Commissioner Murman quoted in this Tampa Bay Times article on transportation sales tax:

The date is set: Hillsborough will debate transportation sales tax on June 9

• Steve Contorno, Times Staff Writer

Wednesday, May 18, 2016 11:34am

It will be the second time the county will hold a public hearing to examine raising the sales tax by a half cent to pay for $117.5 million a year in road improvements and transit projects. The last hearing, on April 27, ended with commissioners voting 4-3 against tax increases of 20 and 30 years.

The June 9 hearing, set with a 6-1 vote initiated by Commissioner Les Miller, will be to consider raising the sales tax from 7 percent to 7.5 percent for a period of 15 years, though the length and cost of the tax could be amended at that public hearing. If approved, it would go to Hillsborough voters in a referendum in November.

While the board overwhelmingly agreed to move ahead with the meeting, there was still considerable dissent and lack of consensus on the best path forward.

For example, Commissioner Sandy Murman said a gas tax increase was a “no brainer” that needed to be considered, and that the county lacked a modern, technology-based transit plan.

But she still voted to set the public hearing. She also asked county staff for information on how much a sales tax hikes of a half cent and a quarter cent could generate and fund for five, 10 and 15 years.

“If we have to do this one more time to get to the same result we got to last time then we’ll do it,” Murman said. “Because at that point then we can force ourselves to look at the budget.

Commissioner Victor Crist said commissioners and an independent task force should comb the budget for savings that could fund road and transit projects. He voted for it but said he didn’t know if he would support it on June 9.

The strongest opposition came from Commissioner Stacy White, who voted against setting the public hearing date and was critical of any new revenue for transportation.

He also put his fellow commissioners on notice if they vote to put the sales tax hike on the ballot. White called it the equivalent of the “board going to the voters with its hand out.”

“Support of this referendum is support for a tax hike,” he said.

That drew a strong rebuke from several commissioners, who didn’t appreciate White’s characterization of the vote.

“This is about our future and the one thing we must realize as elected officials in this county is that we as elected officials should not be repressing the vote of the public,” Miller said. “By not allowing them to do that we’re suppressing the vote. We should let them decide if they should tax themselves a half cent for 15 years.”

Commissioner Murman mentioned in this Tampa Bay Times article on Frontier:

Frontier Communications outlines ‘action plan,’ bill credits to address service problems

• William R. Levesque, Times Staff Writer

Thursday, May 12, 2016 3:12pm

TAMPA — Frontier Communications’ expansion into Florida, which its chief has called “very successful,” is getting a big Band-Aid — an “action plan” to fix lingering service problems.

The announcement Thursday comes after prodding from Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who met with Frontier officials Wednesday to address service outages since Frontier’s takeover of Verizon’s landline phone, TV and Internet service April 1.

“Communications services are critical to the daily lives of our customers, and we apologize to every Tampa Bay area customer who has experienced service disruptions,” said Frontier’s senior vice president and general manager of Florida operations, Melanie Williams.

Frontier said its plan includes:

• Bill credits for every customer who has reported a service outage that will be applied by the end of June. Frontier had previously said it would provide refunds to only those customers who request one.
• Using a U.S.-based call center as the “first choice call response team” when Florida residents call customer service to report problems. Frontier also said average call wait times are now between 30 seconds and two minutes.
• Establishment of a special residential customer care phone number for the next 30 days. The number is 888-457-4110, which will be staffed from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily.
• Creation of a “SWAT Team” to coordinate rapid response to service outages.

The company said it had completed the training of 1,200 Verizon technicians who became Frontier employees April 1, allowing Frontier to address a higher number of service calls than previously. And Frontier said it would finish loading 100,000 additional titles on its video-on-demand service in the next several weeks.

Customers have complained about missing shows and movies or buggy video-on-demand service since April 1.

Both Bondi, whose office has received 721 complaints about Frontier since the takeover, and Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, whose office has received 144 complaints, both publicly called out Frontier this week for its service issues.

Those have included lengthy service outages, technicians who repeatedly fail to show for scheduled appointments and customers who complain about seemingly clueless customer service representatives. Customers also have complained about the difficulty in understanding workers at Frontier’s foreign call centers.

“I am cautiously optimistic that Frontier’s disruptions in service will be quickly resolved,” Bondi said in a news release. “However, my office will continue to work with the company on each consumer complaint until they are all appropriately addressed.”

Frontier CEO Daniel McCarthy told Bondi in a letter Wednesday that less than 1 percent of the 3 million customers affected by the transition in Florida, Texas and California had experienced service outages. About 535,000 of those customers are in Florida, mostly in the Tampa Bay area.

