Ybor’s Teen Clubbers

It was a worthwhile attempt by the city recently to try and recoup the cost of breaking up a melee disguised as teen night at Ybor City’s Club Fuel back in February. The incongruous “teen night” in Ybor required more than two dozen police officers and a helicopter to quell the fighting and vandalism among the 2,000 teen-aged Fuelsters.

But, alas, no curfew was broken, because the incident was on a Sunday. And due to grandfathering, Club Fuel was exempt from extra security requirements at bars. And no “nuisance” rule applied absent evidence of drugs, gangs, prostitution or stolen property. Garden variety mayhem isn’t covered.

“There is simply no legal basis upon which to hold the club legally responsible,” explained Tampa Police Chief Stephen Hogue. Unfortunately, a “really, really stupid idea” doesn’t qualify.

Respect For Pope Has Limits

It’s too much to ask, we all acknowledge.

But suppose, just suppose all those disparate geo-political/cultural-religious elements who publicly mourned the late Pope John Paul II and professed such an abiding respect for him were to accord the Holy Father the ultimate act of respect.

Silly us. That would mean no wars. No terrorist acts.

No one is that respectful.

In fact, Rome’s city fathers would have settled for a much more modest form of respect.

The death of a beloved pontiff brought more than an unprecedented number of world leaders and pilgrims to the Eternal City. It also brought the notoriety of price gougers.

“The closer you get to the basilica, the higher the prices,” noted Franco Cioffarelli, the city’s financial chief.

With security the top priority, it would have taken more resources than Italian authorities could muster to monitor and crack down on price gouging. Actually, it would have taken a miracle.

Uniform Exemptions Wear Thin

The controversy of church and state separation is back on court. Not IN court – but ON court – as in a basketball venue.

Last year it was a female Muslim USF player who wanted to play attired in her hijab (head scarf), a long-sleeved shirt and long pants. After considerable flap and bad national publicity, USF agreed to petition the NCAA for an exemption to its uniform rules.

The case became moot when the student quit – the team, the university and Islam.

Now the issue is back — at the Amateur Athletic Union level. It’s centered around a Hillsborough County middle school Muslim, Briana Canty.

She was initially not allowed to play in an AAU tournament in Orlando because she insisted on wearing her hijab. Eventually, after her mother had complained and the Florida Council on American-Islamic Relations had interceded, the AAU relented. The 12 year old played in her hijab.

Three points.

Freedom of worship is a constitutional right. The right to express it any time, any way, any where is not a corollary. It’s more a function of cultural acquiescence and common sense.

Second, if everyone were allowed a sartorially symbolic extension of their religion when suiting up for secular play, the games would degenerate into sectarian follies. Here a yarmulke, there a crucifix. Would the line be drawn at Roman collars? Hair shirts? Burqas? Saffron robes?

The last point: There’s a very good reason why it’s called a UNIFORM.

Mayor On Museum: “It Will Happen”

Obviously she meant it.

Mayor Pam Iorio had told Tampa Museum of Art officials to meet a very rigid standard of financial accountability before she would sign off on the new one. They didn’t, and she didn’t have to.

Let’s forsake the recriminations – including a smaller museum for the original cost — and pass on the subplots and agendas as well. All involved want the same end: what’s best for Tampa – from a vibrant arts environment to downtown synergy. Speculation on future economic cycles and interest-rate roulette is just that: speculation.

This much, however, needs underscoring.

*TMA’s leadership is a problem. The city deserved better than a long-running potboiler masquerading as a first-class capital campaign. Lots of doors went unknocked.

*A woefully inadequate incumbent facility still mocks the spirit of a “new millennium city.”

*Tampa also deserved better than Rafael Vinoly’s signature homage to car ports. He was to Dick Greco what Wilson Alvarez was to Vince Naimoli. Neither delivered; both cost too much; and the costs kept mounting in their wakes.

One can only wonder what a better design, one that galvanized – not polarized – a community from the get-go, would have yielded. In all likelihood, not this.

But put it this way – as the mayor recently did:

“We will have a new arts museum for Tampa,” Iorio told the gathering at her ‘State of the City’ presentation. “It will happen.

“When one idea falters, it should not be seen as a loss, but as a time for rebirth of new ideas – as a time for opportunity.”

In a speech otherwise suffused with prosaic passages, this was as close to soaring rhetoric as the mayor’s presentation would get.

But given the mayor’s track record on this issue, she gets the benefit of the doubt.

Obviously she meant it.

Atlanta: Nowhere To Hide

Ashley Smith, the former hostage who helped capture Atlanta courthouse gunman Brian Nichols, has been thanked again – this time with more than $70,000 in reward money. And there are other, more lucrative deals, in the works.

Good for her. She saved lives. People are rewarded handsomely all the time in this society for contributing nothing more than bad role-modeling.

As to the city of Atlanta, it got off cheap.

It contributed all of $5,000 of the $70,000 awarded Smith. For relative chump change, it had what remained of its reputational bacon saved by someone who actually showed some presence of mind.

