HIL CO 73 page 28

B: And if I understand correctly, up until you started service on the Road Board,
 transportation issues had not been very significant in your outlook.

C: Not really.

B: But once you got into the meat of transportation on the road board, how did your
 attitudes evolve from there?

C: The more of you become familiar with what the problems are and the problems
 of funding, the more interest you have and the more information you get and the
 more inside views, you see what the conditions are in the state of Florida. This
 was a period shortly after the Second World War, actually about fifteen years
 after the Second World War. Things had really started progressing in Florida in
 the early 1960s. That was about the time when the need for road improvement
 began to exhibit itself.

B: When I read through the correspondence between Curtis Hixon, who was mayor
 of Tampa up until 1956, the transportation correspondence that he had was
 mostly with your predecessor on the Road Board, Al Rogero.

C: That is correct.

B: The impression I gained from looking at that correspondence was that there was
 a rather testy relationship at times between Hixon and Mr. Rogero, [Rogero]
 being from Clearwater but the district appointee for the same district that you
 took over.

C: I was not aware of any problems, even after I took over, because Hixon had died
 in 1956, 1 believe, and I did not become a road board member until January of
 1961. Until you mentioned it, I was not aware of the fact that there had been a
 problem.

B: The gist of the issue appeared to be that Mayor Hixon felt that Tampa,
 Hillsborough County in general but particularly the City of Tampa, was not getting
 as many improvements out of the State Road Department as he and his
 colleagues in Tampa politics believed it should. In looking over Mayor [Nick]
 Nuccio's correspondence, the tone became a lot friendlier, during the Nuccio
 administration.

C: That is not an unusual feeling that Curtis Hixon had, for a mayor of every city in
 the state of Florida. Very few of them felt like they were getting their fair share of
 the money being spent on roads and road improvements and transportation.
 That does not surprise me because that is not unusual. In fact, it is usual for the
 mayor and the city commission and others connected with the city to feel that
 they are being left out in most cases.