Thursday, March 09, 2006
Former Mayor Murphy’s Dream Goes South
Tampa’s Bizarre Sense of Humor
This is no joke. Urban Planners in Tampa have invited Pittsburgh previous Mayor to offer advice on revitalizing Tampa’s urban core. But here is the punch line. According to the president of the Tampa Downtown Partnership, “We want to hear about profiles in courage and the kind of impact creative thinking can have in a downtown.”
Courage? It does not take courage to spend tax dollars, especially those paid mostly by non-residents, such as the RAD tax. It takes chutzpah, but courage? Not as courage is commonly understood. Displaying courage would have required standing up to unions, especially firefighters. It would have meant pushing cost saving through outsourcing many City functions to the private sector. It would have meant working hard to cut spending and taxes and preventing the City’s slide into distressed status.
Courage was not required to pursue a strategy to spend large amounts of tax dollars on stadiums, a convention center and two failed department stores.
As for creative thinking, efforts that fail miserably to accomplish the stated goals can hardly be called creative solutions. Pie in the sky is a better description of plans that deliberately eschew the rigorous analysis and empirical research necessary before plunging ahead. Indeed, deliberately ignoring any of the common sense arguments against wasting tax dollars can never qualify as creative. A better description is obstinate blindness.
Poor Tampa. If they are smart, they will learn from the mayor’s mistakes and not listen to his advice.
This is no joke. Urban Planners in Tampa have invited Pittsburgh previous Mayor to offer advice on revitalizing Tampa’s urban core. But here is the punch line. According to the president of the Tampa Downtown Partnership, “We want to hear about profiles in courage and the kind of impact creative thinking can have in a downtown.”
Courage? It does not take courage to spend tax dollars, especially those paid mostly by non-residents, such as the RAD tax. It takes chutzpah, but courage? Not as courage is commonly understood. Displaying courage would have required standing up to unions, especially firefighters. It would have meant pushing cost saving through outsourcing many City functions to the private sector. It would have meant working hard to cut spending and taxes and preventing the City’s slide into distressed status.
Courage was not required to pursue a strategy to spend large amounts of tax dollars on stadiums, a convention center and two failed department stores.
As for creative thinking, efforts that fail miserably to accomplish the stated goals can hardly be called creative solutions. Pie in the sky is a better description of plans that deliberately eschew the rigorous analysis and empirical research necessary before plunging ahead. Indeed, deliberately ignoring any of the common sense arguments against wasting tax dollars can never qualify as creative. A better description is obstinate blindness.
Poor Tampa. If they are smart, they will learn from the mayor’s mistakes and not listen to his advice.
