Hillsborough transportation planning director steps down

TAMPA - After coming under fire from a Hillsborough County commissioner, the longtime director of Hillsborough’s transportation planning agency stepped down today.

Lucie Ayer, who has been executive director of the Metropolitan Planning Organization for 13 years, is taking a lower-level job at the MPO, where she will now be its programs administrator. That is essentially what Commissioner Mark Sharpe suggested at an MPO meeting last week, where he said he wants a more vocal advocate for mass transit running the agency.

The MPO is in charge of long-range transportation planning and distributes hundreds of millions of federal dollars for roads and buses every year. Its 13-member board is composed mostly of elected officials from Hillsborough County and Tampa, Plant City and Temple Terrace.

Several other officials on the MPO board defended Ayers and said leadership on issues such as light rail must come from elected officials, not administrators like Ayer. They noted that the MPO’s staff recently put together an updated plan for a future countywide passenger rail network, which the board approved in November.

The board's chairman, Temple Terrace Mayor Joe Affronti, said he's disappointed.

"Lucie is a very, very competent, well-respected, knowledgeable executive director," he said. "The majority of the MPO board supported Lucie and said she's been doing a wonderful job. In my opinion, I think the pressure just got to her to the point where she just said it's not worth it."

Ayer was earning $130,000 a year as executive director. It was not immediately clear what her new salary would be.

At last week's MPO meeting, Sharpe argued that the agency needs a more effective communicator at the helm as some officials gear up for a possible sales tax referendum that would be conducted at some point in the future. They would ask Hillsborough voters to approve a half-cent or 1-cent tax to pay for a beefed-up transit system, including light rail.

"We need to be building an A team," Sharpe said then. He’s concerned that if officials don’t have a detailed plan for rail that answers criticisms and questions, and if they don't launch an effective campaign to sell the plan to the public, then “the voters, I believe, will vote it down.”

-- Mike Brassfield