City Guy: “You’re such a tool. That field runner just came from YOUR sideline - that makes him your responsibility. And YOU probably don’t even know HOW to use a taser.”
County Guy: “Why you, I oughtta.”
Of course, by the end of the half-hour episode, those wacky kids learn their lesson that we all need to get along in order to get ahead.
The Tribune editorial board makes some pretty good points with Wednesday’s editorial about St. Pete Beach’s voter-clogged growth approval process.
St. Pete Beach has become a living laboratory to study the statewide consequences of a proposed constitutional amendment called Hometown Democracy.
But regardless of how the town decides it wants to grow, the issues are bewildering. In an earlier vote on a plan, voters saw signs saying vote yes to save the hotels along with signs saying vote no to save the hotels.
Issues have been oversimplified in the campaigns as homeowners vs. developers, preservation vs. growth, low-rise vs. high-rise, tourist trap or serene residential retreat, decay vs. progress.
Voters could easily end up unknowingly voting against their own best interests. That’s no way to run a little city, and it’s certainly no way to run a state.
Go read the whole thing.
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