Last November, Guido Maniscalco joined three of his Tampa City Council colleagues in opposing a substantial tax increase to Tampa homeowners to help pay for major stormwater drainage improvements. It came months after one of the worst bouts of street flooding the city has ever seen and was the second stormwater assessment that Mayor Bob Buckhorn brought before Council for its approval.
Council members rejected the $251 million project on a 4-3 vote.
“I just didn’t feel comfortable voting for such a huge amount of money like that,” Maniscalco told a few dozen South Tampa residents at a town-hall meeting at Hugo’s Spanish Restaurant Friday morning.
The vote was a blow to not only Buckhorn, but many others in the city who acknowledged that it would have been an expensive but necessary tax to improve the city’s infrastructure problems.
After Buckhorn suggested that the critics should offer another plan, Maniscalco said he did his own research, and ultimately presented his own ideas back to the mayor about how to address the issue. He says that the city can pay for some improvements based on a stormwater assessment that the council voted on last summer which raised the regular stormwater assessment from $36 to $82 for the owner of an average-sized home. Part of that research included asking longtime Tampa residents if they could recall similar flooding problems decades ago in the worst flooded parts of the city. He said they hadn’t.
Maniscalco added that he drove down Kennedy Boulevard one day and noticed that the storm drain openings have become smaller due to increased paving of the roads. He suggested Buckhorn should open up some inlets to determine that if the water’s just not draining quickly enough.
“Why don’t we look at rebuilding some of these storm drain inlets and allowing the water to flow quicker in there because the storm drain is typically high?” Maniscalco said he suggested to the mayor.
A couple of people in the crowd weren’t impressed by his explanation.
“Why wouldn’t you just defer to the city’s engineering department to get those things right,” asked one man.
Maniscalco said the city didn’t present a detailed plan.
“I can’t just say here, take this money,” he said. “There were certain details, but it wasn’t where you could see absolutely everything.”
A moment later, another critic questioned his explanation.
“I appreciate how much work there is to be on the city council. It’s a lot of thankless work and I think it should be recognized,” said Tampa resident Jacob Redding. “But at the same time, it seems like your assessment of whether we should spend the money on stormwater was weak, pretty amateur, and didn’t seem to be rooted in engineering facts. You just made your points, you missed the environment assessment. You seem to base your decision on hearsay, and that’s just not the way to govern a city.”
“If staff would have approached us with a more detailed plan, this is how we’re going to fix it, this is how we’re going to plan this, this is why we need so much money for it, it would have been different,” the councilman replied. He added that Ybor City had already paid millions of dollars in the past seven years to fix their own stormwater projects.
Buckhorn told FloridaPolitics.com last week that he was working on a revised plan to bring back before the council. He discounted complaints that some areas of the city shouldn’t pay as high a tax because they don’t suffer from flooding problems, saying that’s not the way to address an issue that affects the quality of life for all Tampa residents.
