Fifty-nine percent of Americans receive health insurance through an employer, according to the ABC News Health Care Town Hall broadcast the other night. If you are among that 59 percent, would you stick to your rhetorical and supposed ideological principles? Would you pony up $10,000 when acute stomach pain you think might be an appendicitis sends your daughter to the emergency room at 3 a.m.? Would you just tell her to suck it up because that’s what conservatives do? Or might you suddenly find yourself rather open to the dreaded socialized medicine? Considering that I’m aware of no great mass of conservative seniors or veterans boycotting Medicare and the VA, guess which option I think is most likely?

For all its massive complexity and expense, the US health insurance model rests entirely upon a single, simply understood Jenga piece: the willingness of private employers to pay for private health insurance and eat its inefficiencies. Pull that piece away, and the whole system falls down in a mass of wreckage – affecting everything from public health to doctors salaries. In this way, private health insurance resembles nothing so much as the institutional newspaper industry, which also long depended on an irrational business subsidy. For years, newspapers managed to convince businesses – and classified advertisers – that they needed to use the newspaper to reach customers in their particular market. At the same time, newspapers convinced themselves that advertisers were paying for their vital community journalism. Reality, in its merciless way, with a little nudge from web technology, has greeted these twin delusions with, “Uh, no” and “Uh, hell no.”

What’s striking to me, in retrospect, is how obviously fragile the entire institutional journalism model always was, even as most of us, myself included, considered it as permanent as undertaking. I suspect, one day soon, we’ll look back on the employer-based model of “free market” health care and say the same thing, especially if the Republicans and corporatist “centrist” Democrats succeed in blowing up meaningful reform as they’re trying very hard to do.

The key health care delusion is that employers provide insurance to keep their employees healthy. No. They provide it because they’re afraid of losing employees to competitors if they don’t. The instant a critical mass of companies perceive they can retain and recruit talent without paying directly for that talent’s basic health care needs, the private US insurance industry, which depends on companies considering health insurance a part of base compensation, is doomed. It is never a good thing for your business model to depend on a single corporate standard, which could be revised in an instant.

How likely is business to wake up and say, “Not our problem anymore?” Let’s take a look at a couple of charts.

And

The first chart illustrates nicely a simple fact that I’m not sure everyone grasps. Those of us who get our health insurance through an employer do not come close to paying the cost of our own insurance. Not. Close. This, folks, is socialized medicine. It’s just corporately socialized – badly – through an enormous and unpredictable business tax. And look at the trends. They are all upward – drastically. It’s the worst of all worlds – employees are paying more, but so are employers, whose share of the costs is actually increasing. At a time when most employers are struggling just to stay in business, this is completely unsustainable. And everyone knows it. Raise your hand if your company is laying the hard sell on you to enroll in a high deductible plan. That’s the first step to dropping insurance altogether.

The second chart buttresses the first, showing how private insurance costs – paid primarily by employers – are projected to balloon over the coming decades, greatly outpacing the costs of the socialized medicine programs, which are growing too fast in their own right. For a citizen, here’s the bottom line of this chart: Government insurance contains health care costs far more effectively than private insurance. And again, I see nobody fleeing Medicare for the glories of the free marketplace because care is somehow worse.

This chart also provides the rationale for the so-called “public plan option” that has become the key source of controversy in the ongoing effort at reform. Government has demonstrated that it controls costs better than private insurance, which must turn a profit and pay big bonuses to executives. Thus, if government creates a plan to compete with private insurers for that corporate business, it’s likely to succeed, and, in turn, drive down at least the growth of costs. That’s the argument for a public plan.

However, it’s not clear to me that business still wouldn’t eventually decide – public plan or not – that they no longer need to provide employee health care. Eventually, it would come to seem odd for the companies to buy health care from the government rather than just allow government to provide it in the same way most other industrialized countries do. That’s the argument against a public option, that it’s actually a Trojan Horse for single-payer health care. Because it will undercut private insurance costs, it will eventually drive private insurance out of business, leaving no option but single payer. I happen to largely agree with this argument. I just think crowding out private insurance is entirely a good thing.

