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Friday's letters: We still lost most of the referendum

 
Published June 20, 2019

Ruling is a big win for power of the vote | Column, June 19

We still lost most of the referendum

I take issue with Sue Carlton's column claiming a "... big win for power of the vote" and with the Tampa Bay Times' editorial praise for Hillsborough Circuit Judge Rex Barbas' "balanced ruling" on the transportation tax. Both praise the judge's ruling because it allows the tax to stay in place while removing the oversight committee's authority and the specific allocations because they "violated the County Commission's authority under state law to make budgeting decisions."

Didn't the appropriate authorities approve placing the referendum on the ballot? Didn't that referendum, approved by 57 percent of those voting, include both provisions the judge deemed in violation of state authority? So why is this a "big win" for the voters who got only one-third of what they approved? Isn't this an instance of judicial legislation and not all that different from the Florida Legislature's recent modification of the statewide referendum on restoring felons' voting rights? Both violate the referendum-based constitutional authority of us voters. And so this ruling makes us dependent on the "good graces" of our County Commission to approve two-thirds of what we have now been denied.

Mark Amen, Tampa

Honor voters' intent on transportation tax | Editorial, June 19

Developers should be paying

The premise that a majority of voters voted for the transportation referendum becomes a moot point when much of what they voted for violated state law. The Tampa Bay Times pushed for passage. Yet it is curious that this news organization never questioned why the public is getting almost the entire bill for transit impacts that were created by land developers.

Hillsborough County promotes development while developers pay a small fraction of the total negative impacts. The Times knows that developers pay very little. Yet they never pushed back or made a point of suggesting that the wrong people (average taxpayers) were getting stuck with the whole bill. It appears that special interests like Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik and his land developer cabal used their influence on the reporting and the editorials promoting the acceptance of average taxpayers heavily subsidizing transit impacts over the next 30 years.

George Niemann, Dover

Move forward with rapid transit | June 15

Wrong bus rapid transit line

We definitely need improved mass transit, but the route from Clearwater to St. Petersburg has disappeared as a priority and been replaced with bus rapid transit to the beaches from St. Petersburg that we really don't need. Spending $44 million to cut 10-to-15 minutes off the trip is not money well spent. We could certainly achieve this time reduction with an express bus during key times utilizing the trolley buses we already have. The proposed rapid transit bus will still get caught in a bottleneck traffic backup at the bridge and on the barrier island side that has no room to designate a lane of traffic for a bus.

Pinellas County needs to step back, take a breath, and design a bus rapid transit line on U.S. 19, especially since there are no traffic lights along the way due to the massive amount of time and money spent building overpasses, a job well done. Creating a successful and much less expensive rapid transit bus there will help usher in our next chapter of transit. Ivylyn Harrell, St. Petersburg