Mitch Perry - page 513

Today’s St. Petersburg City Council meeting will be like every other meeting on the second Thursday of the month after all. There will be some public commendations offered, and the public won’t be permitted to give comments. That’s because Mayor Rick Kriseman smartly opted yesterday afternoon to delay the vote on the deal to allow the Tampa Bay Rays to stadium hunt in Hillsborough County for another week. Hours before Kriseman’s announcement, Councilman Charlie Gerdes told this reporter that he…

Keep Reading

Last week a coalition including business groups released a proposal that would extend private health insurance to hundreds of thousands of low-income Floridians. Called A Healthy Florida Works, it borrowed some elements from the Joe Negron-sponsored bill in the Florida Senate in 2013 that would be funded though the billions of federal dollars available under the Affordable Care Act, but would use a state-operated private insurance marketplace, where eligible people could choose among health plans. Also, it would require participants…

Keep Reading

After losing out to Harry Cohen for the South Tampa seat on the Tampa City Council in 2011, Julie Jenkins didn’t take too long licking her electoral wounds.  Needing to get back to work, she put the word out to her considerable array of contacts that she was looking for a new job, and shortly afterwards   was recruited and hired to serve as development director with St. Peter Claver Catholic School in Ybor City, where she remains today. But she says…

Keep Reading

Although Uber was recently valued at $40 billion, it’s been a rough week for the ride-sharing behemoth. A judge in Spain yesterday ordered the company to stop operating there. That ruling came a day after Uber was blacklisted in the Indian capital of Delhi after a driver raped a passenger. And on Sunday, a court in the Netherlands banned the company’s low-cost UberPop service from operating in the country. The service was banned because its drivers do not have the necessary…

Keep Reading

The CIA and its supporters are in full pushback mode today, a day after the publication of a summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the use of torture (or as the CIA euphemistically refers to it as, “enhanced interrogation tactics”). Like so many other things that come out of Washington, the political establishment is divided, though not necessarily along party lines. U.S. Sen. John McCain was the most eloquent Republican in praising the report. “The truth is sometimes…

Keep Reading

Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan says he intends to pick up the phone and contact Tampa Bay Rays President Brian Auld on Thursday if the St. Petersburg City Council approves the agreement reached between Mayor Rick Kriseman and the local ballclub. That agreement would permit the Rays to speak to officials outside of St. Petersburg about a new stadium for the first time, and after working on such a proposal for nearly five years, Hagan says he, Mayor Bob Buckhorn…

Keep Reading

Although the reaction has been mixed (depending on where you live in the Bay area) to the agreement reached between St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman and the Tampa Bay Rays about allowing the team to negotiate with Hillsborough County on a new stadium, the only people whose opinions truly matter at this time are the eight men and women on the St. Pete City Council, who are charged with approving or rejecting the deal on Thursday. And there is one…

Keep Reading