Tampa City Councilman Harry Cohen spoke to a packed room of constituents early Friday in South Tampa, on issues regarding stormwater, billboards in SoHo and how the city will handle the post-clean-up efforts after next weekend’s Gasparilla celebration.
It’s the type of outreach that he says he loves about his job at council, but he admits he’s thinking about serving them from a different place — such as the Florida House of Representatives.
“I’m going to look at,” Cohen said when asked about the possibility of him leaving the City Council to run for the House District 60 seat being vacated this fall by Dana Young, who will run for the newly created State Senate District 18 seat.
“I’m going to think about it, but as you can see, I’m extremely busy with the issues that I have on my plate, and those are my first responsibilities,” he said.
Cohen, a Democrat, lives in HD 60, which includes South Tampa and parts of western Hillsborough County. He says he doesn’t have any timetable about when he’ll make his decision to leave his District 4 seat, which he was re-elected to last April.
He says when there’s opportunity like this, however, “you have to look at it.”
“You think about it, and you wonder whether it comports with whatever is going on in your life. I’m very, very concerned about the stormwater and flooding and climate change issues that we talked about this morning, I think that was the number one issue that people wanted to talk about still. And there’s no question that the state has a tremendous role in dealing with that. But whether or not I could be more effective there more than here, I really don’t know the answer to that. And, I’m going to think about.”
