The Issues
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The Issues: Habitat Destruction and the Gopher Tortoise
The gopher tortoise is Florida’s canary in the coal mine — and every time a commission rubber-stamps another subdivision on the last dry scrub left in a county, another piece of that mine goes dark.
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The Issues: Mosaic Expansion and the Bypassing of Local Oversight
Mosaic wants to expand its radioactive waste pile in Riverview by nearly 180 acres — toward Tampa Bay, over wetlands, inside the Alafia River watershed. Hillsborough County gets a say. The question is whether it will use it.
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The Issues: The Tampa Bay Rays Stadium Proposal
A new ownership group. A new site. A lot of public money. And a commission vote that could reshape Tampa for a generation — or saddle taxpayers with a debt they didn’t consent to.
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The Issues: Hyperdevelopment and the One Water Program
Hillsborough County’s One Water Program is being sold as a visionary infrastructure investment. It is. It is also the bill for decades of approving growth that the county’s water system was never built to handle.
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The Issues: Glyphosate and Our Waterways
Florida’s lakes and rivers are soaked in glyphosate. The fish know it. The manatees know it. And the people who fish, paddle, and drink from these waterways deserve to know it too. On any given weekday morning in Florida, contracted spray boats are moving through the state’s lakes and rivers. They are not monitoring water…
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The Issues: Teneroc and the Florida Forever Loophole
Florida’s conservation lands are under threat — and Hillsborough County’s forgotten phosphate legacy puts District 1 directly in the crosshairs. There is a place in Polk County, just northeast of Lakeland, that most people in the Tampa Bay area have never heard of. It is called the Tenoroc Public Use Area. Twenty-nine fishing lakes. Seventeen…
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The Issues: Aquifer Depletion and the Renewed Threat of Sinkholes
Sinkholes in Hillsborough County and Why District 1 Residents Must Pay Attention In February 2013, a Seffner man went to sleep in his home and never woke up — swallowed by a sinkhole that opened silently beneath his bedroom floor. It was a jarring reminder that in Hillsborough County, the ground itself cannot always be…