The Capital Tiger Bay Club, the Tallahassee forum that has been needling newsmakers since 1971, has booked a guest who built a second act out of needling local government.
Skip Foster — founder of Red Tape Florida and the former President and Publisher of the Tallahassee Democrat — headlines the club’s luncheon Thursday, June 18, for a conversation on media, messaging, public affairs, and the permitting and bureaucracy fights that now consume most of his attention.
Foster is best known to a generation of Tallahasseeans as the capital city paper’s 10th publisher, a post he held for five years beginning in 2015. His route there reads like a newsroom lifer’s: an entry-level sports reporter in Hickory, North Carolina, who climbed into editing and then publishing in Shelby before running the Northwest Florida Daily News and four weeklies out of Fort Walton Beach.
These days the byline turns up somewhere different. Foster launched Red Tape Florida — now in its second year — to chronicle what he calls a quieter drag on the state’s economy: glacial permitting, inconsistent code enforcement, and the local-government red tape that survives even in deep-red counties. The site sorts its work into three buckets — accountability, affirmation, and advocacy — and it does not pull punches. A recent entry went after a Gulf County “review” fee that, by Foster’s telling, exists mainly to punish builders who use a state-authorized private provider.
His recurring argument ties the beat to the bigger debate in the Capitol: the cost of bureaucratic delay — backlogs, duplicative fees, slow-walked approvals — gets passed straight to homebuyers and small businesses, making permitting reform an affordable-housing story as much as a regulatory one.
Powering all of it is Hammerhead Communications, the public affairs and marketing firm Foster started to fold reporting instincts into crisis work and advocacy. His pitch, in plainer terms than the firm’s website uses: in a media environment that moves this fast, the lines between earned coverage, messaging, and policy fights have all but disappeared.
The Tiger Bay format should suit him. The club has spent more than five decades pairing nonpartisan programming with irreverent introductions and the occasional roast of its own guests — a crowd unlikely to let a former publisher off easy on the state of the business he left.
The luncheon begins at 11:30 a.m., with the program running from noon to 1 p.m. at the Donald L. Tucker Civic Center, 505 West Pensacola Street. Members of the media who want to attend can email or text Club Chair Christina Johnson at [email protected].
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— Ed. note: This story was drafted with assistance from AI. Editorial judgment, sourcing, and final review were performed by Peter Schorsch and the Florida Politics editorial team.
