Luxury complex, cultural spots get Tampa redevelopment dollars while residents beg for streets, sidewalk repairs

As the indefatigable president of a federation of Tampa neighborhood associations, Stephanie Poynor gets around.

“Every single neighborhood meeting that I go to,” she told the Tampa City Council a year ago, “people are complaining about their sidewalks, the roads.”

In November, Poynor urged immediate action. “I have potholes bigger than baby carriages,” Poynor told the council.

Despite the chassis-rattling reputation of Tampa streets, city officials devote just a few million dollars most years to patching or repaving their more than 1,200 miles of public roadways. That was going to be the case again this year until the City Council upped Mayor Jane Castor’s recommended $5.5 million for street resurfacing to $9.1 million.

At that pace, a city street gets repaved every 75 years, Tampa Mobility Director Vik Bhide told Tampa television station WFLA in 2022. City officials would like to reduce that to 25 years. Since 2022, the officials say they are doing better, although they didn’t have an immediate estimate of their progress.

City leaders cannot claim a lack of cash.

Healthy reserve, frustrated motorists

The city’s community redevelopment agency, or CRA, boasted a healthy reserve of more than $120 million, according to its fiscal 2023 audit, the latest available.

But if frustrated motorists getting around on Tampa’s pothole-scarred streets think that sum could help them avoid their next trip to the repair shop, powerful interests are way ahead of them.

The CRA’s downtown redevelopment zone has spent or committed to spend $50 million reimbursing the developer of the high-end Water Street Tampa for infrastructure expenses. Another $64 million has been put forth for expansion of downtown cultural attractions through 2033.

The CRA, governed by the City Council with staff support from the Castor administration, has spent $35 million so far on the capital needs of Water Street, an upscale live-work-play community from Strategic Property Partners LLC, a venture of Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates.

Another $25 million is helping with enhancements at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts, according to presentations by Castor aides to the City Council. The Tampa Museum of Art is growing as well with another nearly $25 million in CRA funds while Tampa Theatre has dibs on $14 million.

“That’s why there is no money to fix the rest of the city,” another local activist, Valerie Newman, wrote on the neighborhood social-media site Next Door.

Cleaning up blight

The Tampa CRA is among 194 such agencies across the state, according to the Florida Department of Commerce.

CRAs can declare a rundown section of town to be a redevelopment zone. In Tampa, the CRA has made such declarations for Central Park, the Channel District, Drew Park, East Tampa, the Tampa Heights riverfront and West Tampa. The zones in downtown and Ybor City each have two redevelopment areas.

CRAs are intended to clean up blight by inducing the private sector to bankroll new housing and businesses. Ideally, the new development raises real estate values. The resulting higher property tax collections are not spent in the rest of the city but instead are plowed back into the zone. That is supposed to incentivize more outside investment until the area can flourish on its own.

To many observers, the Tampa CRA’s downtown zone, anchored by Water Street, already is flourishing.

“The amount of money that the public sector has invested or will invest in Water Street is dwarfed by the amount of tax revenue that will be thrown off by Water Street,” said Bob Buckhorn, Castor’s predecessor in the mayor’s office, who helped put together the deal for CRA funding.

Higher downtown real estate values should generate $507 million in taxes that can be spent within the zone between now and 2033, according to city projections. The zone’s designation as a blighted area doesn’t expire until 2043.

“This downtown CRA has got pockets full of money,” Poynor told the City Council in another of her frequent appearances at CRA meetings. “It’s time for it to be put to bed. It’s done its job…to cure slum and blight.”

Gravy train

How did a program with a mandate to rid Tampa’s central business district of blight morph into a gravy train for luxury developers and arts executives?

The downtown redevelopment zone was set up in 1983 to reimagine the southern end of the business district with an office-hotel combination and an elevated railway to Harbour Island.

Former Mayor Sandy Freedman, who was serving on the City Council at the time, opposed creation of that CRA zone and others.

“There are other ways you could do it as opposed to creating this thing that takes all the money, keeps it in that neighborhood, and no matter how good it gets, there’s no guarantee that you’re ever going to shut it down,” Freedman said in a recent interview. “And that’s exactly what’s happened.”

For decades, the decrepit parking lots and industrial space around what became Amalie Arena, where the Lightning play, had been eyed for redevelopment. “It was a pretty desolate place,” said Buckhorn.

By 1993, when government officials and the Lightning’s original owner settled on the east side of downtown as the arena site, they did so partly out of a desire to revitalize the general vicinity.

Enter Vinik, a Boston money manager who bought the floundering Lightning franchise in 2010 for $170 million. Within a few years, Vinik and his associates also had title to more than 50 acres near his team’s arena.