“However, we are not satisfied with that result,” he said. “While service has been restored for the majority of these customers, there are still many frustrated customers.”

But little more than a week ago, McCarthy indicated to financial analysts during a conference call about the company’s earnings that Frontier had put its problems behind it. He had acknowledged the company responded slowly to complaints.

“This disappointed some customers and resulted in some negative publicity in the market,” McCarthy told analysts on May 3. “We now have these issues resolved and behind us.”

Michael Bremmer, a telecommunications consultant and CEO of Telecomquotes.com, said Frontier officials look silly trying to downplay what to their customers and the world at large looks like a major debacle.

“If you have a problem and you just step up, say you’re sorry you’ve screwed things up, then it’s not that big a deal,” Bremmer said. “But when you deny over and over again to try and make it go away, you’re just adding fuel to the fire.”

Some customers remain angry at Frontier’s response.

Antonio Amadeo, a resident of Davis Islands in Tampa, said he lost his landline phone starting April 1. This created difficulty because his mother-in-law is in hospice care at his home, and her medical care is often coordinated by phone.

“I called Frontier five or six times and just gave up,” he said.

Amadeo’s service was restored Wednesday after intervention by Hillsborough County Commissioner Sandy Murman. Amadeo checked his voice mail for the first time in more than 40 days.

He had 47 messages.

Commissioner Murman quoted in this Tampa Bay Times article on transportation workshop:

Is a third time — and a 15-year tax — the charm for Hillsborough’s transportation needs?

• Steve Contorno, Times Staff Writer

Wednesday, May 11, 2016 7:37pm

TAMPA — Is 15 the magic number?

The Hillsborough County Commission has already said “no” to a proposal to raise the sales tax for 30 years to pay for transportation needs. A 20-year tax hike was shot down as well.

Now, commissioners will consider raising the sales tax by a half cent on each dollar spent for a duration of 15 years in the hopes they’ll finally reach a consensus on how to finance much-needed road and transit projects.

After a year of twists and turns and stops and restarts, it’s anyone guess if this latest transportation proposal can pass. But commissioners voted 5-2 Wednesday to at least advance it to a public hearing. The date of the hearing is to be determined.

If it passes, voters will have a say in a November referendum.

Commissioners Sandy Murman and Stacy White, who both opposed raising the sales tax for 20 and 30 years, voted “no.”

Before the vote, Commissioner Ken Hagan advised his colleagues not to push this measure to a public hearing unless they intend to approve it. He did not want a repeat of the contentious, late-night April 27 public hearing that ended with the commission killing off the 20- and 30-year plans by narrow 4-3 votes. Commissioners Victor Crist and Al Higginbotham were the other two no votes on April 27. But on Wednesday they voted to give the 15-year option a public hearing.

Still, neither committed to supporting it. After the meeting, Higginbotham said he was undecided but added: “A shorter-term tax gives me a lot less heartburn.”

The decision to suddenly consider raising the sales tax from 7 percent to 7.5 percent for a 15-year period — which had never been previously discussed — came after commissioners scuttled other potential funding streams for transportation.

Hagan went one-by-one through some of the options and asked his colleagues to vote whether they should be on or off the table.

First, the commission voted 7-0 against dipping into $968 million in reserves, fearing it would hurt the county’s bond rating. That included leaving intact $22.7 million from the BP oil spill settlement.

Next, they unanimously decided not to touch the budget for the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office and followed it up with a 6-1 vote to leave the rest of the constitutional officers, like the clerk of the circuit court and the property appraiser, unscathed as well. Crist, who had previously called for a 2.5 percent across-the-board budget cut, voted no.

Then, they said they wouldn’t touch the fire and rescue budget.

Finally, Hagan brought up the fuel tax, a key pillar of a November proposal from Murman. At the time, Murman suggested the county could fund transportation by raising the gas tax from 7 cents for every dollar spent at the pump to 12 cents.

At this point, Murman sensed a set up. “I think what’s happening here,” she said, “is we take things off the table, we’re going to get backed into a corner and back to the referendum, and I don’t want to go there.”

But that’s exactly what happened.

After the commission voted 5-2 against a gas tax hike and 7-0 not to consider raising the utility tax, Commissioner Kevin Beckner reintroduced a referendum to raise the sales tax.

Beckner said it was the “only viable funding source” that could pay for infrastructure and transit. Raising the sales tax by a half cent would generate $117.5 million a year.

