It's Not Always Easy Being Green

Published: Aug 14, 2007

This is oh so - Tampa.

Cue the resigned sigh.

After much fuddy-duddying and assorted dithering, it appeared that yet another needless public works project long delayed by clashes of Petticoat Junction egos might actually begin to get off the dime only to have a meal ticket of pols decide to toss their inner Al Gores around.

Early next year, groundbreaking is supposed to commence on a brand spanking new Tampa Museum of (Yawn) Art, which will hold the city's much-beloved Greek Melmac exhibit and its world-renowned collection of White-Out.

It was nearly a year ago that San Francisco architect Stanley Saitowitz prevailed in the bidding to be named designer of the new Tampa Museum of (Stop Giggling!) Art. The process involved presentations to the museum's board of hotsy-tots and a number of forums in which the prominent architect explained his vision and took questions from the public and elected officeholders.

Being Green

So it had to come as a bit of an annoyance to everyone involved with the new museum when, after all this time, some city council members started to go all Greenpeacey about Saitowitz's design.

Councilman John Dingfelder insisted the new Tampa Museum of (Oh, dear!) Art be "green," noting that Tampa lags far behind other cities in creating environmentally acceptable buildings. Councilman Dingfelder? If we start adding up stuff where Tampa lags behind the rest of the nation, the list is going to be longer than the bill of particulars against Pablo Escobar.

No matter, Dingfelder insisted a report be produced on just how nuts and berries-esque the design for the new museum will be by the time the groundbreaking occurs. Ah, yes, what this situation needs is a report! So before you could say "An Inconvenient Truth," other council members joined the fossil fuel fray in a pitched battle to determine whose carbon footprint was - bigger.

Take That!

Not to be outdone by Dingfelder's meddling in a project that has been publicly available for scrutiny for nearly a year, Councilwoman Mary Mulhern suggested that not only should the art museum be more green than the Garden of Eden, but so should other projects such as the Children's Museum and Tampa Bay History Center.

By all accounts, Saitowitz is an architect who is environmentally attuned to the politically correct demands on his work, and the new museum already includes a "green" roof and ecologically sensitive landscaping.

But that didn't stop Councilwoman Linda Saul-Sena, who is sort of the Leo Buscaglia of tree-huggers, who couldn't stand by and let Dingfelder and Mulhern seize the granola high ground.

Saul-Sena urged that Saitowitz submit a museum rendering that would be worthy of the status Leadership In Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), which is a very pooh-pooh-pa-do designation in green circles.

Alas, while Dingfelder, Mulhern and Saul-Sena were busying themselves trying to out-Rachel-Carson one another, it fell to City Attorney David Smith to remind everyone that a LEED certification was never part of Saitowitz's proposal, which is too far along now to start interfering.

Put another way, the Tampa Museum of (Bad, Very Bad) Art is a train that has left the station - but at least it's fueled by ethanol.

Daniel Ruth's column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.