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The cronies are pumping their rail tax hamster wheel again.
It's 2010, 2016 and 2018 in Hillsborough all over.
Instead of the County directly using Parsons Brinkerhoff and local PR crony Beth Leytham as they did with the 2016 Go Hillsborough rail tax hike scam, this go round the County just merged with the All for Transportation Transit (AFT) rail cartel cronies. The County is shamefully rewarding the very same people who funded the illegal AFT rail tax.
The Tampa Bay Times just reported the inflation tax in Tampa Bay is raging at 9.6%. Of course everyone knows the real inflation rate of food, household goods, gas, furniture, vehicles, etc. etc. is in the double digits.
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| Crony Tax Raising Harry Cohen |
Hillsborough County commissioner Harry Cohen doesn't care. He is one of the Tampa Centric 5 Democrat commissioners pushing to put another massive $18 BILLION rail tax boondoggle on the November ballot.
Harry Cohen is running for re-election in November. He wants to burden all Hillsborough County residents and businesses with higher taxes.
Florida and other states including Georgia, Arizona, Ohio. Texas, Idaho, Kansas, Indiana, Texas and Tennessee passed bills that ban "private" funding of elections and/or prohibit "private" funds from being handed directly to local election officials. Democrat Governors of Michigan, Louisiana, Wisconsin and North Carolina veto'd such bills passed by their State legislatures. The Pennsylvania House passed their bill in December and has sent it over to the State Senate.
New York Congresswoman Claudia Tenney analyzed where the partisan "ZuckBucks" were handed out in 2020. No Surprise! She found that in a number of "swing states", 90% went to the Big Blue urban Counties.
The Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners has retained a strategic consultant to develop an equity profile for Hillsborough County that will be used to inform strategic equity spaces including, but not limited to, income bias, economic opportunity, health care, criminal justice, housing, land use/zoning, transportation, food security, and educational access/the digital divide. Additionally, the resulting profile and data will be used to guide the design and implementation of an “equity lens” through which actions taken by the County are examined to assess and measure questions of equity.
Repost from Tampa Bay Guardian
Three months in to its fiscal year 2022, PSTA’s bus ridership year over year has declined another 20%, according to its own official reporting. PSTA, which is the taxpayer-funded Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority, ended its fiscal year 2021 (FY2021) with ridership 46% lower than it was in FY2015.
The data thus shows that the ridership in FY2022 continues to plunge, and has not stabilized after the “COVID-related” plunge over the previous 18 months.
In September 2020 Democrat Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections (SOE) Craig Latimer took over $2.9M of "ZuckBucks". He received his "ZuckBucks" from the highly partisan Democrat activist nonprofit CTCL. There are a lot of questions that deserve answers from SOE Latimer.
Hold onto your Wallets! The Tampa Bay rail cartel are at it again.
The Tampa Centric Five Democrats have the votes to put AFT 2.0, another 30 year, 1%, $16B (probably $18B now) rail tax on the ballot in November. Democrat commissioner Pat Kemp told us this last September. Having the votes is all they care about - silly little things such as refunding the illegally taken $521 MILLION AFT funds and getting real public input don't matter.
It's a done deal. The Vinik bailed out Tampa Bay Times confirmed what we already knew:
The county scheduled a series of community meetings beginning next month in anticipation of a proposed sales tax referendum on the November ballot.
The Town Hall meetings charade the commissioners planned to have last year have been rescheduled. As we noted before, the commissioners ignore the fastest growing area in Hillsborough, South County, where they scheduled NO meetings.
It looks like the County renamed these meetings to "Open Houses" because they are NOT Town Hall meetings where those who attend get to publicly speak.
What is an Open House? It's an "informal" event for the public to "drop by" anytime during the hours of the Open House to view an exhibition or whatever the Open House "host" is trying to sell the public.
These meetings are to sell the public that the County has no money to fund transportation in the County. That is a lie and we've seen that rodeo before.
