Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

Your local elected officials are the people who determine if Wal-mart will build in your neighborhood.  They determine how much you pay for parking, which amenities your parks have, how many police are on hand, and how fast the fire department will show up at your house.

Local leaders are responsible for a myriad of public services and agencies such as airports, convention centers, museums, beaches, harbors, zoos, clinics, law libraries, and public housing. They provide services such as child and family services, elder services, mental health services, welfare services, veterans assistance services, animal control, probation supervision, historic preservation, food safety regulation, and environmental health services. They have many additional officials like public defenders, arts commissioners, human rights commissioners, and planning commissioners. Finally, there may also be a county fire department (as distinguished from fire departments operated by individual cities, special districts, or the state government).

These people affect your day-to-day life as no one else can.

And YOU determine who “these people” are.

We have already listed the candidates for your Hillsborough County elections.  From here forward, we are going to find out all we can about them, and encourage them to address us citizens.  And we’re going to get to know them, so we can make an informed decision when we vote.

But we all have differing ideas of what makes a good leader, so I want to make sure you are heard.  Leave a comment below with an answer to this question:

WHAT QUESTION DO YOU WANT TO ASK THE CANDIDATES?

So the Gov’nah changed his philosophy on oil drilling off the coast of Florida, and so have other already-elected officials in a huge flip-flop while gas prices are huge (with thanks to speculation in commodities trading).

So riddle us this — do you approve of oil drilling off the coast of Florida?

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Here are your 2008 candidates for Hillsborough County elections (incumbents are marked with an *):

Property Appraiser

• Rob Townsend (R)
• * Rob Turner (R)
• Ken Ayers (D)

Tax Collector

• * Doug Belden (R)
• Beverly P. Harris (No party affiliation)

Supervisor of Elections

• * Buddy Johnson (R)
• Phyllis Busansky (D)

County Commission, District 2

• Tom Aderhold (R)
• * Ken Hagan (R)
• Harold “Bud” Gleason (write-in)

County Commission, District 4

• * Al Higginbotham (R)
• Pete Gifford (No party affiliation)

County Commission, District 6

• * Brian Blair (R)
• Don Kruse (R)
• Kevin Beckner (D)
• Denise Layne (D)
• Joe Redner (D)

School Board, District 1

• Dave Schmidt
• * Susan Valdes

School Board, District 7

• Stephen Gorham
• * Carol W. Kurdell
• Jason Mims

Soil and Water Conservation, Dist. 2

• A. J. Brent
• Richard Van Epps

Soil and Water Conservation, Dist. 4

• Jeffrey Ross Garbus
• Tyson Richmond
• Betty Jo Tompkins

Re-elected without opposition

• Sheriff David Gee
• Clerk of the Circuit Court Pat Frank
• School Board, District 3, Jack Lamb
• School Board, District 5 Doretha Wynn Edgecomb

Any woman past a certain age can remember a time when gender bias was open, blatant, ugly. Gender discrimination is still around, but these days it’s usually more subtle than the historic kind and the kind that was aimed at Hillary Clinton during her run for the Democratic nomination for president.

PMS jokes, mood swing jokes, make-up jokes and comedy routines about her pants suits were routine. So were comments about how she looked, whether she deliberately showed her cleavage at a dinner, her nagging wife voice and - and worse.

Male candidates were not subject to similar attacks.

You may well have heard some of those jokes or sexist comments coming out of the mouths of people you know and love.

But there wasn’t anything funny about the yearning by many women to see the ultimate glass ceiling shattered. Some of those women not only remember but experienced discrimination. So the idea of a woman president was pretty heady. Clinton’s loss was their loss and they took it hard.

I felt a certain disappointment as well, but not as much as some because, though I’d love to see a woman president, I didn’t much like Hillary and I couldn’t cast a vote for her or anyone simply based on gender. Or age, or race, for that matter.

William March, political writer for The Tampa Tribune wrote a thoughtful piece in Saturday’s paper in which he asked a number of local women how they felt about Clinton’s loss and whether they would support the presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama. Some said they would; others said they would but reluctantly.

National stories indicate that some women - even young women - are so disappointed and/or angry that Clinton lost that they will simply not vote at all. Others say they will vote for the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain, even though they are Democrats. And quite a few are angry at the Democratic Party for not speaking out about the sexism aimed at Clinton.

The Tribune’s editorial section followed March’s story up on Sunday with a package in Commentary featuring many of the same women March quoted sounding off about the gender factor.

Rosemary Goudreau, the Trib’s editorial page editor, artfully summed up female discontent, while former Tampa Mayor Sandy Freedman, Clerk of Courts Pat Frank, and historian Doris Weatherford added their voices to the discussion.

While Freedman and Frank seem angry, Weatherford explained the discontent in her usual thoughtful, measured way.

Subconsciously, women, particularly older women who have witnessed a lot, resent the fact that nobody ever says thank you, and that (women’s) issues are put off to later,” she wrote.

I agree with Weatherford about the resentment and completely understand the anger some women feel over Clinton’s suspension of her campaign. Recent personal incidents in my own life have fueled exactly those feeling in me.

