Greed and Control

Host

Joshua Black

Description

Joshua covers the council events for January 17, 2019.

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Transcript

Welcome to the 3rd edition of the Saint Petersburg, Florida, Area News Podcast for 2019. I’m your host, Joshua Black, and today we will cover the committee meetings and city council meetings that took place on January 17.

The first committee meeting was at 10 AM, and it was a Committee of the Whole regarding the Fiscal Year 2020, which begins in October. City Administration officials started with an estimate of a 3% increase in revenues and a total demand on those revenues that exceeded them by $13M. When Councilman Ed Montanari asked why the budget was unbalanced, staff explained that it was just a wishlist--everyone had asked for everything they could, leaving to council itself the question of whether they would get it all. Council Chair Charlie Gerdes reminded the rest of the council that the intent of the meeting is to get everyone’s wish list on the table, come to a consensus on the needs vs the wants, fund the needs and consider the wants.

You could tell that the police department and fire department had been lobbying ahead of this meeting. All of council was pretty much on board with fully funding their requests. No word, though, if Chief Holloway has yet included a request for funding for the body cams he keeps putting off.

Other near consensus topics included funding for housing subsidies (misnamed affordable housing), Grow Smarter (actually a contradiction to affordable housing, because of the law of supply and demand), Bus Rapid Transit, Complete Streets, infrastructure projects, and some community redevelopment ideas.

Only council member Montanari brought up the burden that funding all of this will have on taxpayers, and his suggestion of a millage rate decrease was met mostly with scorn. The council chair did voice some support, but both councilmember Rice and Kornell strenuously objected, saying that budget cuts mean staffing cuts and pension cuts and project cuts. But Councilman Montanari was talking about decreasing the increase, not a true cut in the budget.

There was a curious exchange between Councilmember Darden Rice and Deputy Mayor Tamika Tomalin. Rice insists that there are food deserts in the city, and Tomalin said that’s not the case, not in the true sense of the term. Perhaps the co-op group that presented at BF&T last week won’t get that funding, after all.

In social media interactions, Rice had shared a link to a Newsweek article that lamented that food sales at dollar stores had outpaced sales at Whole Foods as her reason for being concerned about food deserts. To be sure, there are a lot of dollar stores in the City of Saint Petersburg, but that’s not solely because of poverty. Selling food isn’t a big money maker for any store, full service grocer or otherwise. Dollar stores make most of their money from selling household wares, household supplies, and fancy cheap trinkets,