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Coffee Talk (Tampa)
Best laid plans
Only 100 days into her first term in office, Hillsborough Clerk of the Court Pat Frank has lost a key member of her senior management team. Stanley Gray, chief of the clerk's human resources department, has resigned.
"It just wasn't the right fit," Frank says.
The decision is a setback to Frank's goal of integrating minorities into her senior management team since Gray is black.
Frank and Gray met recently as part of a planned strategy to evaluate the clerk's operations within her first 100 days in office. The two acknowledged the job fell far short of Gray's capabilities. They then came to a mutual understanding.
"I felt very badly about it but recognized it wasn't fair to Stanley," she says. "I want people to understand he is a very competent individual, a lovely person and a fine gentleman. There was no dispute, no animosity."
Business support
Judges in the Hillsborough and Pinellas-Pasco courts have an unlikely ally: Associated Industries of Florida. Yes, the organization that lists tort reform as its No. 1 priority this legislative session.
The business lobby supports the Florida Supreme Court's request for more judges, Barney Bishop, AIF's president, tells Coffee Talk. The lobby has asked the Legislature to allocate enough dollars to pay the salaries of about 115 new judges. Of that number, the high court certified the need for six new circuit judges in Hillsborough and four more in Pinellas-Pasco. It also certified the need for four new county judges in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties.
An increase in judges would immediately benefit business by reducing the backlog of circuit civil lawsuits, Bishop says. The group also supports the allocation of more dollars to hire law clerks as a way to improve judicial efficiency.
Bishop says the business lobby also wants the Legislature to increase the amount of tax dollars spent on court technology. He says it makes no sense to his 10,000 or so members that the state executive and legislative branches each have their own computer operations and the judiciary does not.
As far as tort reform, Bishop says the group is more committed than ever to abolishing joint and several liability. He acknowledges that may not happen this session, expected to end the first week of May.
"That is going to be the toughest issue," he says. "It's going to be 50-50 whether we pass joint and several."
A little late for taxpayers
Local news media this week marked the first anniversary of a span collapse at a Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway construction project by tallying the costly aftermath.
Although nobody was killed, the collapse is hitting commuters and taxpayers in the wallet.
The Tampa-Hillsborough County Expressway Authority, operator of the toll road stretching from South Tampa to Brandon, is floating additional bonds and borrowing more state money for repairs. That could add tens of millions of dollars to the cost of putting up an elevated reverse-lane span to ease rush-hour congestion.
The authority's credit rating is heading lower, adding to the extra expense. Finally, motorists using the 2-decade-old expressway are bracing for toll hikes to cover cost overruns.
Too bad more government officials and media managers weren't paying attention to a 2003 expose by Tampa television station WFTS-Channel 28.
Seven months before last April's collapse, WFTS reported serious flaws in the design of the elevated expressway. Other Tampa Bay area media didn't play up the story until a pier supporting the elevated span sunk 11 feet into the ground on April 13, 2004.
While many hereabouts ignored WFTS's work, it has garnered national praise. A journalism group at the University of Missouri selected WFTS's expressway exposes as the best example of local investigative reporting in a top-20 American TV market last year.
Unfortunately for taxpayers, it seems not enough people were watching back home.
DeLay reaction
After the Terri Schiavo tragedy, Tampa solo practitioner Herbert M. Berkowitz has one question:
Why didn't one of the many judges to rule in the case sanction U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas?
During congressional debate, DeLay made what was perceived by Berkowitz to be a threat against the judiciary for consistently ruling in favor of removing Schiavo's feeding tube. "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior," is how one Democratic senator quoted DeLay.
Berkowitz believes DeLay should have been called before a judge to explain why the congressman, whose nickname is "The Hammer," shouldn't be jailed for contempt of court.
"It's beating up on a branch of government that, by law, cannot defend itself," Berkowitz tells Coffee Talk. "We don't go to the Special Olympics to trip kids, do we?"
Fortunately for DeLay, the Tampa lawyer doesn't wear a black robe.
Berkowitz says he was gratified by national polls disapproving of congressional and presidential intervention in the Schivao dispute. "At the end of the day," he says, "the courts protect us from the politicians."
New beginnings
After five years, Phil Wolff has split from Sarasota's Levin Tannenbaum Wolff Band Gates & Pugh PL. The real estate lawyer has joined a partnership with Jim Gibson and Lauren Kohl-Helbig to form Gibson Kohl-Helbig & Wolff PL.
Everyone involved describes the parting as amicable, with former law partner Alan Tannenbaum even mentioning his firm and Wolff still maintain a working relationship. Wolff's former partners have reorganized as Levin Tannenbaum Band Gates & Pugh PL.
"It's all amicable," says Wolff, who has practiced real estate law in the Sarasota market for more than 30 years. "I just thought for the future development of my practice this was a better fit."
The move combines Wolff's land development practice with Kohl-Helbig's real estate closing work. If client matters ever go south, they'll turn to Gibson, a Florida Bar certified trial lawyer.
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