Murman contended the commission still hadn’t exhausted all of its options. “It’s premature,” Murman said. “I thought we agreed to go back into our budget.”

A 15-year surcharge would be the latest iteration of a sales tax hike to pay for roads, bridges, sidewalks and buses and other transit. The first came in 2010 when the county said a full cent sales tax increase for 30 years was necessary to pay for all the transportation needs here. That failed in a referendum.

Then, last summer County Administrator Mike Merrill recommended commissioners cut the request to a half cent tax for 30 years, insisting voters would find it more palatable. On April 27, a majority of commissioners defeated that plan.

For those keeping track at home, that means with this latest proposal commissioners are considering cutting in half what was already 50 percent of what the county said it needed six years ago.

Whether there’s support in the community for a 15-year tax is also unknown.

The Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce, the region’s largest business group, endorsed a half-cent sales tax hike but only if it was for 20 or more years. Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn, whose city can’t levy the tax on its own, said he would only get behind a 30-year surcharge because he needed a long-term revenue stream to finance a train he wants to build from downtown to Tampa International Airport.

Conservatives on the right and even some factions on the left opposed any sales tax increase.

Hagan said his exercise demonstrated that “limitations on funding options is beginning to set into this board.”

“The reality is the money isn’t there,” he added.

But Murman said the decision to move forward won’t convince the public.

“Basically we’re back to discussions on our sales tax without going into our budget,” she said.

To that end, the commission also voted to explore creating a citizens’ task force to take a fresh look at the budget.

“I think that there’s more in there (to cut),” Crist said, “and I would like to have an objective, outside perspective of it.”

Beckner responded with a challenge to his fellow commissioners:

“Step up, own what you want to cut and bring it back to the board.”

Commissioner Murman quoted in this Tampa Bay Times article on transportation:

Go Hillsborough is dead. Now what? Hillsborough County administrator Mike Merrill looks ahead

• Steve Contorno, Times Staff Writer

Tuesday, May 10, 2016 3:43pm

The 30-year, half-cent sales tax hike was the option recommended by County Administrator Mike Merrill after more than two years of study by consultants and staff. It was the only option, he insisted, that voters would willingly accept and still could knock out many of the county’s transportation needs.

Now that his preference appears dead and commissioners are scrambling to find other solutions, Merrill said he only wants one thing from his bosses and the community: “An honest debate.”

When it comes to the county’s $4.8 billion budget, and what in the budget can and cannot be realloced to road construction and bus lines, Merrill said he’s already fighting a misinformation campaign.

Much of that budget, about $1.4 billion, is made up of restricted funds, Merrill said, such as grant money from the federal government for specific purposes, or the $115 million indigent health care fund that is paid for by a dedicated portion of the sales tax. Another $1 billion are reserves, most of which can’t be touched by law, either.

Only $1.6 billion of the budget is unrestricted funds, he said. Of that, $317 million is for capital improvement projects, some already underway, and $338 million is allocated to transportation. Clearly, the county wouldn’t cut the transportation budget to fund transportation projects.

The rest includes $530 million for constitutional officers, like the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office and the Clerk of the Circuit Court, and $330 million in department spending.

Commissioner Victor Crist has suggested a 2.5 percent cut across the board. But that’s looking at the entire $4.8 billion budget. When you take out the restricted funds, it would take a 10 percent cut to knock out the 10-year, $905 million list of transportation projects that commissioners recently approved, Merrill said.

“I don’t have $30 million of efficiencies in a $330 million budget. I just don’t,” Merrill said. “I know that hard for people to grasp. You hear $4.8 billion and you try to explain to people most of that is restricted and they think, ‘You’re just lying to me.’ ”

“This whole notion of a conspiracy that we’re not being honest about the budget is nuts,” he added. “We can discuss how to spend money, and we can discuss having less resources, we can realign and cut services. That’s an honest debate that I’m willing to have. Just tell me what you want first.”

Crist, though, insists there are still ways to look at the entire budget.

“The state does it all the time,” he said. “That’s rhetoric.”

Commissioners meet Wednesday for the first of three transportation and budget workshops. Merrill has asked them for direction and to decide which funding streams are on and off the table.

“The needs are only going to get greater and we already have deficiencies,” he said. “The longer we delay the worse it’s going to get.”

Merrill didn’t ask to become Hillsborough County administrator, and somewhat reluctantly accepted the job in 2010 after a majority of commissioners voted him into the position. At the time, the county was reeling from a scandal involving the previous administrator and was amid the tumult of the Great Recession.