Besides gradually transforming Tampa Bay’s woebegone NHL team into a perennial Stanley Cup contender, Vinik endeared himself to the region by handing out $50,000 checks to local charities at Lightning home games.

Locals benefited too

Vinik’s generosity wasn’t limited to area nonprofits. Local pols benefited, too. Vinik and his companies gave $232,000 to Castor’s two mayoral campaigns and her political committee between 2019 and 2023.

Buckhorn, who served as mayor from 2011 to 2019, was a driving force behind the city and Hillsborough County eventually pledging up to $100 million—$50 million each—to help Vinik and billionaire partner Gates with such infrastructure costs as relocating utility lines and burying new ones. The willingness of University of South Florida leaders to open a medical school at Water Street helped seal the deal.

Tampa’s $50 million share is coming from the CRA’s downtown zone account, fattened with escalating property tax revenue from the Vinik-Gates project and other emerging development.

Local boosters have lauded the $4 billion-plus Water Street complex, with its acclaimed restaurants (one earned a Michelin Star), three hotels (including one with the city’s first 5-star rating) and more than 1,300 high-priced dwelling units.

“Water Street has been a tremendous success,” Buckhorn said. “It has put us on the map in the real estate world. It has brought more attention to Tampa in a positive way than probably any project other than the Riverwalk that we’ve done.”

Vinik himself plunked down more than $8 million for a penthouse in 2023. Later that year, Vinik sold his Strategic Property Partners stake to Cascade Investment Fund LLC, a holding company for Gates. In 2024, after announcing a divorce from his wife of more than 30 years, Vinik unloaded his controlling interest in the Lightning for a reported $1.8 billion.

Not everybody is bursting with civic pride about Water Street.

“Fifty million dollars that was gifted to Bill Gates and Jeff Vinik, who have more money than I’ll ever be able to dream of,” Poynor griped to the City Council in 2023.

Are you kidding me?

Critics fear a new giveaway to developers is underway within the CRA’s West Tampa zone. Early in 2025, the City Council approved $10 million in CRA funds to assist with a Riverwalk extension on the west side of the Hillsborough River.

“The public knows that this is an amenity for developers who want to develop a few spots along the Riverwalk,” said City Council member Bill Carlson. “All the other stuff—the sidewalks, the bike lanes, all that stuff—all that is put in to try to get political support and make it look like a West Tampa project.”

Carlson was joined by City Council member Lynn Hurtak in unsuccessfully opposing that CRA expenditure.

Poynor’s years-long critique of CRA spending has taken on new urgency since last hurricane season. Residents all over Tampa were shocked in 2024 by massive flooding of their homes during Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

Those living in the Forest Hills area, which wasn’t in a hurricane evacuation zone, were angrier than most. Only one of three city stormwater pumps in that neighborhood had a backup generator, in case electricity was disrupted during turbulent weather. And that pump shut down during Hurricane Milton when the generator failed to turn on after the power went out.

An audit released in December concluded Tampa’s stormwater pumps have been poorly maintained for years. The audit blamed staff turnover. Officials left in charge lack the expertise to ensure the pumps work properly, the audit found.

In a post-hurricane appearance before the City Council, Poynor, president of the Tampa Homeowners Association of Neighborhoods, highlighted the pump issues as she objected to a multimillion-dollar CRA-funded downtown beautification proposal.

“It’s $6 million! Six million dollars, when we have wastewater generators that don’t freaking work. Are you kidding me?” Poynor said. “What about the people throughout the entire city of Tampa who had poop water in their house covering their things?”

Slum and blighted?

Mayor Castor has deflected that sort of criticism by contending the hurricane rains were historic and thus beyond the design capability of Tampa’s utility system to prevent such flooding. The city and county are looking into what went wrong.

So what is the potential for prying loose some cash from the CRA to begin to grapple with the crumbling infrastructure of Tampa, which the U.S. Census Bureau pegged as the 11th-fastest growing major American city between 2022 and 2023?

The downtown zone, made up of two redevelopment areas encompassing 870 acres, is the CRA’s richest. It had $46 million in reserve funds in 2023, according to the agency’s latest audit. The second-richest zone, covering an adjacent 200 acres in the Channel District, reported $23 million in reserves.

“Neither of those areas, downtown or Channelside, could be categorized as slum and blighted,” said former Mayor Freedman, “and haven’t been able to be categorized that way for a very long time.”

Gwen Henderson, who chairs the CRA’s governing board, is among the City Council members concerned about what spreading the wealth beyond downtown might involve. Rejiggering the CRA funding formula would require the city to redo a contract with Hillsborough County commissioners. Five of the seven commissioners are Republicans.

