Tampa City Councilman Harry Cohen warned the city’s budget vote Friday will have long-term effects. Cohen’s compromise proposal to have the Council vote on raising the millage rate by 0.475 broke a seven-hour stalemate just after midnight Friday morning on Mayor Bob Buckhorn‘s fiscal year 2018 budget.
A year ago, St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman requested and received $350,000 from the local governments of Tampa, Hillsborough County, Pinellas County and his own City Council to help fund the Cross-Bay Ferry public-private pilot project that ends Sunday. While those local governments won’t get close to that money back — they were never expected to — but final totals could end up bringing as much as $30,000 back to those local governments. Speaking before the Tampa City Council today…
The first regularly scheduled flight in more than 50 years flew from Miami to Havana yesterday morning, just in time to begin the formal mourning for Fidel Castro, which leads to the question du jour — What will Donald Trump do with the Cuba-U.S. relations? The President-elect tweeted that “If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the U.S. as a whole, I will terminate deal.” To date, Cuba hasn’t appeared to reciprocate very much in terms of the U.S.’s…
Shawn Harrison, a former Tampa Council member representing District 7 who was re-elected to the Florida House last week, is backing Jim Davison in the District 7 runoff election next month. Davison will face Luis Veira in the special election runoff for the Tampa City Council seat on December 6. “Luis is a good man but Jim has been a stalwart champion for New Tampa for 20 years,” Harrison wrote on his Facebook page on Wednesday. “He is well known in…
Avis Harrison cut a $4,000 check earlier this week for her campaign for the Tampa City Council District 7 seat. That follows the $21,000 she gave to her campaign in the last fund-raising period. Her $44,038 that she has raised in the race is second only to Luis Viera, who has raised $66,529. Meanwhile, the $1,000 check that the Hillsborough County Republican Party cut for Jim Davison last month has now been listed as officially returned back to the party.…
One of the biggest surprises of how the Republican primary season played out to this reporter was how successful Ted Cruz was. When you looked at the panoply of candidates who had serious potential to go all the way in 2016, he was never at the front of my list (neither, of course, was Donald Trump). But Cruz emerged over the much more hyped Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, et al. He’s a true believer, what Paul Ryan likes…
When people say that Bernie Sanders has pushed Hillary Clinton to the left, there is no greater issue to prove that point than her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP is a huge deal between the U.S., Canada and 10 countries in the Asia-Pacific region that’s been under negotiation for over a decade. Its aim is to phase out thousands of tariffs, open markets and impose new trade rules, including for labor rights and environmental standards. Critics contend the document is full…