Despite his initial hesitation and the sting of watching commissioners shoot down one of his administration’s greatest undertakings since he took office, Merrill, 62, said he’s not looking for the exit.

“I’m in the job. I don’t have any plans to leave,” Merrill said. “I think this has to get fixed and until it is we’re going to work at it. I’ll stay as long as they want me to.”

So far even commissioners who opposed Merrill’s recommendation on transportation continue to have confidence in him.

“Mike has done an admirable job for us,” County Commissioner Sandy Murman said. “There’s been some missteps but nobody is perfect. That’s going to happen with a county as big as Hillsborough.”

His greatest misstep, Murman said, was when Merrill briefly floated a one-cent, 30-year sales tax hike for transportation last year after already recommending the half-cent proposal. That was done without informing commissioners and it injected distrust and confusion into an already contentious debate.

Commissioner Al Higginbotham said Merrill and his staff have served the commission well.

“I don’t feel like he was out campaigning as some folks in the community claimed,” Higginbotham said.

Crist, too, said he has confidence in the administrator. But, he added, how Merrill and the commission are viewed — and view each other — could come down to whether a transportation plan eventually passes.

“Then I think you’ll see people begin to show either their frustrations or their pleasures, depending on which direction it goes,” he said. “If at the end of this the money isn’t in place to do something with transportation then I think Mike isn’t going to be happy and the commissioners aren’t going to be happy.”

Commissioner Murman quoted in this StPetersBlog article on affordable housing trust fund:

Hillsborough County Commissioners dismiss call for affordable housing trust fund

MITCH PERRY

A proposal advocated for by the Hillsborough Organization for Progress and Equality – HOPE – to have the Hillsborough County government establish a $10 million affordable housing trust fund, fell by the wayside on Wednesday.

Commissioner Victor Crist won praise from his colleagues for bringing the issue up for discussion, but they politely rejected the concept for the moment, saying that they still have yet to address other important issues that would require funding, such as transportation.

“This is a community problem, and it begs for a community solution,” said one member of HOPE’s affordable housing task force who addressed the board. He said that that there are over 74,000 people in Hillsborough County who make less than $30,000, and called the insufficient number of existing housing programs in the county as “staggering.”

HOPE members say that the creation of an affordable housing trust fund isn’t a novel concept, with more than 700 city and county governments having such a program around the country. They offered proposals to create such a revenue source, including public service taxes, an increase in ad valorem taxes, or funds taken from code enforcement violations.

“Ten million dollars is a tall ask,” countered County Commissioner Al Higginbotham. “I can’t support it today, especially when we’re looking at our transportation needs.”

“The timing on this request is probably not the best,” said Commissioner Sandy Murman.  She added that any movement on a potential housing trust fund should only come after a master plan on affordable housing is completed later this year, and that the issue could best be addressed in the county’s two-year budget plan.

County Administrator Mike Merrill said that county programs for the homeless, affordable housing and transportation have all been deleteriously affected because of a reduction of funding from Washington D.C. and Tallahassee. He said that there are only two places to get new funding – from raising revenues or cutting from existing programs.

“I am in agreement that we need to do something, but where do we take it from?” he asked.

Former Commissioner Tom Scott made a plea for the proposal, saying, “one way to kill something you don’t want to move forward is to study something to death,” and adding that the problem has only grown worse since he left the board a decade ago. He’s running again this year for the countywide District 6 seat.

At that point in the debate, Crist told his colleagues that they were moving in a different direction than what he was calling for in his proposal, which was to simply have Merrill’s staff conduct a study of the county’s affordable housing program to determine whether the current “inventory” was adequate or not, what would be needed over the next 20 years, and to list potential funding sources. Realizing he didn’t have the votes, Crist said he would pull the motion, and have his own staff to put together information on how to address the problem.

Crist and Commissioner Kevin Beckner told an estimated crowd of 1,200 HOPE members last month that they would commit to advocate for an affordable housing trust fund.

Commissioner Murman quoted in this Tampa Bay Times article on transportation:

On transportation, the only thing Hillsborough commissioners agree on is to hold more meetings

• Steve Contorno, Times Staff Writer

Wednesday, May 4, 2016 7:25pm

TAMPA — It’s back to the drawing board for Hillsborough County’s transportation plan.

A week after voting 4-3 to kill a half-cent sales tax increase that would have paid for $117.5 million in roads and transit projects a year, Hillsborough commissioners on Wednesday scrambled to figure out what’s next.

