Miller, Redner Headed To Runoff

Posted Mar 6, 2007 by Alex Vila

Updated Mar 6, 2007 at 11:47 PM

By ELLEN GEDALIUS and NEIL JOHNSON

TAMPA - Tampa’s best-known strip club owner and perennial candidate Joe Redner will face incumbent Councilwoman Gwen Miller in a runoff for the District 1 citywide seat.

In six other attempts at public office, Redner had not made it to a runoff election.

“This is a first for me,” Redner said.

Neither Miller, seeking her second term in the District 1 seat, nor Redner gathered enough votes for an outright victory and will face each other in the March 27 runoff.

The District 1 race drew six candidates, but Miller and Redner easily distanced themselves from the other four candidates.

Miller drew 27 percent of the vote, and Redner gathered 23 percent.

None of the other candidates gathered more than 15 percent of the vote.

Miller wasn’t surprised the race didn’t yield an outright victory and said her second campaign begins today.

“I’ll just go out there and start working, maybe harder than I worked before. Maybe I didn’t work hard enough,” she said.

In his seventh political race, Redner said that maybe the public was beginning to listen to what he had to say.

Part of that message is to control growth.

“Growth has to pay for itself. That will free money for all the other things the city needs,” Redner said.

The candidates were: Rick Barcena, owner of an Italian restaurant on Kennedy Boulevard; Randy Baron, president of the Old Seminole Heights Neighborhood Association; Denise Chavez, owner of a restaurant on South Howard Avenue; and Julie Jenkins, a neighborhood activist.

During the campaign, candidates characterized Miller as a do-nothing councilwoman who skipped a key budget vote last year to instead go on a partially taxpayer-funded trip to Spain.

Miller countered that she quietly works behind the scenes.

Reporter Ellen Gedalius can be reached at (813) 259-7679 or egedalius@tampatrib.com. Reporter Neil Johnson can be reached at (352) 544-5214 or njohnson@tampatrib.com.