Time for St. Pete and Clearwater governments to develop a backbone

Who runs the cities of St. Pete and Clearwater? Is it duly elected and appointed officials or a group of auto race promoters, baseball executives and restauranteurs? In St. Pete, the promotors of the annual March road race willy-nilly change the dates of the race, St. Pete’s Dali Museum, the Mahaffey Theater and the city in general be damned. The Tampa Bay Rays keep posturing about where they want their new stadium that still won’t draw crickets no matter where it’s located or how fancy it is. The hard to swallow fact is the bay area is just not a good baseball market and never will be. Then in Clearwater, there is a restauranteur who has pretty much been given carte blanche over matters at the publicly owned Clearwater Marina to the detriment of businesses that have been there upwards of fifty years. The result there has been an embarrassment for two years. In all three cases, (and there are others) it’s time for policy makers to develop some backbone and tell all these parties something to the effect that it is they, not the entrepreneurs, who run the city. If they can’t, we need to find some new policy makers and elections in both cities are just around the corner.

Around Tampa Bay:

1. Word on the street - if you enjoyed movies like Top Gun, Cocktail and Mission Impossible, you might want to look into buying a condo at the old First National Bank building in downtown Clearwater. You’d probably recognize one of your upstairs neighbors.

2. Well, Mr. Atwater, do you want to run for the U.S. Senate or not? Florida’s CFO’s dithering and his being compared to Charlie (Which party am I this week?) Crist do not inspire confidence.

3. Factoid: If you are celebrating your 100^th birthday this year, the population of the United States when you were born was 100 million – the same number of people who will visit Florida before the end of the year- astonishing.

4. It appears it will be the next decade before anything substantial is done about mass transit in the bay area as both Hillsborough and Pinellas County Transit Authorities continue to shoot themselves in the foot.

5. Related to above: you’ve lived in Clearwater for a long time if you rode on the 1950s era Clearwater bus system owned by the Wickman family. You boarded in front of McCrorys and Woolworths on the south side of Cleveland Street.

The diamond, the media and other stuff:

6. Item: Manager Bryan Price retained by Cincinnati Reds despite a last place finish. Both Hall of Famer Sparky Anderson and Sweet Lou Piniella were dumped by the Reds after finishing second. Just saying.

7. Yet another gem “borrowed” from the peerless 5:05 Newsletter: The Toronto Blue Jays have made the playoffs for the first time in 22 years; and nothing says “America's pastime” more than a bunch of guys from the Dominican Republic playing for a team in Canada.

8. New York City’s first Chick-fil-A opened last week. As you would expect, there were animal rights and gay rights protesters on hand – as well a few city dwellers telling the folks in the kitchen, “This is the way we do it up north.”

9. The last time a Washington-based team participated in a World Series was 1933 – a streak much longer than even the hapless Cubs who last appeared in 1945. Among the members of the ’33 Senators was Clearwater’s Jack Russell, Sr. who won a career-high 12 games that season.

10. As we were composing this week’s edition, we learned to our sorrow, that Jack Russell, Jr. passed away. Jack, like his father, was a community leader, a longtime member of the Rotary Club of Clearwater, a Past President of the Clearwater Chamber of Commerce and a man with a passion for sports cars. He will be missed.

At the NFL’s quarter pole:

Focus is on six teams – two who are not as bad as they seem and will be back in the hunt before too long. That would be the Seattle Seahawks who had some early season turmoil and the Baltimore Ravens who are simply just too good to be at the bottom of the AFC North. Two teams that are every bit as bad as they seem reside in the same division – the Detroit Lions and the Chicago Bears. The good news here is they play each other twice so one or both of them could pick up a win – even two but they are bad. Finally, two who are currently near the top who will come back to the pack - the Cincinnati Bengals who always find a way to lose crucial games and the Carolina Panthers, who after the Bucs, start playing some real football teams. And did anybody see the events in Miami coming?