A grassroots campaign is continuing its effort to have voters decide on imposing term limits of eight years for Pinellas County Commissioners later this year.

The campaign is being organized by Friends of Pinellas County, which needs to gather more than 56,000 signatures from registered voters in Pinellas County this summer to get the measure on the Nov. ballot.

“I think that we’re seeing that once we give people in office more than eight years – regardless of what office we’re talking about -it becomes kind of a ‘uni-party’ and they stop having real debates about things,” says Barb Haselden, a St. Petersburg conservative acitvist and the executive director of Friends of Pinellas County.

Haselden notes that the lack of term limits in the county has allowed some commissioners to serve as long as two decades or more in Pinellas County government. Among those in that category include St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch — who served on the board from 2000-2020 — and Karen Seel, who was initially appointed to the board in 1999 and will step down from her District 5 seat later this year.

Commissioner Janet Long says that simply proves that those lawmakers were popular enough to continue to be relelected over the years. Now in her tenth year in office, Long doesn't support the idea.

“If you’re not happy with who you have in office, then run yourself for election or vote the person out,” she says, noting the fact that only Commissioner Seel has been on the board longer than herself.

"That says to me that term limits has happened naturally by virtue of our election process," Long adds.

Haselden and her organization committed to the effort after the board voted down a proposal by Commissioner David Eggers in February to propose a charter amendment that would impose term limits of 12 years, or three four-year terms, for board members. The measure needed five votes to move forward, but only received approval from Eggers and Commissioners Charlie Justice and Kathleen Peters.

In 1996, Pinellas County voters overwhelmingly supported a charter amendment that would place term limits of eight years for county commissioners and five constitutional officers - sheriff, supervisor of elections, clerk of the circuit court, property appraiser and tax collector.

In 2002, however, the Florida Supreme Court overturned the measure, saying it was unconstitutional. They reversed themselves in 2012, but the measure never went into effect. The Pinellas County Charter Review Committee heard arguments about placing the measure on the ballot in 2015-2016, but ultimately declined to do so.

It’s not easy getting a charter amendment on the ballot. The county’s Charter requires that petitions must equal eight percent of the number of registered voters in the county at the time of the last election. In 2020 there were 711,171 “registered electors” in Pinellas County, meaning that the group needs more than 56,000 signatures to qualify. That’s not all, however. No more than 30 percent of those signing can reside in any one of the four single-member districts in the county, and no more than 40 percent can reside in one of the county’s three at-large districts.