Council holds 66 two-minute drills

When Tampa City commissioners Linda Saul-Sena and John Dingfelder suddenly resigned their council seats last month, few people foresaw the level of interest to replace them — all 66 of them.

Saul-Sena and Dingfelder, both Democrats, are each seeking seats on the Hillsborough County Commission, but both failed to resign by a required deadline setting off a chain reaction of legal maneuverings.

Dingfelder, a candidate for the District 1 seat, withdrew from the county race in hopes of being appointed by the Hillsborough Democratic Party under a state law allowing the party to select a candidate when a party is left without a candidate.

Saul-Sena, however, didn't initially follow suit, but now under threat of a GOP lawsuit finally did withdraw. On July 19, Saul-Sena was also appointed by the Hillsborough Democratic Party to be its nominee for the countywide District 5 seat.

The GOP, however, maintains that the Democrats never truly had a candidate because the Supervisor of Elections office shouldn't have allowed Dingfelder and Saul-Sena on the ballot to begin with. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, an initial list of seven candidates for the two vacated Council seats ballooned to 66. Saul-Sena seat was sought after by 39 candidates and 27 applied for Dingfelder's.

The remaining five council members were tasked with sorting through all the applications and interviewing the candidates publicly. With so many candidates, the Council could only give them two minutes each to set themselves apart from all the competition.

In the end, Curtis Stokes and Yvonne Yolie Capin came out winners for what can best be described as 66 two-minute drills with a lot of voting to get the three vote majority needed to win.

Stokes, a former head of the Hillsborough NAACP, was chosen to fill Saul-Sena's citywide district post. Capin, a Democratic fundraiser who lost a bid for the state House District 57 seat in 2008, was picked to take Dingfelder's south Tampa's district seat — on the 17th ballot.

And if they want to keep their not-so-hard-won seats, they'll have to put in more than a couple minutes before the next city election on March 11.