Doctors – or at least the American Medical Association lobbying group – hate this idea because it means some physicians might get paid less. They remind me very much of reporters and editors asserting how important it is to maintain the authority, rigid heirarchy, and surprisingly highly paid executive structure of the traditional newsroom in the face of budget cuts and dirty bloggers. We’re very important, damn it. How will you get along without us? Yes, yes, all true, except people vote with their money. And health care can be surprisingly elective, right up until the point when it absolutely isn’t.

Doctors clearly have greater immediate importance than journalists. But people die, or get sicker, every day in this country for lack of insurance money to pay doctors, or, more often, because of inertia brought on by what it costs to access quality primary care without insurance. What happens when a big chunk of that 60 percent of Americans with employer-based health care suddenly finds it has to pay the full cost of a visit to Watson Clinic? Either they won’t go – they’ll wait until they need the ER, which they also will not pay – or Watson Clinic will drop its prices, otherwise known as paying doctors less.

Whilw doctors may not perceive their own risk if nothing changes, I think the private insurance industry does see what’s coming. That’s why they’ve “come to the table” with what sounds like major cost control commitments. Who knows how serious or enforceable they are, but they are using them as a cudgel against the public plan. Private insurers have a very small political, and especially economic, needle to thread. If Congress does nothing, I think the private health insurance industry realizes it could face a very rapid apocalypse akin to what the newspaper industry is now enduring. If Congress adopts a meaningful public plan, I think the industry sees a slower, more gradual glidepath to the same apoclayptic end state. One could argue quite forcefully that this represents the best option for the country – a managed destruction of the employer-based model that allows the insurance industry to gradually shrink to a niche, supplemental status, much like in the excellent French model, which most observers consider the world’s best health system. But ultimately, that doesn’t serve the industry’s economic interests.

Rather, it seems that its preferred option is to commit to some cost reduction and universal, or near universal, coverage backed by government subsidy and an individual mandate. No public plan, or, more likely, a public plan intentionally larded with landmines designed to keep it from functioning well. This, to me, is worse than doing nothing.

In any event, Congress isn’t really debating heath care reform. It’s debating the future of the private health insurance industry. That’s what we’re deciding right now because all evidence suggests that the industry cannot both support itself and provide health care for all Americans. I also think, politically, this debate is about deciding who gets to blame who for bringing socialized medicine to America in the years to come.

I must admit that a very large part of me is rooting for Senate Republicans and the Mary Landrieu/Bill Nelson band of Corporacrats to succeed in blowing up the public plan, which will force the House to vote against any health care reform. I have come to believe that truly significant systemic change, the type of change driven by a fundamental reassessment of how we think about a subject, comes only as a byproduct of massive, widespread economic pain. Human beings just don’t do abstraction very well. For example, $4 gas single-handedly destroyed the Hummer culture in this country in about six months and did more to shape energy policy than any congressional initiative in my lifetime.

The face-spiter in me would take some joy in the day that the coalition of major industry associations announces that within three years its members will no longer offer health insurance to employees. They’d get to be the bad guys, and I’d get to enjoy the spectacle of watching the AMA – the progenitors of the “socialized medicine” epithet — help write the single-payer health bill it would take Congress about 15 minutes to approve. I have always said that single-payer health care would come from the business Right. I still believe that. Doing nothing will ensure it, I think.

So while I acknowledge that a public plan-based gradual reform path is probably safer for the country, I must confess that I’ve grown weary over the years of protecting penny ante economic conservative bleaters from the consequences of what they think they believe. The silence of the lambs as it all came tumbling down would be sweet – at least for a minute or two.

This story, which exists solely as the means for somebody to broadcast that Julian Mullis is in a gay relationship, is an object lesson of everything that’s wrong with institutional journalism in this country. It’s a great example of what I think Chris was saying in his Defeatism column a few weeks ago.

It’s important for me to note that if I still worked for The Ledger or The Tribune, I would almost certainly have written this same story in much the same way my friend Rick Rousos wrote it. So when I criticize, I’m criticizing the corrupt and smug standards of modern newspaper and television journalism that force good, conscientious reporters to act as agents in petty squabbles while ignoring the important investigative or explanatory work because it’s hard and not spoon-fed by a malevolent cop or political enemy. Not having to wrestle with my conscience over this is perhaps the best perk of leaving professional journalism. But I was lucky. I had an option. In this economy, many reporters don’t. They hold their noses and cash their checks and feed their kids.

