Opinions to go Online

Earlier this week former Tampa Bay area priest Robert Schaeufele was found not guilty of capital sexual battery in an emotion-and-controversy-charged trial. The jurors all looked shaken after the verdict and none were immediately available for comment. Schaeufele now awaits trials on three more capital sexual battery charges.

The wrenching verdict underscores one aspect of our criminal justice system that we must never confuse. Too often jury verdicts of “not guilty” are interchanged and interpreted as “innocent.”

“Not guilty” is a qualified legal term. It means an absence of provable guilt based on a legal threshold and rules of evidence. Innocence isn’t a technicality. It’s a state, as in sinless, untainted, pure.

In his first trial, Schaeufele was found “not guilty.” But make no mistake; there is nothing “innocent” about a priest administering an enema to a young boy.

* Look who’s moving into the neighborhood — a bunch of lawyers — and the neighbors couldn’t be happier.

It’s what happens when the Solomon Tropp Law Group replaces Club Atlanta at the corner of Kennedy and Fremont. It’s what happens when North Hyde Park neighbors are no longer held hostage to early morning noise, public urination and the occasional murder.

Once City Council scissors some zoning red tape, the Solomon Tropp Law Group should begin renovations this summer.

Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Planning Organization has accepted a plan to spiff up Kennedy with landscaping, ornamental lights and benches. Not everything will happen to everyone’s satisfaction because scarce tax dollars are involved. But at least one Kennedy corridor neighborhood already feels beautified.

* In fits and starts, the Channelside entertainment complex has been making incremental progress in realizing its considerable potential. It certainly hasn’t lacked for key pieces of the puzzle. But the commercial mix, a constant exercise in tinkering and market chemistry, keeps falling shy of its mark.

What the $45-million complex isn’t missing are cruise ships, a trolley line, restaurants or an Imax theater.

But what has been missing is the one obvious element Channelside has long needed to bring in that critical mass of visitor-customers: a Hooters.

Now one is finally on the way.

* High-end retail. A world acclaimed airport. Luxury cruise liners. A Super Bowl champion. Plans for a new art museum. What additional signs are there that Tampa just may have “arrived”? Well, there’s now the $4-million tear-down.

That’s approximately what billionaire Mitchell Rales paid for that eye-catching, waterfront, Italian villa mansion on Davis Islands. Plus nearly $2 million for an adjacent property. Both will be bulldozed to make room for a more modern manse.

Not everyone, presumably, is pleased. Ironically, Rales is the co-founder of Danaher Corp., a hostile takeover specialist.

Much has been justifiably made of how some schools have spent their Florida School Recognition Program reward dollars. More than $300 million has been ladled out since 1999 to reward schools for good FCAT results.

A lot of it has gone where it was intended — for teacher bonuses and traditional educational purchases. But some of it hasn’t. FCAT cash, as we now know, has paid for pizza parties, PlayStation video game systems and playground equipment. And some even went to BoJo the Clown, who was hired with FCAT money to entertain at an elementary school celebration in Sumter County.

It’s really two issues. One is the dilemma of how — literally — to spend such money. Does everyone get a little bit, including the best and the worst teachers? If not, how does that shake out for morale? Do you recognize support people who are not unimportant and could really use a few extra bucks? Do you spend it on the students whose performance earned the reward in the first place? Do you buy some stuff, such as lawn mowers, that the school really needs?

The other issue is the principle involved. Aren’t teaching and learning and performing what the educational process is all about? Whatever happened to certificates, banners and assemblies to honor those who helped make it happen? Is learning no longer its own reward?

Couldn’t that $306 million have been better spent on something other than bonus rewards for those who did their jobs?

Here’s some advice for those black civic leaders who are already questioning Mayor Pam Iorio’s commitment to diversity. Back off.

For openers, don’t rush to judgment. It makes you look more contentious than assertive. A number of appointments have yet to be made. Of the 10 top managers who will report directly to Iorio, she has named but four, one of whom — City Clerk Shirley Foxx-Knowles — is black.

More to the point, your diversity agenda is not more important than the mayor’s charge to find the best personnel possible. Show the sort of good faith you’re demanding from her — even if you still pine for Frank Sanchez or Bob Buckhorn as your mayor.

Moreover, don’t misread the reassignment of Curtis Lane from minority liaison in the mayor’s office to head of city code enforcement. As a former deputy police chief, Lane should mean business-not-as-usual for chronic code violators. It also means window dressing is out in city hall.

Second, and more importantly, look at the mayor’s commitment to East Tampa and see how you can help make it happen. Other than interim City Attorney Fred Karl, no appointment is more symbolically important than that of Ed Johnson, a black banker. Johnson is the city’s director of East Tampa Development and Citywide Lending Programs. It’s a newly created position. Iorio has, in effect, hitched her own political reputation to transforming a poverty-and-crime-infested area into a truly more “livable” part of the city.

Put it this way. If East Tampa becomes nothing more than token islands of Tampa Housing Authority innovation amid a sea of druggies, thugs and dilapidated commercial properties, improved diversity at City Hall will be a hollow celebration.

Black activists need only look across the bay to see the challenges of St. Petersburg’s Midtown for guidance, if not pragmatic inspiration. A recent five-day spree of drive-by shootings in the mostly black and poor section of that city is a graphic reminder that pouring public money into an area is no guarantee that private investors will follow. What they may do is follow each other out of town.

Midtown is Exhibit A for a call to community arms and positive neighborhood leadership. It means saying no to all that is culturally dysfunctional and all that smacks of the victimization syndrome. It means working WITH law enforcement and being thankful that somebody is actually willing to police such high crime areas that are also menacing to officers.

Helping out in East Tampa means heavy lifting. It’s not nearly as easy as calling for diversity at city hall.

But Ed Johnson and Pam Iorio can’t revitalize the area themselves. And it will take more than the creative use of tax increment financing and the creation of community redevelopment areas. City, state and federal purse strings are all drawn tautly.

The key is the jobs-creating private sector. The best intentioned developers are not investing out of altruism. They need to make a profit. They don’t have to choose high-risk communities with scary crime rates, open drug dealing and aging, ill-kept properties.

Absent a community-wide commitment to a safe place to do business, they won’t.

And that’s the mayor’s daunting challenge. And she needs serious, roll-up-the-sleeves, take-no-prisoners activist help to make East Tampa happen.

For all those appalled that the University of South Florida and the Hillsborough school district will be taking a serious budget hit in the coming school year, these thoughts:

*No way is a shortfall not going to hurt. And no way did this have to happen. Florida’s toga-party of a Legislature keeps giving incompetence a bad name. Long-term, revenue-raising solutions? There’s a better chance of bringing back Ol’ Sparky.

Obviously it does no good to write your representative. But here is a perverse suggestion. Send out some thank you cards. One to Jeb Bush, who can’t reconcile Republicans and Libertarians and saves his passion for FCATS, vouchers, affirmative action and presidential visits. One to Johnnie Byrd, who would rather cut a critical service or tap a trust fund than repeal a gaggle of special interest, sales tax exemptions. One to Kendrick Meek, who never got over being kicked out of his governor’s sit-in. The former state senator and now a Congressman from Miami-Dade created Amendment 9 to reduce class size. And the rest to this state’s (but not this county’s) voters who were too clueless to see where their yes vote on Meek’s amendment would lead.

*Florida’s budget is so hamstrung by having to live within Johnnie Byrd’s means, that it was almost shocking that the money would be found to fund a special session to finalize the budget.