This week I did not do much work on the campaign, I spent all of my time talking, listening and learning. The main things that I learned about were Steve’s motivations for running and his stances on the issues. As discussed in our first assignment Steve has various reasons for running from his desire to help his community grow to the opportunity of an open seat contest. What is more interesting to me, and to the voters is his stances on the issues. One of the things that I respect most about Steve is that his stances on the issues are just that, HIS stances not just what he thinks his audience will prefer. Steve is taking hard stances on issues and coming up with solutions to problems which he thinks will help the citizens and the city at large.
I already spoke briefly about his stance and proposed solutions for public safety, but I did want to mention a few of the ideas he was sharing with the community this week. I will start with the ballpark, because as a sports fan and nonresident of the city of Saint Petersburg, this issue will most affect me. Steve, like myself, sees the importance of having a sports team in Saint Petersburg, especially in a downtown area. What he would like to do with the Rays is either renovate Tropicana Field or build a new ballpark in the same location, he also is not willing to extend the funding to the team to a higher amount. I think that this is a very smart idea, the Trop could be turned into a really nice ballpark with some tweaks although it could be cheaper to build a new park so that idea should not totally be thrown out the window but I think it is imperative to the team and the city to keep the ballpark downtown. The average attendance rate for the Rays in 2008 was 22,370 people, with 81 home games in a year that is a lot of people (1,780,791) coming into the area and taking that away from the downtown area could prove detrimental to the local businesses.
This example is just one that shows how well thought out Steve is with each of the issues. He will not come to a rash decision to try and look tough on the issues or please anyone. He has a record of getting things done in an efficient manner and this is because of how well he plans for tasks and how well he educates himself on all sides of the story before coming to a conclusion or taking action. I am really excited about this campaign and working for such a thoughtful person.
