Greed and Graft

Host

Joshua Black

Description

Summaries of the Saint Petersburg City Council committee meetings for January 31, 2019

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Transcript

Welcome to the 5th edition of the Saint Petersburg Florida Area News podcast for the year 2019. I’m your host, Joshua Black.

Today, we will cover the committee meetings that took place on January 31, 2019. The first was an agenda review for the full-day city council meeting planned for February 7. Ed Montanari pulled a couple of items from the consent agenda, and Lisa Wheeler-Bowman added a new business item. These meetings are important because they are intended to cut down the time required to conduct the city council meetings, and many explanations from staff to clarify items are made here that aren’t made during the ordinary meetings.

For example, agenda item F2 would seem to be redundant for a similar item from the December 6, 2018, meeting, but, as Brejesh from Engineering and Heather from the legal team explained, the item is actually a correction of that action, because the contract signed differed from what was presented to Council. No explanation for how that happened, but I’m sure a one on one meeting from staff will happen this coming week with Ed Montanari, the council member who asked about it.

The other significant occurrence was the fact that Council Chair Charlie Gerdes implored the rest of the council to be mindful of the tone they would strike in the impending Committee of the Whole with the board of the Saint Petersburg Housing Authority. If you recall, the former chair of the council, Lisa Wheeler-Bowman, had made quite an effort to get this meeting to take place after the board had requested $3M from the city council for the Jordan Park project. In her efforts, she had uncovered some practices of the board that seemed to be quite unlawful on their face and clearly unethical, too. The result was that the board was resistant to the idea of meeting, because they didn’t want to face any questions, but they still requested the $3M.

As a result, City Council requested their legal team to draw up a request that the mayor consider removing two of the board members, a move that would have to have been approved by council. This suddenly changed the tone of the meeting talks. They still requested to preview the list of topics that council members intended to discuss with the board for the meeting set for January 31. However, they didn’t reciprocate. In fact, new council chair Gerdes informed the Committee of the Whole during Agenda Review that he had almost insisted on postponing the meeting, because the board did not submit the back up materials for the items they wished to discuss until Tuesday. The only reason that he didn’t, he said, is that the board had already bought a plane ticket for the expert they needed to testify during the scheduled CoW. She was flying in from Arizona, and Charlie didn’t want to waste her flight.

I got the sense from several of the members that they wouldn’t have minded wasting her flight.