Revel with a cause: Another State of the City speech, another exercise in soaring rhetoric, symbolic optics and diversity shout-outs. Mayor Bob Buckhorn definitely gets it: “From New Tampa to Port Tampa, we’re all in this together.”
With a riverfront and skyline as backdrop, the historic Tampa Armature Works Building for presentation ambience, and a receptive, inclusive audience, he comes close to preacher mode. Nobody waxes euphoric about Tampa’s potential, can-do spirit and regional destiny quite like Mayor Bob.
But this time he also made news.
Jane Castor, the retirement-eligible Tampa Police chief, will be back. Yes, that notorious DUI scenario was a TPD embarrassment, but her role in a 69 per cent drop in crime over the last 11 years is compelling. She was nationally prominent in the incident-free Republican National Convention. It’s the right move.
And for good measure, Buckhorn underscored his commitment to the synergistic tandem of transit and regionalism. Yes, he wants a Hillsborough transit referendum by 2016–although he made it clear that he “would prefer sooner.”
And, yes, he’s more than an interested observer of what’s going on in Pinellas County, where his simpatico fellow mayor, Rick Kriseman of St. Petersburg, will be a key partner.
“We need to support Greenlight Pinellas,” said Buckhorn of the Nov. 4 Pinellas transit referendum. “We need to do everything we can to make sure that passes. When Pinellas succeeds, we succeed.” In other words, he wants to see Tampa and St. Pete connected by rail.
And on that other matter that always finds a forum. “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind his (Kriseman’s) baseball team.”