The only agreement was they need to agree on something — and soon — and they plan to meet three times in the next five weeks to figure out what that something is. The first is a workshop set to be held May 11.

“Time is of the essence,” Commissioner Ken Hagan said, noting that county staff is a month away from presenting a budget for 2017.

However, it took three years for Hillsborough’s elected leaders to come up with the plan that the commission rejected during a four-hour public hearing on April 27.

Still floating out there is a 10-year, $905 million list of transportation projects that commissioners unanimously agreed were needed just days before they voted down the plan to pay for those projects. They also voted in unison recently to draft a plan that devotes half of all new growth in revenue over the next three years and one-third after that toward transportation.

But now some commissioners are saying they want to take another hard look at the budget to see if there’s any extra money there for transportation.

Commissioner Victor Crist, who cast the last vote against the sales tax referendum, has said 2.5 percent across the county’s entire budget would match the money a half-cent sales tax could bring in. But County Administrator Mike Merrill said that can’t be done without cutting services.

Meanwhile, Commissioner Sandy Murman, who also voted against the plan, said developers are getting uneasy with the new mobility fees commissioners approved last week that charges more for construction and growth. That ordinance made the fees considerably higher if the county failed to pass a sales tax hike.

But that’s also the only transportation funding plan the commissioners have agreed on so far, unanimously approving it the night before voting down the sales tax plan.

Murman suggested the county may have to delay implementation of those fees if a consensus can’t be reached on the rest of a funding plan.

“Let’s get started. Let’s dive in,” Murman said. “The public wants it. They’re anxious. The building and development community is very anxious right now about mobility fees.”

Hagan said commissioners have to start deciding which of the other funding options they want to consider — like Murman’s previous proposal to raise the gas tax by five cents and Crist’s call to reallocate existing revenue streams — and which don’t stand a chance of getting the four votes needed to pass.

If they can’t pass, they should be taken off the table, he said.

“This board rejected the only solution that significantly addresses our unfunded transportation needs to the extent of $3.5 billion,” Hagan said. “That leaves us with very few remaining sources.”

That $3.5 billion figure is what the half-cent was projected to generate over 30 years. But even that is 61 percent less than the $9 billion that consultants believe Hillsborough County will need to pay for its future transportation needs in the coming decades.

The transportation debate is looming over just about everything at the Frederick B. Karl County Center these days.

That became clear earlier Wednesday when Crist lobbied his colleagues to back a county study of new affordable housing solutions.

One proposal pushed by several advocates who addressed commissioners is to create an affordable housing trust fund. But that would require $10 million in new revenues.

But commissioners said they weren’t willing to spend that, or even the $50,000 or so needed to fund an exploration of that plan, until the transportation issue was solved.

“There’s a list of areas we can increase the taxes for this need,” Commissioner Al Higginbotham said, “but until we have a serious discussion on transportation I don’t think we can bring anything else to the table.”

Commissioner Murman mentioned in this Tampa Tribune article on MILO:

EDUCATION

Books and readers will arrive by bus in poor neighborhoods

By Anastasia Dawson | Tribune Staff

Published: May 2, 2016

Updated: May 2, 2016 at 07:53 PM

TAMPA — The latest reading project in Hillsborough County goes beyond handing a kid a book. In its launch Saturday, at Sulphur Springs’ Springhill Community Center, a psychedelically colored, air-conditioned school bus will bring free children’s books along with characters from a favorite PBS show like Curious George and, most importantly, volunteers dedicated to reading and spending time with children.

The bus-turned-mobile library, named the Mobile Interactive Literacy Opportunity or MILO, will travel the county on the first Saturday of every month, stopping at Children’s Board Family Resource centers and public libraries to bring free books and volunteer readers to children ages 3 to 8 in underserved and rural urban neighborhoods.

“This will reinforce to the students that reading isn’t just something that happens in school, it’s a lifetime experience and the summer is as good a time as any to get into reading,” said school board member Doretha Edgecomb, who unveiled the bus Monday morning along with the Children’s Board of Hillsborough County with the Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library, the Junior League of Tampa and WEDU PBS. “I want kids to really enjoy reading and not get hung up on the skills involved, but really just enjoy finding a book you want to read over and over.”

MILO will still teach those skills, through art activities and character-led reading circles designed to get parents involved with their children. Kids will pick a book they want to bring home and will be encouraged to sign up for a free library card and explore myON, a free online library program with more than 6,000 free children’s e-books.

The myON program recommends titles based on reader’s preferences and allows teachers to track how much time their students spend reading. Since the program launched in 2012, students in Hillsborough County have read more than 7 million books through the program.

