Over the course of the last year, advocates for Greenlight Pinellas said they had learned the lessons from the problems with Hillsborough County's transit tax in 2010. And while nobody could dispute that the effort was much better organized than four years ago, the result was actually worse in terms of the percentage of the loss.
Stuart Rogel is the president & chief executive officer of the Tampa Bay Partnership, which played a leadership role with the Hillsborough initiative in 2010 and was responsible for helping raise funds for the Greenlight initiative. He admits that there is a whole lot of soul searching going on in the days after the resounding defeat.
"Is there something more that we should be doing?" He asked on Wednesday afternoon. "Should we play a different role, or not role at all?" He said he's not sure at all at this point.
Already, advocates for Hillsborough's potential transit tax referendum are downplaying the Greenlight electoral debacle, as detailed in a story by the Times' Caitlin Johnston on Thursday.
Chris Steinocher was the number two man in charge with the Tampa Bay Partnership in 2010 when the Moving Hillsborough Forward initiative went down to defeat, and took over a leadership role with the political action group Yes on Greenlight in 2014.
When asked if it's just possible that people in the Tampa Bay area just don't want light-rail as a means to improve transportation, he said that was just one of the questions that will be asked by those who worked on the campaign in the weeks ahead.
Steinocher does say that he personally knocked on a lot of doors with Pinellas County voters and talked to them about the proposal, and he says the fact that rail was part of the package being presented by PSTA was a motivating factor for many to vote for the issue. "I'd hate to throw the baby out with the bathwater," he said about removing that critical component of the Greenlight plan.
"I really think it's about the sales tax," he said, with people asking about the fact that the transit agency through a tax swap would essentially be netting $100 million more annually in revenue was troubling to some people.
Perhaps even more stunning than Greenlight's collapse was the transit and road funding proposal in Polk County shot down by an astronomical 72 percent of the public there. That one-cent transit tax swap fared worse than the half-cent tax proposal in 2010, which went down by a 62-38 percent margin.
Tom Phillips, the Executive Director with the Polk Transit Authority, said of the nine tax initiatives on the ballot on Tuesday, eight failed by more than 10 percent.
"I think that Florida voters in general said we're not comfortable with the state of the of the economy," he told CL on Thursday. "I still think that My Ride (the name of the Polk transit plan) is a great plan, we need to figure out a way to move forward, but there's no way to move forward in a tax revenue neutral way."
Phillips suggests possibly having local counties working together as a region could be one possibility, as well as working with the Legislature to ask for more funding.
As the Times' Johnston noted in her story, the measure was successful in St. Petersburg this time around, as it was in Tampa in 2010, proving that for all of the extensive analysis about how "flawed" the proposals were, city folks bought into it.
But state law currently only allows counties to place such referendums on the ballot, and Mayor Bob Buckhorn didn't really even attempt to persuade the Tampa Bay area local delegation this past year on the concept. Whether he and Mayor Rick Kriseman would want to team up to so next year doesn't appear to be on the agenda.
"We're not taking the foot off the gas pedal, we're just watching for the curbs," says Stuart Rogel. "We're going to be keep moving because it's still the most significant issue we have to resolve in the community."
