- Group Builds Vision For Bay Area’s Future - With Legos
- ‘Veterans For Peace’ Distribute Flyers Outside School
- ‘Match Day’ Clarifies Med Student Futures
- State’s Lethal Injection Policy Discussed
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By Karen Branch-Brioso
The Tampa Tribune
TAMPA – The group gathered Friday at the Tampa Convention Center – CEOs and chefs, developers and deejays, educators and environmentalists, businesspeople and political power brokers – all had one thing in common.
They wanted to get their hands on the Legos.
The small plastic children’s toy became a tool of power Friday at Reality Check Tampa Bay. The exercise turned more than 300 people into Growth Gods for the morning.
With borderless maps of the seven-county Tampa Bay region spread before them, they were asked to find a place for 3.2 million new people and 1.5 million new jobs expected here by 2050.
For the players, that meant placing 1,015 yellow Legos for homes and 408 red Legos for jobs on each of 32 maps on tables across a large ballroom. They criss-crossed the region with orange ribbons for mass transit. Purple ribbons for roads. With as many as a dozen players at each table – deliberately drawn from different counties and job descriptions – they didn’t always agree.
At Table 4, after St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker saw that a colleague had stacked a tower of yellow Legos in the downtown area of his city, he plucked them from the map. He put some back. But then the rest made their way to other parts of the region.
“You want to increase residential density and jobs downtown, but that was too much,” Baker later told the Tribune. He also took issue with his decision to place a purple ribbon – for new roads – to mimic a controversial proposal for a Heartland Parkway stretching south from northeast Polk County to Fort Myers.
“I don’t necessarily agree with that. I would be concerned building new interstates would create more sprawl.”
Despite its bumpy moments, Reality Check Tampa accomplished something that is a rare event in the region. It brought together people from seven different counties – Hernando, Hillsborough, Manatee, Paso, Pinellas, Polk and Sarasota – to plan how they should grow together. Not as individual city zoning commissions. Or counties.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the people of seven counties and many municipalities and a greater number of special interests groups to transcend all of that to become one body, envisioning Tampa Bay,” said the Rev. James T. Golden, a Bradenton city commissioner and a member of the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council that was one of the event sponsors.
The Urban Land Institute and the Tampa Bay Partnership spearheaded the event.
By Crystal Lauderdale
The Tampa Tribune
ST. PETERSBURG - The sign on the gate of St. Petersburg High School warns against trespassing, so Dwight Lawton, 76, stays on the sidewalk with his stack of flyers.
Lawton is a member of Veterans For Peace. His mission is to remind students that there are alternatives to military enlistment and to share a veteran’s perspective on life in the armed forces.
“We’re not against the military because we were all in the miltary,” said Lawton, “But particularly with Iraq and Afghanistan they have a high risk of being injured and the miltary recruiters don’t discuss that.”
While military recruiters are permitted inside schools to share information with students, other organizations, including Veterans For Peace, are not afforded the same access. Lawton and other volunteers are lobbying to change that.
“If they’re going to allow military recruiters in there, then they need another viewpoint,” Lawton said.
The school is not opposed to having Veterans For Peace share information with students. They are simply waiting for the school board to establish guidelines for allowing multiple groups to distribute information. “We have such a good working relationship with the military. It just works. Now, we’re trying to figure out having both organizations on campus,” principal Al Bennett said. “How’s it going to work so it doesn’t disrupt our campus?”
Miltary recruiters would also be subject to any new guidelines set by the school board.
Until then, Lawton and his comrades are up before dawn, reaching out to sleepy-eyed students before they cross the front line.
Students cheer for one another as the Match Day choices are announced.
Video: Students Learn Their Next Move
By ADAM EMERSON
The Tampa Tribune
TAMPA — Like the rest of her USF medical school classmates, Beth Blazick accepted the envelope that would determine her professional future with pangs of anxiety.
Its unknown contents contained the location of where she would spend the next three to seven years of her life. The control she exercised over her studies for the past four years dissolved in the second it took to rip it open.
Thursday was Match Day, when prospective physicians and surgeons nationwide discover where they conduct their residency training. University of South Florida medical students traditionally gather at Skipper’s Smokehouse, where the heightened anxiety is tempered by draft beer and chicken wings.
More than half of the 116 graduates learned their fates by the time Blazick reached the microphone. Her hands trembled when she unfolded the letter announcing her destination: Massachusetts General Hospital, one of the nation’s most esteemed, where she will serve as a surgical resident.
She cried into the microphone and ran to her cheering classmates. When the tears dried, she double-checked the letter to make sure she read it correctly.
“This is really the trophy at the end of it all,” Blazick, 30, said afterward.
