As far as recapping the agenda items Council/CRA Board voted on, there’s not much to report. I do want to mention I think I misunderstood the $5000 CRA Post Disaster Grant Relief. I believe this was to cover future events, not to help with post-Milton work. Board member Hurtak offered a motioned that was approved by the board at the end of the CRA meeting to allocate another $100,000 for the East Tampa CRA district’s tree trimming/removal fund and there are still funds available in the other districts. The evening meeting was uneventful aside from the strong public support for the redevelopment of Saint Johns Parish school.
The special call discussion on “decorum and efficiency” in between however has created quite a bit of drama, enough to get the Tampa Bay Times to assign a reporter to cover it. This was on the heals of the city announcing Mobility Director Vik Bhide was stepping down. He has been at the center of a lot of contentious issues going back to at least 2023. Tampa Bay Times reported accusations of a hostile work place in July of 2023. January of this year, several of those former employees spoke during a workshop item related to whistleblower complaints. Last week a current Employee of the Mobility Department during public comment offered new allegations of a hostile work environment along with accusations of fraud and abuse. Add in stormwater and contentious projects like South Howard flood relief it’s been a lot. The route study and streetscape concepts presentation on June 5 should be something.
As to the mayor’s letter and substance, I haven’t seen the letter but La Gaceta mentioned specifically the issue between Council member Clendenin and Abbye Feeley. I shared my thoughts on that buried in a long wrap up I wrote in March about that issue and I still feel that way.
At the end of Thursday’s meeting there was a discussion amongst Council under agenda item 101. Rules and decorum. I thought it was going to be a public admonishment of Council member Clendenin in how he spoke to a staff member at a recent Council meeting. During new business Council member Clendenin wanted to introduce new language into the code to increase the required size of garages in single family homes. He was misunderstanding the process so when Abbye Feely tried to interject her opinion, he said “run for office and you can do that.” And not in a joking manner. Never mind he just approved her appointment by the Mayor to be the highest paid city employee ever and to be THE subject matter expert for Development, that was a completely inappropriate thing to say to a representative of the Mayor’s office. We can disagree, but raising your voice and yelling back to an employee of the city , in public no less, shouldn’t be tolerated. Council doesn’t accept that kind of behavior from the public, they shouldn’t demonstrate it themselves.
However, on the flip side, the complaints about “too many staff reports”, I think the mayor needs to ask why are there so many? The public is demanding oversight. The City Attorney makes clear every chance she gets that personnel is strictly up to the mayor. Then the mayor should accept some responsibility for the issues. It wasn’t up to Council to replace 5 of the top 6 people in Development and Economic Opportunity. The issues within Mobility aren’t new. Ignoring them for 2 years got the city nowhere.
She complained about tracking 60 staff reports and how that’s a drain on staff’s time. Council has limited the number of in person staff reports to no more than 5 each regular meeting and in my opinion done a better job of keeping them focused since they adopted their new rules. They do ask for more written reports, but again, they are often informational in nature sharing already generated data or a quick update for the public on the status of a project. I think the idea of asking for more written reports was in response to wanting to respecting staff’s time and not require them to spend half their day sitting around waiting to give a quick public update. The upcoming agenda has 9 staff reports—one with a request to continue until June 5 and five submitted as written reports updating the status on specific projects. I’ll acknowledge Council member Viera having a standing monthly written report on Station 24 with a quarterly in person report plus another motion request for an in person report is excessive, but so were the excuses for why the station has been delayed.
If the problem is internally “tracking” 60 motions, that sounds like a you problem. Partner with Tech and Innovation to define the bottlenecks and map out a technical solution. An electronic calendar of approved motions with a notification system and some kind of editorial check list. Figure it out. But limiting oversight and transparency isn’t the answer.
There were also some discussion about Charter amendments and the budget during new business I intend to cover in separate posts as they are big subjects I have a lot of thoughts on. No motions were made, though a couple were floated.
