Winding down Tampa Monitor

This is the most difficult post I’ve written but I didn’t want to just go radio silent without expressing my sincere thanks to those that have supported my efforts here at Tampa Monitor. I apologize I wasn’t able to leverage that support into something sustainable long term.

What will be going away is me writing. Last week was the final “agenda preview”. I will not be attempting to make sense of issues or trying to boil down what is really up for a vote. In essence, the blog portion of Tampa Monitor.

What’s not going away.

The site, TampaMonitor.com will remain online with all of the content that’s been written the last couple of years. The maps, including the land-use map with both current and future land use designations for the city will remain. I’ve been in the process of implementing new technologies to serve the maps and as part of my plan to migrate the site to static HTML (from WordPress) I’ll migrate that map and update it to the latest versions. That’s also mostly automated and changes quarterly. I’ll also continue to maintain meetings.tampamonitor.com as all of the code has been written and it’s mostly automated. However I did receive an email from the tech & innovation department that an internal change was coming to the agenda so depending on what’s different will dictate whether the agenda generation will be able to continue.

Why now?

I’ve known for the last year the current model wasn’t sustainable. Over the course of this 18 month experiment of weekly previews and explainers 27 people donated roughly $1,000. Neither I nor Tampa Monitor received any other financial or material support beyond those donations. I couldn’t be more appreciative of the folks who chipped in to cover the hard costs—hosting, premium newsletter support and my GitHub expenses which combined are $45/mo.

I was actively pursuing opportunities that would dovetail with my work on Tampa Monitor and afford me the time to continue writing. Unfortunately those opportunities didn’t pan out and at the same time, side work I’d been relying on unexpectedly ended. I just couldn’t figure out how to continue to make room for the time and attention required to write about the issues.

So thank you again for your interest in what I was doing and again I apologize I couldn’t figure out how to make this work. I hope you’ll continue to engage with the issues and share your opinions with your elected officials.

A final note to subscribers of the weekly email. I will not be using that list any further. I guard my email inbox and respect yours. I made promise I would only send a single weekly email for a singular purpose and intend to keep that promise.

Also, on a personal note, expect to see even less of me on Facebook. That was my last ditch effort to build broader awareness of my work here. You can still find me and the site on Bluesky.