About 15,000 U.S. medical school seniors performed the same exercise at noon Thursday, a record number of seniors applying for residencies nationwide, according the nonprofit National Resident Matching Program.
Thirty of USF’s 116 graduates will remain at the college to conduct their residency. Not everyone received the first choice they hoped would jumpstart their careers. But many shed tears as Blazick had.
“I started out at a community college,” said Archer Martin, 24. “Now, I’m going to Yale,” where he will conduct his anesthesiology residency.
By Crystal Lauderdale
The Tampa Tribune
4:22 p.m.
Commissioners and observers have packed up for the day.
Mark Elliott, the director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, has been to every meeting so far and plans to maintain his attendance.
‘’The information coming out is being heard, a lot of it, for the first time by a lot of people,’’ said Elliott. ‘’It’s extremely important to get this into the public arena.’’
The commission will reconvene Saturday for a workshop to discuss their preliminary report to Governor Crist.
3:49 p.m.
With the floor open to the masses, the Commission heard only one voice from the people today. Mary Berglund spoke on behalf of The League of Women Voters of Florida.
3:23 p.m.
Death Penalty facts from www.deathpenalty.org:
- Approximately 84 percent of executions in the United States have been through lethal injection since its adoption in 1977.
- Thirty-seven states, the U.S. military and the U.S. government hold lethal injection as their preferred method of execution.
- Nine states, including Florida, offer electrocution as an option. Nebraska is the only state that requires electrocution.
- Five states uses the gas chamber, but all of them offer lethal injection as an alternative.
- New Hampshire and Washington allow hanging but offer lethal injection as an alternative.
- There have been 38 botched executions since 1982. Twenty-six of them were lethal injection procedures.
- Five botched executions, including Diaz’, took place in Florida. Three of them were electrocutions. Two were lethal injection procedures.
Descriptions of Death Penalty Methods
2:55 p.m.
Today, the commission on lethal injection has heard testimony from medical professionals, execution team members and officials from the Florida Department of Corrections.
They are scheduled to take comments from the public in just a few moments.
11:41 a.m.
Harry Singletary reviews the agenda for a meeting of the Governor’s Commission on the Administration of Lethal Injection. - Crystal L. Lauderdale/Tampa Tribune
Wikipedia biography of Angel Nieves Diaz
Angel Nieves Diaz, a native of Puerto Rico, is the inspiration for the Governor’s Commission on the Administration of Lethal Injection.
Nieves Diaz was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1979 murder of Joseph Nagy, a manager of a Miami topless bar.
On December 13, 2006 Nieves Diaz was administered lethal injection at the Florida State Prison in Starke. The execution, which normally takes 15 minutes to complete, took 34 minutes.
Factors to consider include:
1) Medical reports state that the needles were incorrectly inserted into his veins slowing the flow of chemicals through his bloodstream. Diaz had chemical burns on both arms.
2) The executioner testified that his only training took place seven years ago when Florida switched its preferred method of execution from the electric chair to lethal injection.
All Florida executions have been put on hold pending the Commission’s final report.
Lethal injection is the preferred method of execution in 37 states.
—Tampa Tribune reporter Kevin Begos contributed to this blog entry.
Mark Elliott, the director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, of Clearwater, chats with a fellow observer before the start of the Governor’s Commission on the Administration of Lethal Injection meeting. - Crystal L. Lauderdale/Tampa Tribune
10:33 a.m.
Doctors, advocates and state officials are gathered at the Tampa Airport Marriott today charged with the task of analyzing and possibly revising the state’s lethal injection procedures.
On December 15, 2006 then-governor Jeb Bush issued Executive Order 06-260 creating the Governor’s Commission on the Administration of Lethal Injection. The order was issued following the botched execution of Angel Nieves Diaz on December 13, 2006.
The Commission will meet in Tampa throughout the month of February, and a final report is due to Governor Crist on March 1. Meetings are open to the public. The floor will be open for statements and opinions between 3 p.m. – 4 p.m. today.
Death Penalty facts from www.deathpenaltyinfo.org:
- Approximately 84 percent of executions in the United States have been through lethal injection since its adoption in 1977.
- Thirty-seven states, the U.S. military and the U.S. government hold lethal injection as their preferred method of execution.
- Nine states, including Florida, offer electrocution as an option. Nebraska is the only state that requires electrocution.
- Five states uses the gas chamber, but all of them offer lethal injection as an alternative.
- New Hampshire and Washington allow hanging but offer lethal injection as an alternative.
- There have been 38 botched executions since 1982. Twenty-six of them were lethal injection procedures.
- Five botched executions, including Diaz’, took place in Florida. Three of them were electrocutions. Two were lethal injection procedures.
Description of methods of execution: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=8&did=479
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