In a special meeting last night, the Treasure Island city commission voted unanimously to pay $450,000 in attorney’s fees for the three hoteliers who sued the city in November 2014. The hoteliers won the suit…
“The referendum language was vetted closely,” Hillsborough County commissioner Kimberly Overman told the Tampa Bay Times earlier this month. Overman was speaking about the ballot language for the Hillsborough transit tax hike referendum that passed…
“I’m a lawyer,” All For Transportation (AFT) volunteer Brian Willis told FloridaPolitics.Com today. “We’ve had attorneys at Holland & Knight vet this. Constitutional law professors. Nobody had any issues with it.” Willis was referencing the tax…
Yesterday, 10News reported that Hillsborough County commissioner Stacy White is filing a lawsuit today to kill a recent sales tax hike for transit. The measure adds 1% of sales tax, was passed with 57% of the vote…
Just as citizens vote on a 1% sales tax to fund transit in Hillsborough County, the county’s transit authority reported that its bus ridership is down 10.3% for the fiscal year that ended September 30th…
EDITOR’S NOTE: this article by Jim Bleyer is reposted from Tampa Bay Beat. We post it because the Tampa Bay Times today reported that the leader of Hillsborough County NAACP has come out in opposition…
In its fiscal year which ended September 30th, so-called revenue passenger trips on PSTA’s network of buses dropped 4.5% compared to the previous year. PSTA’s ridership is thus now 13% lower than it was 10…
A local citizen journalist claims that Seminole mayor Leslie Waters tried to remove him from city public meetings. In a written statement submitted to the city, a city firefighter seems to back up the journalist’s story. And…
Largo City commissioner Samantha Fenger used her city e-mail account to ask city staff to sign petition cards so she could get on the ballot for the November election. On the face of it, Fenger’s…
A review of the Tampa Bay Partnership’s (TBP) 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 tax returns shows a 35% decline in membership dues in just three years. In the last year, it dropped 11% from the year…
Voter support for the 14% hike in the Hillsborough County sales tax is already unlikely. If the statutorily required audit of the government agencies receiving the money was supposed to increase voter support, a state…
Yesterday morning, a state agency told the Guardian that they did not have an audit report that was due for delivery to them five days earlier. Yet that same afternoon, the Tampa Bay Times obtained…
The Hillsborough petition effort underway to raise the sales tax hike to fund transit is looking very shaky. The petition itself violates state law, and the overall effort is sloppy in matters large and small.…
The City of Clearwater scored a victory on Friday when the 2nd District Court of Appeals (DCA) for Florida overturned a circuit court decision involving submerged land in waters off of Clearwater Bay. The Guardian…
The City of Temple Terrace displays a third party political ad prominently on the front page of its website. The ad opposes Amendment 1, a high-profile referendum measure on this year’s general election ballot in November. The…
In the past six months, the Guardian has reported on PSTA’s plummeting ridership and its declining farebox recovery, We’ve also reported on PSTA’s increased reliance on free parking shuttles and free special events shuttles to boost ridership. PSTA’s soluiton? …
Campaign finance reports for the month of April show former Tampa police chief Jane Castor raised $33,540 in April from 89 donors. A political action committee called “Tampa Strong,” which is likely to support the same…
More than five weeks after the Parkland school shooting, Broward County school superintendent Robert Runcie wrote that “the rise in ‘fake news’ related to this tragedy is reprehensible.” Runcie then alleged three examples of such fake…
