Council met for four hours Thursday morning with a regular meeting agenda with the much anticipated and highly attended evening special call workshop/continued public hearing for the transmittal of the future land use portion of the comprehensive plan update. Fortunately that meeting only lasted 5 hours ending just after 10pm.

Starting with the future land use update: continued. Perhaps I was the last person in Tampa to know they weren’t up against a deadline and that the transmittal would be continued. It sounded like a foregone conclusion from the start and ended with an unanimously approved motion to continue until another special call meeting February 17, 2026. The companion items on the agenda were also continued as they weren’t even discussed.

First, I want to point out that there’s obviously something broken in this system. This update started 3 years ago; there’d been at least a dozen staff updates and workshops before council prior to the May 2025 meeting. That something either so drastically changed between the last preliminary approval of the update direction in the fall and what the planning commission approved or that it was failed to be communicated to the community shouldn’t happen again. That it took another dozen and half community forums, a 3 month delay and another 5 hour meeting to basically not have resolutions on key issues is failure. That’s on everyone — council, the planning commission, us.

I will take credit for the planning commission acknowledging that yes, the current plan would accommodate the anticipated population growth. The argument to increase density regardless is that “people don’t want the density that’s in the current plan in their neighborhoods”. Guess what? Those entitlements can’t go away so at some point, it’s coming to their bonny single family home neighborhood. The proposed plan update apparently is an attempt to slow it down by pushing more density along roads that somehow miraculously are “transit ready” or what ever the catch phrase they’re trying to market it under this pass was. I guess some progress was made because the debate is which roads (which neighborhoods have the loudest voices) and whether it’s 1/8 of a mile or 1/16 of a mile from the road for increased density. Anyway, February 17th this will be back on the agenda.

Another can that’s been kicked a few times and took maybe its last dent was the item regarding reimbursement resolutions. First appearing on the agenda in May, continued until a FY26 workshop which was continued until Thursday to appear again on October 6. One of the sticking points was the TPD Howard Ave Annex not appearing on the resolution. Except it does in the 2022 reimbursement resolution under a different name. That was approved in the FY23 budget as a much smaller project. Somewhere it ballooned in cost and rebranded as Howard Ave Annex but was still under the same CIP. When council approved the design portion of the contract, they knew it was going to be $41 plus what ever had been spent on the property acquisition. However that $41 million isn’t represented directly in the proposed reimbursement resolution. Why? The final discussion seemed to end with a decision to only bring back a new reimbursement resolution with only the $105 million in projects that weren’t previously approved in reimbursement resolutions rather than combine all 3 resolutions into one. I’ll remind everyone these projects were all approved conceptually in prior year budgets and is unrelated to any spending proposed in the FY26 budget.

The final significant item that was continued was the first reading for the ordinance to modify Chapter 9 of the municipal code. Code Enforcement. Rather than try to summarize the whole discussion I’ll direct you to what Bobby Creighton wrote over at Vibrant Places. The crux is the admin and City Attorney is arguing “policy and procedure” is a function of the executive branch and therefore best managed through an executive order. That using an executive order is more efficient to be able to make changes to said policies and procedures. Which sounds like a perfect argument for why it should be spelled out in the ordinance to prevent abuse of the code enforcement process. Hypothetically speaking of course. It’s scheduled to be back on the agenda November 6th.

Finally I’ll add that if stormwater and what we are doing long term to address it is an issue you’re following, there was another good update from staff and the engineering firm doing the master plan. You can watch on YouTube (cued to the start of the discussion). On the short term front, it was previewed a couple of weeks ago during the special call stormwater budget workshop, but the city took them out of beta and went live. There are now 2 interactive dashboards for both completed and in-progress storm water maintenance work.