The Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority (PSTA) is once again attracting negative press. The Tampa Bay Times reported last week that PSTA misled the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) about local financial support for the so-called Central Avenue Bus Rapid Transit (CABRT) project. Specifically, PSTA put forth a financial plan to the FTA which included the City…

The federally funded St. Pete Housing Authority (SPHA) sent a mass e-mail last week urging recipients to “reach out to your Congressional Representatives and demand that a fiscal year 2019 appropriations bill for HUD be passed.” The SPHA is funded by HUD, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. The e-mail was sent by Larry…

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 and are entitled to attorney’s fees under Florida statutes. In addition, the city has incurred in excess of $250,000 for…

“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 in the general election this past November. Overman’s claim was essentially the same as the one made by All For Transportation…

“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 hike for transit which Hillsborough county voters passed last month after AFT spent $4 million getting it on the ballot…

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 among county voters on November 6th and is set to go in to effect on January 1st, 2019. One of the…

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 (FY2018). The steep plunge calls into question the “need” or market demand for more transit, especially since more transit won’t…

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 to the sales tax hike. As you will see below, Tampa Bay Beat was way out in front on that story…

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 years ago. Despite a $100 million per year budget, a 34% increase in the tax rate levied on real property,…

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 the mayor denies all of it. Steve Hirschfield, citizen journalist and owner of the  local news website IonTB.com, filed a…

It was after 3 P.M. in County Center on a hot Friday in September. The previous evening at 6:15 P.M., Hillsborough County Chief Financial Administrator Bonnie Wise had requested that “errors” be corrected in the performance audit report delivered by the auditing firm McConnell & Jones (M&J). The corrected report arrived at 2:33 P.M. In…

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 actions appear to violate Florida Statutes 104.31 , which governs the political activities of state, county, and municipal officers. “I’m reaching out…