I called Rick to ask about the origin and thought process of this story, and not surprisingly, he wouldn’t comment. Not because he was combative, but because he didn’t think he was authorized to talk about internal Ledger rigamarole. I did get the impression he took no pleasure in writing this piece.

Understand, there’s no way Rick or one of the cop reporters just happened upon this police report during regular rounds or checks. Somebody, either a cop or a political enemy or somebody who’s just mean, called The Ledger and informed about it. That’s how these things work. Ninety percent – or more – of all scoops come from somebody who wants to use reporters for some purpose. That’s always been the case. The key, as a reporter, is how you deal with that. If there’s a specific quibble I have with Rick’s story, it’s that he did not say who pointed him to the report and provide context as to why they might do that. The rejoinder is, well, you can’t jeopardize sources. Balderdash. In this story, the source, whoever it was, is just as much a character as Mullis.

That being said, under the classic newspaper standards for public officials, you have to write this story. After all, Julian Mullis is a mayor of a city. He’s a public official. If a woman was arrested in his home, you’d write about that. And of course, The Ledger and all newspapers have a solemn duty to closely scrutinize the behavior of our important elected and public officials. After all, look how thoroughly they examined the personal economic interests of JD Alexander and his friends in the CSX and Heartland Parkway deals. Oh right, I forgot. I guess that solemn duty only applies when somebody holds your hand and walks you to it. Or when you can do it with a single phone call and faxed police report.

Newspapers have always published these types of gossipy stories. People read them. They’re easy. They sell. But papers used to try to offset them with tougher, public service pieces that truly helped keep powerful people on notice. Back in the day, circa 2000, despite constant business community pressure on Skip and then publisher John Fitzwater, The Ledger gave me the time and backing to take a blowtorch to the Central Florida Development Council. We ran about 10 A1 stories in a row focusing on the agency’s petty self-dealing in those days. I fear that the days of that kind of institutional support for real local reporting on people and organizations with power have come and gone. The Ledger has lost too many reporters, and there’s too much demand for web porn, along the lines of Mullis story. That’s understandable, given the financial and resource realities. But they ought to stop pretending that this Mullis story serves their public mission. They’ve abdicated their public mission, mainly because we, the readers, don’t want to pay for it.

If papers wanted to be serious about their public mission, they could adjust its tenets based on common sense reality. It is absurd to treat Julian Mullis and Buddy Fletcher as public figures of equal coverage importance. Reporting on the personal lives of the people elected by a few hundred votes with the same ferocity – or more, really – than real politicians with real power makes no sense. You might as well report on the personal lives of PTA chairs.

How about, if these small town officials screw up with public money, you investigate and report it. If they’re arrested, report it. Other than that, let them be imperfect citizens like anybody else. Especially if you have no intention of looking into the personal economic behavior of far more important officials.

This whole thing reminds me of that wonderful Anatole France quote: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” You might rewrite it: “Newspaper conventions, in their majestic equality, forbid Mulberry mayor and powerful state politicians alike from keeping their sexuality private when victimized in an alleged crime.”

Finally, I think this highlights powerfully the sheer destructive force of the closet.

Accounts of sad, brutal news events fill newspaper pages every day. See Iran. By comparison, the saga of Mulberry’s mayor is, by comparison, a small thing. Yet, I don’t know that I’ve ever read a more heartbreaking quote in The Ledger than this:

“This will be the laughingstock of my family, and we’ve been here for generations,” Mullis said. “I can take it. But my parents, and my children …”

I’m not gay, so I can’t know the fear that motivates people to hide who they are. But it can’t be healthy for a person – or for their family – to live like an actor at all times, to live as if you’ve committed an undiscovered crime.

Outings are complex things. I support them for people like politicians or preachers – like Ted Haggard, for instance – who cover for themselves by spewing homophobia about others. Beyond that, I think each person needs to make his or her own decision about coming out. But all anecdotal evidence I see and read, as well as common sense, suggests that people who live in full acceptance of who they are, live more happily, as do the people who truly love them.