Only after some real soul-searching did I come to understand that I’d spent far too much time time and energy focusing on something I can’t change. The only healthy and productive thing to do is keep on keeping on.

Will women eventually get the appreciation we deserve? I don’t know. But I can continue to educate my grandchildren about how things were, how far women have come - and how far we have to go.

It’s gonna be a mess downtown.

If you plan to head downtown for the ObamaRally and haven’t left your house yet, get in the car now. Parking is going to be, uh, trying.

For those of you content to just read about it, The Tribune’s William March is liveblogging the event.

We have said before that Buddy Johnson is not fit to be the Supervisor of Elections.  He continues to prove us right.

He’s not real good with the money stuff:  Thanks to his banker’s generous lending policy, the guy has property all over the Tampa Bay area, yet he seems to have trouble paying his taxes on time.

He not real good with bad employees:  Buddy Johnson has a history of letting people go with big severance pay on the condition of silence.  To be fair, that practice is county-wide and like the Tribune, we would like to know what’s up with that.

He hires and promotes questionably:  Johnson hired his boyhood Little League teammate Jim Reed in 2003 at $50,000.   Reed got five raises or promotions within 19 months, and left the office this week making $125,000.  Reed is wisely bailing on Johnson to move to Virginia to be with his wife, former Managing Editor of the Tampa Tribune, Donna Reed.

At least he is competent at the election stuff, right?  Uh, nope.  He has non-citizens registering to vote, and mistakes in nearly every election are well documented, too.  Not to mention his attempt to collect illegal contributions for his own campaign.

Still, through all of that, he is undeterred, and is running for reelection as Supervisor of Elections this year.

I suppose he still has his connections.  For instance, his campaign treasurer is also his banker.

There is no way that even county Republicans can get behind this guy for reelection.

So the question is will they find someone to run against him in the primary?  Or will they just concede the race to Phyllis?

What if you held an election, and no one (literally - not one person) cared?

The City of Tamarac (near Fort Lauderdale) wants to annex the adjoining neighborhood of Prospect Bend. The question of annexation was on Tuesday’s ballot for Prospect Benders, and not a single one of them showed up to vote. Check out these tidbits from the article:

on Election Day, poll workers sat in a nearby polling site… for 12 hours — to no avail.

“I’m just shocked that there was an election held and no one showed,” said state Rep. Jack Seiler, D- Wilton Manors…

… registered voter, 23-year-old Juan Vidal: “It doesn’t make any difference to me either way.”

And now some folks want Floridians to vote twice for the same thing?

Good luck with that.

I confess I’m a political junkie. I also confess I assume - stupidly, I guess - that most people are at least somewhat informed about the what’s going on in politics these days. So when my yard dude and his co-worker both disavowed me of that notion Tuesday it broke my heart.

“You guys vote yet?”

“I’m not registered,” said one. The other said the same. “I’ve never voted,” added No. 1.

I’m familiar with non-voters. My father never voted. Ever.

“I don’t want to encourage them,” he’d tell me and then launch into one of the many stories he told and retold about political corruption in New York City during the Tammany Hall days of his youth.

My father was cynical. I don’t think my yard guys are. They just have a lot of other stuff on their plates, primarily families and making enough money to keep households going.

But they’re both dealing with the multitude of problems that confront workers who live from week to week - problems they ought to be using their votes to solve such as no health care, high taxes, high property insurance, skyrocketing gas prices, a gallon of milk with a pricetag almost as high as high test.

One had little or no money to buy holiday presents for his kids. The other has a chipped tooth that he can’t afford to have fixed.

When I began yelling (fondly) at them about not voting, No. 1, who runs a very successful landscaping business, tried to deflect the attack by arguing he wasn’t smart enough to vote. He doesn’t keep up with the issues, he said, and, therefore, isn’t well enough informed to make a wise choice.

“I might vote for the wrong guy,” he said. “So I leave voting up to smart people like you.”

Not a good excuse. Not an excuse at all. In fact, it’s bad, bad, bad. He ought to be informed. We all should.

But at least he isn’t making an ill-informed vote. Not so a woman I’ve known for about 10 years who told me later in the day that she doesn’t even know if she’s a Democrat or a Republican.

“I’m not keeping up with things,” she said. “Who’s running?”

Since she was cutting my hair and had scissors in her hands, I didn’t explode. Instead, I calmly mentioned all the candidates. She didn’t recognize most of the names and had no clue what party any of them were in.

Since her admission came after I asked her if she’d voted yet, she tried to reassure me that she would exercise her franchise.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I promise I’ll vote on the way home.”

I didn’t have the heart to ask her for whom - and why. I probably should have told her, “Don’t bother.” But I didn’t do that either.

I guess I’m trying to convince myself that any vote is better than no vote at all.

Editor’s note: See similar laments from the 2004 election, an overwhelming show of apathy in the 2006 election, the general population’s failure to know the slightest thing about government on a national scale, turnout at the ‘06 Presidentials, ghostly turnout at St. Pete’s elections in ‘07, and Wayne Garcia’s recent piece on irrational voters.