Commissioner Murman quoted in this StPetersBlog article on HART:
Some HART members express further misgivings about potential transit referendum
By Mitch Perry on December 1, 2014
The power to put a referendum on the 2016 ballot in Hillsborough County on transit is up to the seven members of the Board of County Commissioners, and one of their newest members, Stacy White, has been quite explicit in declaring his lack of support for such a tax while on the campaign trail.
“I’m not in support of any type of tax right now,” White reiterated after attending his first meeting as a member of the HART (Hillsborough Area Regional Transit) board. He self-deprecatingly said as a new commissioner he was “wet behind the ears” and thus wasn’t prepared to address where the funding would need to come from to contend with Hillsborough County’s transportation woes, but said he knows he can’t just criticism against a proposed sales tax. “It’s easy to say you’re against something. But what are you for?,” he asked rhetorically, adding that it would take him a bit of time to come up with a strategy to answer that question more fully.
“We have major traffic gridlock,” he admits. “So the question is, how do we solve that? Is it Bus Rapid Transit? Is it expanding upon our bus system? Everybody talks about that bad word, rail, right? But there is so much more to transportation infrastructure than rail. I want to make sure that I can come up with some sort of comprehensive plan that I can either propose or listen and support another commissioner’s plan.”
As White sat in on his first meeting with the transit agency on Monday, he got support for his opposition from one of his new HART colleagues, Josh Burgin.
Though Burgin couldn’t attend the meeting in person, he wanted to make sure that the board understood where he was coming from regarding the potential 2016 ballot measure loud and clear, sending a letter to HART board chair Mike Suarez that Suarez read aloud during the board’s monthly meeting.
Referring to how not only Greenlight Pinellas, but other transportation referendums went down to defeat in Polk, Alachua and Hernando counties by wide margins, he warned Hillsborough County leaders that they “cannot ignore the implications of these outcomes.” But he’s not sure they are.
“Immediately following election night’s tax proposed defeats, some local leaders publicly denied that these neighborhood county election outcomes had any hearing on the visibility of 1-cent proposal for Hillsborough in 2016,” Burgin wrote. “The hackneyed claims that the Hillsborough Proposal for 2016 would be different from Pinellas plan were reminiscent of prior claims that the Pinellas plan was to be different than Hillsborough’s in 2010, but in the end both the Hillsborough 2010 and Pinellas 2014 plans were opposed by approximately 60% of the voters.”
Burgin then cited a post-referendum analysis produced by Hillsborough County’s Metropolitan Planning Organization in February of 2013 regarding the failed Hillsborough 2010 vote, as well as the Tampa Bay Partnership’s recent voter analysis on Greenlight Pinellas, and deducting that the public’s priorities are for streets, roads and bridges, and not for light-rail. He then goes on to write that a 1/2 cent proposal “starts off with at least a some chance of acceptance by the voters,” before clarifying that he doesn’t support any type of tax increase in the future.
Burin’s opposition is no surprise. He took on then-incumbent County Commissioner Mark Sharpe back in 2010 for the GOP nomination to the board, mainly due to Sharpe’s outspoken support for the transit tax (Sharpe held off Burgin and went on to easily win re-election).
He concludes his letter by saying that “the most likely scenario” for increased HART funding through a tax would be a 1/2-cent sales tax, “with a majority of the revenues committed to roads and a relative small amount is dedicated to HART.”
But while such transit referendums all went down to defeat in the Sunshine State last month, that wasn’t the case around the country. HART board chair Mike Suarez cited a statement issued by the American Public Transportation Association that noted that public transit initiatives prevailed at the ballot box in 15 out of 25 possible local public transit ballot initiatives on November 4.
The only other comments the letter elicited came from HART board member and County Commission Chair Sandy Murman, who said it should be a priority in 2015 for the agency to discuss how to raise more money for buses and services. “That’s what they want. The message is clear to me.” She said she wants to have workshops on bonding, finances and going through line items. “We can’t keep on getting bogged down with other administrative and governance issues….that’s got to be our mission and goal over the next two years for HART.” Murman said the best way for the board to deal with that would be to restructure some of their committees. Chairman Suarez said he would entertain such discussions at an upcoming board meeting.