Hillsborough County Commissioner Sandy Murman dreamt up MILO in January over coffee with representatives from the Junior League of Tampa, which has donated books to area children since 1996. The Children’s Board donated about $15,000 to the project, but most of the resources needed to make it run are in-kind donations like collected books and the unused bus.

The bus will travel to urban areas as well as rural and suburban areas like Seffner, Ruskin and Plant City, founders said.

“I’m from a rural area and its particularly heartwarming to me to know that these kids will have the exposure and access to books that the kids in more urban areas have,” said Kelley Parris, executive director of the Children’s Board of Hillsborough County from Gallion, Alabama.

About 25 percent of Hillsborough County children live in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and school district performance on standardized tests show that about 40 percent of third-grade students read below grade level.

MILO is just the latest in a string of programs aimed at improving literacy among Hillsborough County’s youngest students, and the stakes are high. In Florida, third grade students who don’t pass reading benchmarks on the state’s standardized tests aren’t promoted to fourth grade. Last year, about 20 percent of Hillsborough County third-graders were at risk of being held back, according to the Florida Department of Education.

“Those reading below a third grade reading level are rarely able to close the achievement gap and often fall through the cracks of society,” said Director of the Tampa-Hillsborough Public Library Andrew Breidenbaugh. “This doesn’t just have personal consequences, this has real costs to our community in the form of lost wages, public assistance and incarceration,”

Commissioner Murman quoted in this StPetersBlog article on Go Hillsborough:

THE BAY AND THE ‘BURG, TOP HEADLINES

Sandy Murman has no regrets in helping to kill off Go Hillsborough

Thirty-six hours after she joined three other county commissioners in rejecting the half-cent transportation tax on the November ballot known as Go Hillsborough, Sandy Murman says she has no regrets, but says she might have voted for a tax for a shorter duration than the 30-year, $117 million plan that was presented on Wednesday.

“I have to be honest with you,” she told SPB upon arriving at the Jan Platt Library in South Tampa on Friday morning to meet with constituents. “I was prepared to look at other options. I think it was the whole approach that was taken: ‘all or nothing.’ That really killed it probably for Victor (Crist) and I, who were pretty much the swing votes.”

At one point during the debate before Wednesday night’s vote to kill the proposal, Commissioner Kevin Beckner suggested an alternative 20-year-plan, but it failed to garner a second vote. Murman said she supported a 10-year plan, but neither she or anyone else made that suggestion.

Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn said repeatedly going into Wednesday’s vote that he had no use for such a short timeline, with the debt service being too high for the city to pay. He kicked off the public hearing by saying that, “I can’t issue debt on anything less than 30 years. I can’t go to the federal government without a revenue stream that is consistent, that is long term.”

Buckhorn blasted Murman, Crist and the other two commissioners who opposed putting the measure on the ballot, calling it “a profile in cowardice.”

The Tampa Tribune weighed in on Friday as well with some choice invectives, calling it a “pathetic lack of leadership.”

“I represent a constituency that is hard right and hard left, and I have to really work hard to balance and build consensus and that’s what I plan to do now,” Murman says of the constituents in her District One seat, where she’s running for re-election this fall. “They can make their vitriolic comments, say how ‘pathetic it is, but he (Buckhorn)  came in with an all or nothing approach and you know, I think it turned the county residents off.”

Murman said she is surprised over the shock that the vote has been felt in some quarters since Wednesday night, but insists she’s been consistent about feeling uneasy about the 30-year-tax for months now.

Murman floated her own surprise hybrid proposal on transportation last November, that called for bypassing a sales tax and instead using newly implemented mobility fees, a transportation trust fund financed with a portion of the county’s annual revenue growth; and a 5 cents-per-gallon gas tax. The proposal was met with stone silence by her colleagues, and shortly afterwards, those same colleagues ousted her as county chair, with Les Miller succeeding her.

On Friday Murman backed those proposals once again, and said she agreed with conservatives who lined up en masse on Wednesday to say that the county’s current funding on transportation of 3 percent of the budget was smaller than in comparable counties in Florida.

“We have to get it up to 10 percent,” she says. “Have to. And I have made that statement so many times. And that’s why I want these new revenues – at least half of them to go into trust funds so we can build up the percentage.” She says it time to look at other parts of the budget to cut to do so.

Commissioner Crist tells today’s Tampa Tribune that he prefers a 2.5 percent cut out of general revenues that would include cuts out of the sheriffs department, property appraiser and clerk of the court. Murman concurs, though she says she that Crist’s vision is “harsher” that hers.

