The Clearwater city election

Surprise! There is an election in Clearwater in less than two months. Two of Clearwater’s five city council posts are being contested. One incumbent is up for re-election – longtime councilman Hoyt Hamilton. He is being challenged by Clearwater Beach Realtor John Funk. Easy call here – Hamilton’s experience and his Clearwater roots outweigh Funk’s rather limited resume. Councilman Bill Jonson is termed out of his seat which is being sought by Clearwater native David Allbritton and political newcomer Tom Keller. Here again, Allbritton’s grasp of his community and his service on city boards over the years make him an overwhelming choice. The election is March 13 and mail ballots will be going out soon.

Tampa Bay, politics and stuff:

1. In a 19-paragraph article on Florida’s robust economy and employment rates – the best in a decade and a half by all measures, not a mention of Governor Rick Scott or the programs he put into place upon election to “Get to Work”. Now, if he had a letter other than R after his name…

2. The folks at USF are losing sight of their primary mission in the bitter infighting over who should be calling the shots at their satellite campuses. Their job is to turn out well-qualified graduates, not to engage in meaningless turf wars.

3. By proclamation, the Morton Plant Hospital Treehouse (see below) proclaimed that elected officials not be paid during any government shutdown – to include any back pay after the end of the shutdown.

4. The spirit of Gasparilla is spreading with news there will be a mini-invasion of Indians Rock this year. It’s not the first invasion of Pinellas County. There was another in Clearwater back in 1976. Unfortunately those invaders never went away.

5. You’ve lived in the bay area (or anywhere else) if you remember the old fashioned soda bottle vending machines filled with ice cold water where you slid your purchase along a rail and through a coin-activated lever.

The diamond, the media and other stuff:

6. The Patriots should win the Super Bowl, but they seem to be winning by just enough each game, so give us the opening line of the Eagles plus 5.5 points. We would be happier with six.

7. Now that the Hall of Fame ballots are in (congratulations to Vlad Guerrero, Trevor Hoffman, Chipper Jones and Jim Thome) don’t dismay if your favorite player did not get a big vote. On their first time on the ballot, Hall Of Famers Duke Snider and Bert Blyleven got 17 and 17.5 percent respectively.

8. Allow us to hop on the bandwagon and predict a terrific season for the San Francisco 49ers next year. Jimmy Garoppolo has taken the reigns of the offense magnificently and Kyle Shanahan has far exceeded our expectations. No, that’s not right. We simply were completely wrong about the job he would do.

9. Idle observations: last week (TBRR Jan. 21) we mentioned Pittsburgh’s KQV had gone silent at the end of 2017. KQV was unique in several ways. It was one of just a few stations east of the Mississippi with a “K” rather than “W” call letter – its long time Pittsburgh rival KDKA, America’s oldest station, is another. And KQV was one of a handful of stations with just three call letters. We have a couple in the South – WBT in Charlotte and Atlanta’s WSB – both 50,000 watt regional stations dating back to the 1920s.

10. From the sports section of the 5:05 Newsletter: The Winter Olympics are a few weeks away. That means you have less than a month to pretend you understand curling.

Farewell, at least temporarily, to the Treehouse

The late Skip Carey once said he did not want to belong to any organization that would have him as a member. We disagree. For over a decade, a group of leading citizens (known informally as the Treehouse) has allowed us to occasionally sip coffee with them and help right all the wrongs in the world weekday mornings between 7:00 and 7:30 at K’s Cafe in the Morton Plant Wellness Center. Coffee follows a morning workout (wink, wink). The group consists of a restaurateur, an attorney, CPA, insurance agency owner, neurosurgeon, retired judge, former politician, current politician, Realtor, builder, retired hospital executive, a competitive sailor and a guy who defies description. Main qualification is a thick skin as feelings are not spared. Your humble blogger is frequently targeted for allegedly having a cellphone with a rotary dial. We recently corrected that by getting rid of the cellphone all together. Sadly, K’s Café closed last week leaving the august group temporarily homeless. Hopefully, Clearwater’s answer to the Algonquin Roundtable will reform in the near future. It is a terrific group of gentlemen (a few of our wives occasionally visit to class up the place) and we wouldn’t swap our tenuous membership for any other group on the planet.

SNEAK PEEK AT NEXT WEEK: The most dangerous man in the Florida Senate