And, one asks of those who oppose gay marriage, or even basic civic normalization of gay relationships, if Julian Mullis and his kids wouldn’t be far better off today if we lived in world where being gay – a thing no one can control – didn’t make you fear making your family a laughingstock? Do you really want to keep human beings in this twilight world of social existence? For those of you who are religious, do you really think this serves Christ’s purposes? Do you care?

That stems from a question asked 14 years ago during a panel on “The New Economics of Journalism.” Seated at the head table were Esther Dyson (Forbes columnist), Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. (New York Times, Publisher), Walter Isaacson (Time, New Media Editor), and Frank Daniels III (Nando.net publisher).

The question was from NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen…

I’m Jay Rosen from New York University. And I’d like to address a comment to something that we’ve heard repeatedly throughout the Conference, and a lot in this Panel, which is that what journalists sell us, or the value they add is judgment.

That’s something that I hear a good deal of at conferences like this, and what the conversation never gets to beyond that is: What are the grounds for that judgment? Where is that judgment coming from?

There are a lot of ways to judge the world, and if what “The New York Times”, or any other news medium is doing is providing the information that a human being needs to function well in this society, there are a lot of views of human beings,- there are a lot of ways to function well; there are a lot of views of what’s going on in this society.

And the question becomes: On what grounds are those kinds of judgments made? Now, if we take Esther’s metaphor of mapmaking, which is also interesting, there are a lot of ways to map anything. If I take the State of Connecticut, I can map the river system; I can map the transportation system; I can map the demographics; I can map population shifts. All of those things will produce maps that are accurate, credible, potentially valuable, but there are different ways of mapping the world.

So when I read “The New York Times”, I don’t get just information, and I don’t get just good judgment. I get a vision of what culture is about in the culture pages; I get a vision of what politics is about and for in the political news,- I get a vision of the local community in local sections. And I think one of the questions that’s beginning to be raised in the online area is: Where is this vision coming from?

In the years when “The New York Times”, for example, saw culture a certain way and didn’t include rock and roll as part of it, I wasn’t buying your judgment. I was waiting for your judgment to catch up to the way the world is. Do you see?

So it seems to me that the challenge of online world, which incidentally, is also the challenge of public journalism, is: How can we create grounds for judgment that arise out of interactions with people and relationships with people?

And it seems to me that the days of judgment coming from a citadel of judgment may be drawing to a close. And now, it’s the quality of our relationships with people that will determine the quality of our judgment, and the ultimate grounds for making those judgments that add value in journalism.

Rosen had the right idea in 1995. Newspapers have long labored under the belief that their institutions provided the trust that people had in the news. While there might have been a day when people followed select newspapers like they follow favorite sports teams today, there has always been a number of readers who were waiting for their “judgment to catch up to the way the world is.” I believe the Internet greatly accelerated that process.

So now, it is up to the newspapers we read to re-prove themselves. They have to come, pressman’s hat in hand, and improve the quality of their relationship with their readers. Those readers no longer want persons in Ivory Towers who explain All the News Fit to Print. They no longer expect their letters to reporters go unanswered. They want neighbors who understands the subtleties of their community; a trusted analytical voice who is in the same traffic jams, travels the same potholed streets, and lives in the same brown grass dream homes they do. That’s why many readers turn to writers that offer two-way relationships — be they bloggers, mainstream reporters, or or alternative publishers. It’s those people they trust, not the institution where they work.

The I4 community newspapers will eventually reach their equilibrium of staff and news output. They’ll return to printing the news of our neighbors. We won’t become isolationists. We’ll still get our national, and international news. Just not from our hometown newspapers. We’ll get the news from people we know. And some will even work at the newspapers.

The Ledger of Lakeland, the Tampa Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, The St. Pete Times, the News Chief of Winter Haven are quickly leaving area residents to the shallow depths of TV news.

I don’t blame the TV reporters. They’re forced to 60 seconds of “in depth” coverage.

I blame the owners of the newspapers. Newspapers were the news of record. The news organizations that spent the time to give readers the full story. Businesses that assigned reporters to dig deep into problem governments. Companies that allowed editorial writers to publish columns that named names, columns that called for change, columns that not only told it like it was, but told readers what lay ahead.