“Can they cut back?” she asks of the constitutional offices. “I don’t think we’ve ever asked them.”

The prospect rankles Tampa transit activist Kevin Thurman, who says that “the idea that she wants to take Sheriff deputies off the street and cut our court system and lay off firefighters instead of giving people the chance to vote on a referendum, it clearly says where her priorities lies.”

Thurman says it’s time for the public to stop depending on the county commission to do anything proactive on transportation in the county, and says the next steps include lobbying finding candidates to run against the four board members who opposed Go Hillsborough. He also wants to see the Legislature to allow big cities like Tampa to offer their own tax referendums, and to go through the petition process to get a measure in front of county voters.

Mayor Buckhorn did make an effort a couple of years ago to rally the Hillsborough delegation to sponsor legislation on allowing cities like Tampa to put up their own tax referendums, and didn’t find any takers.

Thurman says none of the county commissioners who opposed putting the measure on the ballot should be proud of what they’ve done.

“Victor Crist promised to judge this on the merits and he did it on ‘instinct.’ Sandy Murman promised us we would have a plan that was comprehensive and was something that we could be proud of and there years later we have nothing. And Stacy White completely disagrees with her. He thinks that we need to go back to Square one, so she doesn’t even have consensus on her own board.”

Despite it all, Murman says she’s actually optimistic that something can be accomplished on transportation this year.

“I’m hearing doom and gloom that we wasted the last three years (on Go Hillsborough). We didn’t waste the last three years. We’ve got a good list of roads. It’s not a plan, it’s a list of roads, we need a transit plan. You have to have a transit plan that connects everything and it wasn’t in there, so I think that we’ll definitely do something this year. I’m feeling very optimistic. I think at the end of the day that people will realize ‘let’s do something.’”

On the idea that Go Hillsborough wasn’t much of a plan, critics and supporters do appear to agree.

“I completely agree with Sandy (that) much (of) the county transportation plan is a list of roads. Without HART & the cities it is not a real plan,” he emails.

Murman says she hasn’t heard much of any comments – pro or con – from her constituents in the wake of the rejection of Go Hillsborough. In fact, there were only a handful of citizens that arrived in the first hour of her appearance at the Jan Platt Library on Friday, and transportation didn’t appear to be on their minds.

One exception was Hillsborough Republican David Wilson. “In my opinion, I think the majority of people actually would want something like that on the ballot because there’s no better sense of democracy than everyone getting a vote. It’s about having the maximum amount of input,” he says.

Wilson, who serves on the Metropolitan Planning Organization advisory committee, said he wasn’t sure how he would vote on the matter in November. But now, of course, that doesn’t really matter anymore.

Commissioner Murman quoted in this Tampa Bay Times article on MOSI:

When Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry moves, will its top executive move with it?

• Steve Contorno, Times Staff Writer

Friday, April 29, 2016 10:00am

TAMPA — The future of the Museum of Science and Industry is decided: It’s moving downtown.

The future of its leader is less certain.

Molly Demeulenaere was named President and CEO of MOSI in June 2015 after 10 months serving as interim executive. Almost immediately, her long-term prospects to keep the job were deflated by the museum’s most important benefactor, Hillsborough County.

County Administrator Mike Merrill said in July that Demeulenaere was “good enough to keep the lights on” but not to orchestrate a move to Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik’s redevelopment project. Commissioner Sandy Murman suggested MOSI’s board should “take another look” at prospective leaders after they decided whether to relocate.

That decision came last week when MOSI’s board voted to begin planning a move. So where does that leave Demeulenaere?

Merrill and Murman now defer to MOSI’s new board chairman Mike Schultz on those questions.

Schultz said Demeulenaere’s future will be reevaluated along with the rest of the museum, from mission and design to board governance.

“When an organization reinvents itself it has to look at every aspect of its organization,” Schultz said. “That includes leadership.”

• • •

Relocating MOSI from its longtime home in north Tampa will be a complicated and expensive endeavor. Consultants told museum officials that it will take considerable vision and effective management to move and reinvent MOSI in downtown Tampa — not to mention millions of dollars from the private sector to reopen debt free.

Demeulenaere, 38, acknowledged that she doesn’t have experience leading such a massive effort or raising that much money. But she said she will surround herself with people who do.

“Any time that you take on something this size, you don’t do it alone,” Demeulenaere told the Tampa Bay Times. “We will bring in a team of people that have done this and had success doing this all over the country.