Now to anyone familiar with the race-based, image-conscious inner workings of Atlanta, the whole Keystone Kops scenario – from pseudo security to manhunt mayhem – was no shock. What was truly different, however, was that the unnecessary, unconscionable and tragic deaths of a judge, a court reporter, a sheriff’s deputy and a federal agent couldn’t be covered up in the finest tradition of skewed Atlanta crime statistics.

The world watched this one. We all knew who did it – and it wasn’t Richard Jewell or Ray Lewis.

Atlanta, long a siren song to the black middle class, has too long skated on its well-marketed, Andy Young-proclaimed renown as “The city that’s too busy to hate.”

Well, if Atlanta were ever actually too busy to hate, it would have been because it was preoccupied cooking the books on crime. But here were four murders – three downtown and one in Buckhead – that couldn’t be concealed from convention planners, Super Bowl task forces and Southeastern Conference basketball tournament officials.

And had it not been for Ashley Smith, a widowed waitress from a nearby suburb, Nichols might still be on the lam.

But at least Wayne Williams remains behind bars. Last we heard.

Terri Schiavo Postmortums

*No one would debate that life has sanctity. What’s problematic is debating with the sanctimonious.

*The afterlife may be an afterthought, but not a living will. Not anymore.

*A legitimate tragedy morphed into a circus. “Jugglers For Christ” made it official. Eventually Jesse Jackson would enter the center ring.

*Michael Schiavo is easy to dislike but also easy to demonize by the usual demonizing suspects. In a case that had been playing out in the media for years, why had no one on Michael Schiavo’s side thought to consult a Public Relations 101 text?

*Sen. Mel Martinez proved that his pandering wasn’t limited to campaign expedience.

CEO’s Need To Ask: “What’s The Culture?”

Here’s some advice for prospective CEOs – as well as their counterparts in government and academe – courtesy of Robert McMurrian, director of the University of Tampa’s Center for Ethics.

“Upon assuming a position, a typical CEO initially used to ask: ‘Where is the profit?'” says McMurrian. “But what they need to ask first is: ‘What is this company about? What’s the culture I’m getting into?’ If you don’t address that one, you leave yourself wide open.

“Because if it happens on your watch,” underscores McMurrian, “you got it. You got it all. ‘I didn’t know’ is now a cop out.”

So what do CEOs – or university presidents or mayors – do when they’ve got a scandal born of charges against a key staffer and media scrutiny that won’t abate? Is “letting the process run its course” not a realistic – and fair – response?

McMurrian’s take: “You have legal issues and you have to protect yourself and your company or organization. A lot of your response frankly is related to public perception. Public perception is important. You probably get more leeway to support the person through the process if the internal perception is ‘this is kind of contrived.’

“Suspension is usually the best middle ground.”

Mayor’s Artful Inclusion

Those viewing the video shown before Mayor Pam Iorio’s “State of the City” speech had all the clues they would need about the viability of the city’s proposed new art museum. The lone museum reference was not as a cultural cornerstone and downtown catalyst – but as an entity celebrating its 25th anniversary.

The Dragon Boat races were more prominently mentioned.

Pope Successor Scenarios

Speculation will now be ratcheting daily about the successor to Pope John Paul II. The world will watch for clues as to which of the 117 voting-age Cardinals seems to have an inside track to the papacy.

A Cardinal of color? The Italian Battalion? A Latin American? An American American? The sacrilegious will quote odds. The blasphemous will take them.

An early New York Times’ short list features four Italians, two other Europeans, an African and three Latin Americans.

The handicapping included this curious capsule of Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, 60, the Archbishop of Vienna: “Multilingual, highly educated; youth could be a handicap.” Or how about 62-year-old Honduran Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga, the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa? He’s summarized as: “Multilingual, outspoken on social issues; relative youth is handicap.”

YOUTH as a disadvantage? Still wet behind the mitre? Do sexagenarians need co-signers?

But both Schoenborn and Rodriguez are older than John Paul II was when he was elected (at age 58) in 1978. Could this be insider code for “the fix is in” for a caretaker or a transitional figure who won’t go off the conservative reservation staked out by John Paul II?

Put me down for Italian Cardinal Angelo Sodano, 77, the Vatican’s secretary of state and second only to the Pope in church hierarchy. Which means he’s been running a lot of the day-to-day stuff for a while.

If it matters, he’s the one with on-the-job experience. And he’s old enough.

Global Village Reminder

Once again we are reminded that we are truly a global village. This time the validation was provided by an aerial photo of damage done by the recent earthquake in Indonesia.

The Associated Press wire photo showed collapsed buildings on the main street of Gunungsitoli, a city on the Indonesian island of Nias. Bordering the main street were largely-intact homes that looked like stalls in a Third World flea market.

The lean-to construction, however, was more than sufficient to support a satellite dish. In fact, roughly half of the 50 or so tiny abodes that were visible in the photo were sporting dishes.

Global village, indeed – including the main drag of Gunungsitoli, Indonesia.