Those businesses traded that public service for 20% profit margins. And now those margins are gone. Long gone. Never to return. And the newspapers are hemorrhaging.

To stop the bleeding who do they remove? Front line staff who did the work we read – long time columnists and hungry reporters. They dump expert photographers and talented copy editors.

And readers with fond memories of newspapers rush to give up the ghost they find on their lawn.

Those readers will soon become TV news viewers and they will get used to news in 30 second teasers. They won’t find a Pentagon Papers story following “The Dirtiest Inch in Your Kitchen!” scare stories.

Where can readers turn?

Blogs and self-published news sites like MI4 can not replace the newspapers. We’re too small, too focused. We’re news specialists, and the newspapers are your general practitioners.

And it is time we say “physician heal thyself.”

What publisher will take the steps to reduce all coverage to what local residents can see, touch, hear, taste, and vote for? What publisher will make the decision that everyone can cover a beat. From the publisher down to the cub reporter? Put every Editor in a city government committee meeting and remind them what it was like to write a story.

You say your Editor never wrote a column? She’s a business major? Send her to the city finance meetings. Everyone needs to feed the 24-hour news monster.

Publishers can make these changes immediately. If you want your children to read the newspaper as their children sleep in…publishers must these changes immediately.

photo credit: Tom Hagerty

Meanwhile, the Ledger is going hourly. Ledger News Now

An author the Sentinel fails to name believes a Shorter workweek can pay huge dividends. (By the way, his name is Timothy Ferriss.)

Bonus:

The Sentinel: We think: State Farm’s rate hike request for homeowners seems unreasonable. You think? 47%. Who wouldn’t think?

Tribune: Gas Prices Drive Demand For Downtown Dwellings

“During a 10-hour shift, a worker can lift two tons; the pay has been about 1.4 cents per pound.” and yet farmers haven’t passed on the extra penny a pound the workers got Burger King (and others) to agree to pay: Orlando-area immigrant workers fight to hold the pennies they won

Confused about carbon offsets? This Sentinel article won’t help: Everyone has a carbon footprint – but do ‘offsets’ make sense? So why link to it? Well, the Sentinel writer tried, but the concept deserves a lot more space than a few inches in the daily paper. That’s he kind of article that could have been a series. The question now is: will readers take the time to follow a series that isn’t about sex, beauty or gossip? I think they will. I’m not so sure many newspaper marketing people would agree.

A defense contractor says their plant isn’t hazardous. This is news? Nelson Plans Meeting To Address Raytheon Issues

I am surprised the Tribune hasn’t announced a series on teen sex trafficking in this week’s paper. It must be the recent cut in staff. However, they do have an editorial: Region Needs To Wake Up To Teen Sex Trafficking. I hate that headline though. It reminds me of a morning show promo. Region Needs to Wake up to Kristie Lee and the Morning Report!

Note today’s date: July 13, 2008. That’s important as you read State Chided For Dip In Voter Registrations Now note this line from the article: “In January, lawyers for three national advocacy groups – Project Vote, ACORN and Demos – complained….” They complained in January and it took six months for the Trib to write about it? Or did they just hear about it? Either way, it’s good it finally made the paper.

Bonus:

Expect more articles like this in your local paper: This Isn’t Goodbye, But Merely The Turning Of A New Page

If you didn’t read it in a newspaper, you might not know the American press had an especially bad few weeks. Reporters, editors, photographers losing their jobs in droves. The American press is in upheaval because you’ve stopped reading the paper. Worse, you’ve stopped buying the paper. Even worse, you’ve stopped putting ads in the paper.

What comes next: citizen journalists. The problem is the majority of citizen journalists aren’t going to have the resources to dig deep and uncover the big problems. Crooked presidents, wars started on false pretenses, corporations polluting the environment. Americans need a healthy press to do that.

I’m going to start writing more about the changes in the regional papers. Not in this column, but another that will debut later this week.

