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Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn skeptical of county transit tax success in 2016

 
Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn says voters are “not yet secure in their economic existence.”
Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn says voters are “not yet secure in their economic existence.”
Published March 31, 2015

Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn, one of the region's biggest cheerleaders, is not optimistic about the chances of a successful Hillsborough transit referendum next year.

"If the election were held today in Hillsborough, it would lose and it would be, I think, defeated just as badly as the Pinellas referendum was," Buckhorn told the Tampa Bay Times editorial board Monday. "That's sort of the reality with which we're working. Can we change that dynamic over the next year and a half?"

He answered his own question a few moments later: "My sense is even if we went in 2016 we'd lose, so do we have a fallback position for a project, particularly on the transit side? Because for me as mayor, I've got to have those mobility options because I can't build more roads to get myself out of this ditch."

The prediction comes as the county holds a series of public meetings in a process called Go Hillsborough meant to help officials determine how best to address transportation issues. County Administrator Mike Merrill has said the goal is to have a plan and a proposed funding source by this fall so officials have a year to build momentum for a 2016 referendum in which the county could ask voters to approve an extra sales tax.

Attention has turned to Hillsborough after November's overwhelming defeat of the Greenlight Pinellas referendum — 62 percent voted no — that would have increased the county sales tax by a penny to expand bus service and build a light rail line between St. Petersburg and Clearwater.

Why is Buckhorn so pessimistic about Hillsborough's chances?

"My sense is when (voters) walk into that polling booth, they are not yet secure in their economic existence, that it's still for the average person a rather fragile environment," Buckhorn said. "I just don't think they're comfortable enough yet forking over more money to a government or governments that they're not sure can deliver on what they say they're going to do."

Merrill said he agrees with Buckhorn, but only because the county is so early in the process.

"That's what this whole effort is about," Merrill said. "It's about recognizing, for all the reasons the mayor talks about, that the community is not ready to make that commitment. The Go Hillsborough public outreach is a way for people to understand the need, to listen to what they value and what they need and at the end of that, they hopefully will be willing to say they want to invest in the future and the prosperity of this community."

Merrill said he is seeing a level of public engagement that wasn't evident before Hillsborough's failed transit referendum in 2010.

Buckhorn said a good example of a "fallback project" would be a system connecting downtown Tampa, the city's West Shore area and Tampa International Airport. That, he said, would give voters a tangible example of mass transit at work.

"If history is any indication in Denver and Phoenix and some other places, once that happens they start clamoring for it to come to their neighborhood," he said. "That may be more attainable."