“Would you say that could be a risky situation for us, considering how conservative the County Commission is?” Henderson asked last year. “Slashed affordable housing. Constantly question the arts. Wouldn’t we be putting ourselves in danger if we renegotiate the interlocal agreement with them?”

Nevertheless, Carlson has advocated redirecting some of the CRA’s downtown property-tax windfall to improving the quality of life in neglected Tampa neighborhoods. 

“Downtown has been a success,” Carlson said. “Now we have other areas that desperately need funding.”

But Carlson has found few takers.

Affordable housing in downtown

His colleague Luis Viera has been supportive, signaling slight remorse that the council, acting as the CRA board, funneled so much money to downtown cultural assets.

At a 2024 CRA meeting, Viera recalled backing $15 million for the art museum but later voting against another $35 million in requests from cultural institutions. Viera said he supported the CRA’s downtown efforts despite taking “heat” during his election campaigns. “I still do,” Viera said. “But don’t stretch a double into a home run.”

Coming out of the pandemic, arts advocates pleaded poverty at the time of their CRA requests. “I don’t think any of those projects would get funded today,” said Carlson, who voted to fund projects at the Straz and Tampa Theatre..

Buckhorn says those cultural requests should have never been funded by the City Council. “If they would stop giving away tax dollars to not-for-profits that don’t produce any property taxes that replenish the fund,” he said, “then maybe you could do things like expand the streetcar and create even more economic opportunities.”

What is getting CRA funding these days is affordable housing, to the tune of $136 million over the next eight years from the account of the downtown zone alone.

“We need affordable housing in downtown,” said Hurtak. “It’s very important. We need people to be able to live downtown and work downtown.”

Yet, after years of effectively subsidizing Water Street’s unaffordable housing, Carlson questions why new subsidies have to be confined to downtown.

“Affordable housing is many times more expensive in downtown than it is anywhere else,” Carlson said. “I would rather get more units because right now we need units, not just spending somewhere.”

Third World country?

Neighborhood activists point out that Tampa’s lack of affordable housing hasn’t been helped lately by a lot of new residential construction favoring the affluent.

However, Carlson hears from newcomers who regret buying into Tampa. “Some of the people that moved here in the last few years are moving out because they don’t like that we don’t have sidewalks,” he said, “don’t like that we have roads that look like they are from a Third World country.”

Tampa has 800 miles of sidewalks but city officials figure another 1,300 miles would be ideal. They say designing and constructing a mile of sidewalk costs $750,000. That means all the needed sidewalks would cost $975 million if it was possible to install them this year.

In 2022, city officials reported that they put in about one mile of new sidewalk annually. A year later, they were able to add two miles of new sidewalk with help from federal post-pandemic stimulus grants.

Officials are optimistic that Tampa could come into extra road and sidewalk money in 2025 and beyond. A countywide sales tax for capital needs was renewed by voters last year. The state is also expected to share a slice of the leftover proceeds from a short-lived countywide sales tax that was invalidated by the Florida Supreme Court.

In 2023, Castor proposed a 16 percent property tax increase that would have raised $45 million to deal with maintenance backlogs and other public works. The City Council shot down that plan.

“She tried to raise taxes,” Freedman said of Castor. “Why didn’t she think that some of those dollars could come from either partially reducing a couple of the CRAs that have done well and allowing them to flow into the neighborhoods or shutting them down altogether? Time’s up.”

Pleas of activists

Castor spokesman Adam Smith pointed out that CRA spending is controlled by the City Council, not the mayor.

Smith added in an email: “There are legal restrictions on what CRA money can be spent on. The money must be spent within the CRA area and toward purposes identified in each CRA’s community redevelopment plan. Generally speaking, CRA money can’t be spent on normal governmental operations, like paving or police patrols.”

Otherwise, the Castor administration hasn’t shown much sympathy for the fix-the-roads pleas of activists such as Poynor, who became a government watchdog due to what she considered the city’s disregard for her low-lying neighborhood south of Gandy Boulevard.

At a CRA meeting last spring, Alis Drumgo, Castor’s deputy administrator for development and economic opportunity, seemed to address Poynor and other critics in comments to the City Council.

“If you want to line up all the people who live south of Gandy who get flat tires from potholes, I’ll gladly help them change them,” Drumgo said.

Smith says Drumgo was probably joking. The city does pay for automobile damage from road hazards, he added.

In any case, Drumgo’s offer may no longer stand. He left city government in July to join the local office of Capital City Consulting LLC, a Tallahassee lobbying firm.