Oddly, the Tampa mayor is bucking the obvious turn away from bottled water Don’t Toss Bottled Water, Iorio Says

Just be very careful where you park in downtown Orlando: Car-booting guy offers no apologies

This is a scary thought “The massive Deseret Ranch — four times larger than the city of Orlando — is taking a key step toward its first major development.” Homes, homes on the range in Orange County near Orlando International Airport?

The public has been discussing rail road issues quite a bit this past year, but how many officials were listening? Here’s a Florida DOT meeting so the Public Will Get Chance to Discuss Railroad Issues

A pair of bonus stories: Newspaper Industry Woes Inspire Prayer Web Site is presented without comment, other than if Americans can’t find a way to fall in love with newspapers again, we’re going to be a much poorer country.

This is an old one, but I thought it deserves a look. It’s all about fair representation and some people don’t believe we get it when politicians design political districts: Taking Aim at Gerrymandering

In an ALL CAPS top of A1 SCARY HEADLINE, the Orlando Sentinel tells us that the RAIL DEAL CLINGS TO LIFE.  The other big story is an important one in the wake of the Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair photos: growing up may be life’s toughest role for kid stars.  Well, it’s important for all those cast members, I suppose.  On the opinion page, the Sentinel says Florida’s standards for concealed-weapons permit are dangerous.

The Ledger reports that the The future of commuter rail in Orlando grew shakier on Wednesday, and that Funding for USF Polytechnic is near approval.  Also, Polk County schools failed to adequately educate an autistic student and now must pay up to $720,000 to give 22-year-old Andrew "Drew" Sammons a proper education.  An editorial begs legislators to drop the existing CSX nonsense, and begin work on an effective commuter and freight rail solution for next year.  IN THE SUNSHINE.

The Tampa Tribune simply says that the CSX deal has run out of steam.  In other news, they report the survey results of Who is Living in Downtown Tampa, and what those residents need, but the St. Pete Times rightly finds flaws with the survey itself.  Trib editorial board says the State Threatens Port Business With Duplicative ID Mandate.

And although they are not near I-4, Chuck likes to follow those Devil Rays, so we try to include their hometown paper now and again. The St. Pete Times reports that it is now your move to rescue the nation’s economy, and that local lifeguards may need rescue from budget cuts.  An editorial encourages St. Pete leaders to make sure Tropicana Field gets redeveloped properly before building a new stadium for the Tampa Bay Rays.

• Evidently Polk County is in the Orlando area to at least one Sentinel headline writer, Orlando-area deputies arrest 11 men in Internet sex sting

•

These are today’s stories from three local newspapers that affect Metro I-4 citizens..

• The Sentinel includes a guide to go green, Orlando wants to sell arenas, Columnist Mike Thomas has something to say about opponents of the CSX project, their Tallahassee Bureau asks Will painful tax cuts be left to lawmakers.

• In the Ledger this morning: CSX Facing Liability in Massachusetts, 4th Legionnaire’s Disease Case Found in Orlando (Same story in the Tribune)

• In the Tribune: Polk County Jail Ranks Among Nation’s Busiest

• Eight Lakeland teen girls beat friend. The story is in the Sentinel , and the Ledger.

Dear Readers:

Earlier this week we made some technical upgrades on tampabay.com meant to improve your experience and our work processes. Unfortunately, just the opposite is happening in some cases.

Many links appear out of date, and certain features, such as the ability to view past editions, are not working.

Listen here, Times. Leave the screwed up websites to the professionals at TBO.com. But the Times promises they will fix it, eventually:

… I think it will take us days not hours to fix our issues.

Yipes…

In addition to your votes that transportation is the first issue to tackle, recent and upcoming TBARTA public meetings and debating red light cameras, Rich Shopes tells us that the Florida Department of Transportation says morning commute times will increase significantly by 2025. The story includes a map of six routes and the estimated driving times during peak hours currently and projected for 2025.

Helpful information missing from the map is the actual mileage for these commutes, driving time outside of rush hour, and alternative means of transportation. It wouldn’t be too hard, since Google does most of the work. Google Maps gives us the actual mileage as well as their calculation of approximate driving time. On top of that, Google Transit is helpful in determining if HART might be a good choice.

