After spending months studying Tampa’s charter, the city’s Charter Review Advisory Commission sent City Council a set of recommendations for changing the rules that divide power inside City Hall. Council is now working from a different package, strengthening some of the commission’s proposals, dropping others and advancing changes commissioners considered but chose not to recommend.

Mayoral term limits are one of the clearest examples, with Council voting 5-2 on Oct. 1 to advance a restriction the commission had considered and left alone. The timing gives the proposal an immediate political backdrop. Former Mayor Bob Buckhorn is running again eight years after leaving office, doing what the proposed change would prevent a future two-term mayor from doing. The restriction would not apply retroactively to Buckhorn’s campaign.

Garrett Greco, a Charter Review Advisory Commission member who hosts The Tampa Bay Developer and is now running for City Council, put the larger split more simply in a Sept. 30 interview with TBBW. “The council clearly had plans of its own,” he said.

Before Council met, Greco was pushing members to strengthen the inspector general proposal, which commissioners had narrowed to win enough votes to send it forward. “What we put forward was a compromise. I compromised to help get that passed so it could be in front of City Council, and I’m going to tell them to go further,” Greco said. “I’m going to tell them to get stronger for an independent inspector general that can be dynamic and surgical and have the power to actually dig and find inefficiencies to make a better government.”

That is what Council did Oct. 1, unanimously advancing a stronger inspector general with authority to operate outside both the mayor and Council and launch investigations, audits and reviews without waiting for a complaint. The office could subpoena information, require cooperation from city officers, employees and contractors, refer matters outside City Hall and retain independent counsel. A selection committee would nominate candidates before five council members made the appointment. A five-year term, a five-vote removal threshold and a budget submitted directly to Council would give the office additional independence.

Council went beyond the commission again when members considered giving themselves the power to remove certain mayoral appointees, rather than limiting their role to confirming them before they took their jobs. The commission had recommended restoring Council confirmation of certain appointments. The proposal before Council went further, allowing five members to remove an officer after giving the mayor and officer an opportunity for a public hearing.

The debate over removal quickly turned to the people who would have to work under that arrangement, with Councilman Charlie Miranda warning that City Hall could have a harder time recruiting senior administrators if their jobs became more political. Councilman Luis Viera was open to removing an appointee through something closer to impeachment, but not simply because five council members wanted the person gone. Councilwoman Lynn Hurtak came at it from the other side. Department heads work with Council too, she argued, and members need some recourse when residents bring them problems they cannot get fixed. Council did not settle the issue. Members voted 4-3 to send the proposal back to outside counsel Kent Tinkler and have him define what would justify removal and how the process would work.

Council also advanced several changes that would let members act without the mayor’s approval, including a five-vote executive-order override, greater authority over certain budget changes and more control over Council staffing. Five members could override a mayoral executive order and prevent the same order from returning during that mayor’s term without majority Council consent. Councilman Bill Carlson questioned whether that authority should be limited to orders that violated the charter or intruded on Council’s authority. Hurtak pointed to the years-long fight over control of Tampa’s police review board. Council directed Tinkler to draft the broader five-vote override.

Greco’s objection to Council’s approach was clearest on a proposal he did not even support, after he cast the commission’s lone vote against creating a special zoning hearing master. Commissioners had spent hours discussing the idea with attorneys and other experts before recommending it, and Greco still believed they had reached the wrong answer. “The reason why I’m not that big on a special zoning master is because we still have a broken and antiquated land development code that still creates a ton of contention in our local government,” he said. “I look at it like a Band-Aid and not a full fix. I don’t really see it as a real solution. I think the real solution is to get serious about land development policy.”

Greco’s concern was less about where Council landed than whether members had fully engaged with the work commissioners had already done before getting there. “I sort of wish Council would have at least talked for a few minutes each about their thoughts,” he said. He had pushed Council to go further than the commission on the inspector general and opposed the commission’s own recommendation for a zoning hearing master, so he was not asking members to simply adopt its work. “I don’t know that Council has necessarily considered the work,” Greco said. “I think they kind of know what they were going to do with or without whatever our recommendation was — rightfully so, as Council has that express authority in the charter.” Greco later underscored that Council has the final say, saying he supports members exercising the authority the charter gives them over what moves forward.

None of the charter changes reached the ballot Oct. 1, when Council instead directed Tinkler to draft separate ordinances and ballot language for the changes members want voters to consider. If Council advances them, voters could separately decide questions involving mayoral term limits, the inspector general, the executive-order override and whatever removal process emerges from the next draft. Council scheduled its next charter update for Oct. 15 at 1:30 p.m.

The commission had also recommended stretching Tampa’s formal charter review cycle from every eight years to every 12, a proposal Council left behind while moving ahead with other changes to the city’s governing document. For Greco, that recommendation grew from the same question now hanging over the broader debate, how readily Tampa should rewrite the rules that distribute power inside City Hall. “A stable government is one that has solid rules that everyone knows that can be adopted through time,” he said. “Rules can still be changed. City Council writes ordinances and all that. But we just figured the city’s charter is the city’s constitution. You shouldn’t change it that often.”

Click here to watch the Charter Review Advisory Commission’s meetings and see how commissioners developed and debated the recommendations now before City Council.

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