“It won’t be Molly saying, ‘How are we going to build the next $200 million science center?’ ”

(A spokesman for MOSI quickly added that there is no estimate yet for what a move or a new museum will cost.)

To usher the museum into a new era, MOSI is leaning heavily on Schultz, who as president and CEO of Florida Hospital’s West Florida Region has helped build several hospitals. Schultz — not Demeulenaere — is leading the task force of community leaders and industry experts that will shape the relocation and reinvention of the brand.

Murman also expects Vinik to play a significant role in that process. He and his partners at Cascade Investment LLC are planning a $2 billion redevelopment around the Amalie Arena, home to Vinik’s hockey team.

Vinik took an active hand in attracting the University of South Florida to the development. USF’s new medical school will be built downtown because Vinik donated the land, pledged to build ancillary development and lobbied for the state money needed to make the project happen.

“I’ve gotten to know Jeff enough that I think he’s formulating a plan,” Murman said. “I’m just not sure what that is.”

When asked about MOSI’s current and future leadership, a spokeswoman for Vinik said the Lightning owner also defers to the board on those matters.

Vinik supports MOSI’s move downtown and has offered to help the museum. However, it’s too early to say what shape that support could take, or if it would be similar to the commitments of land, money and infrastructure that Vinik has made to aid USF.

“We will work with MOSI and Hillsborough County in the coming months as they plan what’s next for the museum,” Vinik said in a statement to the Times, “and want to help them achieve their goal of making the institution one of the finest in North America.”

• • •

If there are any clues as to how Vinik views nonprofit leadership, they may have been revealed last year at the Tampa Museum of Art.

Penny Vinik, his wife and philanthropic partner, was chairwoman of the search committee that named Michael Tomor as the new executive director of the art museum. Tomor had 21 years of experience working in art museums and he holds an advanced degree in art history.

Downtown Tampa’s community of cultural institutions — which MOSI expects to join — similarly boast leaders with extensive pedigrees. Thom Stork, for example, had a 27-year career at Busch Gardens and Sea World before he became president and CEO of the Florida Aquarium in 2002.

And last year, Merrill said he envisioned a downtown MOSI would be led by an executive with “national credentials.”

But Demeulenaere’s experience is shorter and less traditional. For example, she does not have a college degree. She was named vice president of development of MOSI in 2012 after a rocky three-year tenure as executive director the Gulfcoast Wonder and Imagination Zone in Sarasota. Before that she was director of development for the Sarasota County Arts Council and worked as an event planner.

Donors and board members for G.WIZ told the Times that after Demeulenaere left they discovered the museum was on the verge of collapsing. They said she hid the depths of the museum’s financial troubles and took a $50,000 line of credit to cover operating expenses without informing the board. Demeulenaere disputed those claims.

G.WIZ closed its doors four months after Demeulenaere’s exit. It never reopened.

Demeulenaere took over as MOSI’s interim president when the museum’s longtime leader Wit Ostrenko retired in 2014.

After a national search, MOSI’s board settled on Demeulenaere as Ostrenko’s successor. Uncertainty about the museum’s future and its recent financial troubles led to an unimpressive slate of applicants, Merrill said last year.

• • •

Her time leading MOSI has not been without its problems.

The museum was saddled with significant debt when she took over after years of fiscal mismanagement and poor bookkeeping. But the financial outlook has remained uneven under her watch.

Total unrestricted liabilities have grown from $2.1 million in August 2014, her first month as president, to $2.8 million in March. The museum owes vendors more money now and there’s a new $248,000 line of credit on the books, according to financial statements MOSI provides the county. The museum has lost $277,000 since the fiscal year began in October 2015.

Hillsborough County staff discovered that Demeulenaere, while interim president, converted a $400,000 line of credit into a five-year loan to pay off vendors without county approval. That loan, the Timeslearned, violated an agreement between the museum and the county, which owns MOSI’s building and land. Demeulenaere said it was a mistake and she was unaware of the agreement.

But MOSI’s board has so far publicly expressed confidence in Demeulenaere during her 10 months as president.

There are also reasons a shake-up may not make sense at this point. In a consultant report provided to museum officials, two museums that underwent successful moves said that consistent leadership was important and that projecting continuity is critical to convincing donors to invest in a significant fundraising campaign for a large capital project.

“She’s given me no reason at this point to not have my confidence and support,” said County Commissioner Al Higginbotham, Hillsborough’s representative on MOSI’s board.

“This is going to be a real test by fire and an opportunity to show what she can do.”