If you plan to use this in a court of law, you might want to double-check my math, but here is what we found:

We will start with the longest route given to us by the Tribune, Wesley Chapel to Westshore:
Google Maps Distance: 28 Miles
Off Peak (Google) Time: 33 minutes
Peak Commute Time: 56 minutes
2025 projection: 68 minutes
Google Transit: 91 minutes (two hours for the 6:30 bus) plus a short drive to the Park & Ride. Car ride and two buses for less than 30 miles – sounds like fun, no?

Next is St. Pete to Downtown Tampa:
Google Maps Distance: 24.1 Miles
Off Peak (Google) Time: 28 minutes
Peak Commute Time: 53 minutes
2025 projection: 65 minutes
Mass Transit: 80 minutes includes PSTA Bus #59 for 25 minutes, a 10 minute wait, then 100X for 45 minutes. Couldn’t get Google Transit to include Pinellas.

Valrico to Downtown Tampa:
Google Maps Distance: 14.1 Miles
Off Peak (Google) Time: 19 minutes
Peak Commute Time: 45 minutes
2025 projection: 60 minutes
Mass Transit: 60 minutes (short drive to the P & R, plus 50 minutes on 22X).

Carrollwood to Westshore:
Google Maps Distance: 11.6 Miles
Off Peak (Google) Time: 16 minutes
Peak Commute Time: 45 minutes
2025 projection: 37 minutes
Google Transit: 80 minutes (two buses)

Plant City to downtown Tampa
Google Maps Distance: 24.2 Miles
Off Peak (Google) Time: 29 minutes
Peak Commute Time: 38 minutes
2025 projection: 50 minutes
Mass Transit: 60 minutes (short drive to the P&R and 50 minutes on Route 28X).

And finally, Brandon to downtown Tampa
Google Maps Distance: 14.1 Miles
Off Peak (Google) Time: 21 minutes
Peak Commute Time: 27 minutes
2025 projection: 31 minutes
Mass Transit: 50 minutes (short drive to the P&R and 40 minutes on Route 27X)

All of that only tells us that current rush hour commute times are simply ridiculous – the average speed from Valrico to downtown is less than 20 MPH, and those of you who drive from Carrollwood to Westshore average less than 16 MPH!!! – and our existing mass transit is even more ridiculous. Can’t wait to hear about your trip, Wayne!

In addition to the outrageous volume of traffic, we know that inattentive and/or distracted drivers hold things up or cause accidents, too. Which is highlighted nicely by the story’s inclusion of a photo by Trib Photog Dave Geiger taken while he was driving.

Auditor slams watchdog’s recordkeeping

The Environmental Protection Commission is doing a poor job of keeping track of its work.

Like a gossip tabloid making something innocuous sound sensational, the Times makes a bland audit sound as though it revealed shoddy bookkeeping which might be hiding something. They even misquote the auditors:

“It is unclear if they are protecting wetlands because of the incomplete data,” said Chad Lallemand, who helped prepare the report for auditor Jim Barnes.

Both Jim Barnes and Chad Lallemand tell me Lallemand never said this. The auditors have no doubt that EPC does protect wetlands. What is somewhat unclear is the extent to which they protect wetlands, because while much of the protection is documented, some simply cannot be.

As EPC Director Dr. Garrity told me, “It’s like asking the police how much crime they have prevented.”

EPC can and does count the acres of wetlands that have been impacted (legally or illegally), then replaced or mitigated through EPC regulation. But it’s impossible to know exactly how many acres of wetland impacts have been avoided due to EPC.

When a developer brings their plans to EPC for an initial review, who can say how many acres of wetland impacts they have already avoided, knowing that EPC would make them revise their plans had they shown certain impacts? How can EPC count all the acres of wetlands that would have been impacted if developers didn’t have to go through EPC reviews? Maybe some developers would have avoided some wetlands voluntarily, while some would have paved over every inch of wetlands that EPC protects, if they could get away with it.

EPC protects wetlands not only by enforcing regulations, but also by working together with builders, farmers and others in the early planning stages of projects, to help draw up plans that avoid wetland impacts in ways they may not have considered without the expertise of EPC’s engineers and hydrologists. If EPC suggests relocating an access road on an early pencil-draft plan, are they to take credit for saving a wetland that would have been impacted IF that road had finally been built over the wetland where it was first penciled in? Would the auditors then fault them for claiming too much success?

