City prepares for referendum
By LESTER R. DAILEY
Article published on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2006  |
CLEARWATER – At its Dec. 12 work session, the City Council started gearing up for a referendum on the March ballot that would allow a downtown marina, with up to 140 boat slips, to be built at the eastern end of the Memorial Causeway Bridge, behind Coachman Park.
It heard a report from Susan Schuler, the Brandon consultant gauging citizens’ reaction to the project, and it fine tuned the verbiage of a proposed City Charter amendment that would put into effect the referendum if it passes.
Schuler selected 14 Clearwater residents who had voted in the last three city elections and asked them to participate in a project that would benefit their city, but did not tell them in advance what the topic of the study would be. All of the participants knew that two previous referendums dealing with the redevelopment of the downtown bluff had been defeated, and most were aware of the proposed new referendum, although only one was very familiar with its details.
“They were all very knowledgeable, articulate and well informed,” Schuler said.
Most of them favored the marina, saying it would provide sorely needed boat slips and might stimulate downtown revitalization.
There is no doubt that the boat slips are needed; the county’s Boating Access Task Force found that Pinellas County lost 341 wet slips and 960 dry-stack racks between 1996 and 2005.
But the opponents on the panel feared that marina patrons might take scarce parking spaces away from shoppers, thereby hurting downtown businesses. They also worried that fuel docks, commercial boats, fish cleaning and other undesirable things that would initially be prohibited would later be allowed.
Schuler concluded that most Clearwater residents know little about the upcoming referendum and a public relations campaign, with lots of maps and drawings, is needed.
Although the panel praised the wording of the proposed referendum, which uses every one of the 75 words the law allows, the council members tweaked it a little. They eliminated the word “boardwalk” and moved the location description closer to the beginning of the verbiage.
“What is difficult is to fully describe what is being done and what is not being done in 75 words,” Mayor Frank Hibbard said.
The council discussed at length the meaning of the word “moorings” in the proposed City Charter amendment that would enforce the marina referendum. Bill Morris, the city’s marine and aviation director, said that the word refers to “side-tie” spaces, where boats tie up parallel to the dock, and that most of such spaces are for transient boats rather than for marina tenants.
“I think that what has happened is that we’re paranoid,” Hibbard said, adding that the council was getting too bogged down in semantics. “But at the same time I want to be effective.”
But Councilman John Doran said he had a reason for being so picky.
“One person in particular has said that she would prefer (buoy) moorings to boat slips,” Doran said in an apparent reference to Anne Garris, head of the Save the Bayfront group that led the opposition to the previous referendums. “So, obviously, to that person, the word ‘moorings’ has a specific meaning.”
But Hibbard replied that the nuances of the wording didn’t matter.
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Article published on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2006
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