A sign of hard economic times is the depression of prices for the leasing and buying of city councilmen and County Commissioners throughout Tampa Bay.

Insiders have reported that the recent Saint Petersburg City Council vote on privatizing the Baywalk sidewalk did not even cost the developer a dime. “Word is the politicians were offering that as a loss leader to incite more bribes from developers down the road” told one unnamed source who said that politicians around the bay area are aggressively lowering their prices for their votes, souls and integrity.

An anonymous politician told us “Look, Blogovich was selling Obama’s U.S. Senate seat for a few hundred grand, all I got is a seat on city council in a town full of broke people packing up to leave for where the jobs are. If this gets any worse I will have to get a real job.”  

Developers are reaping huge benefits with bargain prices. Code variances, new legislation and free passes on code violations now can be bought at cheaply as $300 at the city level. Bob of Inspire Building said “we had to do $200,000 in repairs to a dilapidated building we owned according to the code department. Yet for less then $300 our city councilman made the problem disappear.”

Hope still exists. Aggressively passing developer friendly laws at the state and local level for free is expected to attract future developers who can and will bribe our public officials at premium prices. 

“We have always been a community, a state that is governed by the developers for the good of the developers and God willing we will be again” said an unnamed county commissioner.