One of the conclusions in the county’s audit of the EPC is the suggestion to develop some performance measures to better account for the wetland impacts that are avoided due to EPC processes. As noted in the auditors’ report, and in Dr. Garrity’s attached response, EPC has recognized this need, and has already begun improving their performance measures.

So the Times turns this into an accusation of incomplete record keeping, and boosts it with a misquote suggesting that EPC may not be protecting wetlands at all.

Last summer, special interests almost succeeded in getting our county commission to eliminate EPC wetland protections. Citizens had to work feverishly to snatch the agency from the flames. Innuendo from the Times serves only to fan those flames which are still licking at our EPC.

Alas, it is over. In tomorrow’s weekly, she dumps Creative Loafing for a bigger paper:

There’s no easy way to break up, except to just tell the truth. He’s older, more mature and…sigh…has a bigger masthead. I’d be lying if I told you that size doesn’t matter, because right now at this stage in my life and career, it does.

Today we found Jaden in Jeff Houck’s Flavor section (more to come on this!), announcing her new gig at the Tribune. Who knows what’s next?

Of course, not everybody goes from being an unknown to a superstar, but earlier this year, Jaden gave Creative Loafing readers some helpful hints on how to begin your very own food blog. You can imagine one or more of those readers finding how easy it is to get it going, and just start blogging. And who knows, one day they too may become a media superstar like Jaden.

Creative Loafing might have an opening.

On deck so far:

• Ken Knight, multimedia reporter for Media General
• Demorris Lee, reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, who recently completed a multimedia reporting fellowship at the Knight Digital Media Center
• Boyzell Hosey, director of photography at the St. Petersburg Times
• Ken Irby, photography and multimedia expert at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies
• Eric Deggans, St. Petersburg Times TV/media critic and editor/creator of The Feed blog

Scheduled for 11 a.m. March 8 at the Tampa Tribune, 200 S. Parker St., Tampa, this seminar is free and open to anyone who wishes to attend.

During the panel discussion, we will talk about ways to think about expanding traditional journalism work to multimedia platforms, the advantages and challenges of blogging for journalists, the resources available for those who hope to learn more about this kind of work and more…

Last year, we got a great response from area bloggers of all ethnicities and had a chance to turn it into a wide-ranging discussion. Even if you don’t consider yourself a journalist, but would like to learn more about this new field, please feel free to attend.

As we all work to try and understand these new media platforms, sometimes the most fun comes from getting together and swapping ideas on what it all means. And fellow bloggers, feel free to post this on your blog somewheres…

The Tampa Bay Association of Black Journalists’ website is www.tbabj.com. Please remember, however, that you’re welcome even if you’re not a journalist. Or from the Tampa Bay area. Or black.

You read it right – bloggers are welcome to sit in and learn as well as share experiences. Also, any bloggers are welcome to post this info on your blogs.

Hope to see you there.

(cross-posted at www.tampafilmfan.com and www.tampabookbuzz.com)

In fact, they created an entire new blog devoted to FIX IT NOW: 

… each week from now on, in print and online, we’ll follow up with information, interviews and ideas aimed at making headway in the 10 problem areas. At the same time, we are launching a new blog, Fix It Now Tampa Bay, which will feature activists intimately familiar with the 10 issues we outlined, as well as information from Loaf staff.

It’s all part of an experiment in civic and citizen journalism, one aimed at providing solutions — and getting our government officials to take action.

And here are Tampa Bay’s top ten problems, according to Wayne:

1. Suburban sprawl
2. Urban density (lacking)
3. Transportation
4. Environment (weak protections)
5. Living green
6. Diversity (racial, ethnic, class)
7. Professional sports (over-subsidized and over-idolized)
8. Media consolidation (lack of independent voices)
9. GLBT Rights
10. Save our young (with economic opportunity)

Boy, if we just had some leadership within local government, you’d think some of these would have been addressed by now.  But we don’t, and they are not.

But are they the only problems here in Tampa Bay?  Are they even the most pressing problems in the area?  Which of the above ten issues would you say is most important, and what problems would you add to the list?