TAMPA, Fla. – He may be gone from the Tampa City Council, but he's not being forgotten.


What You Need To Know

  • John Dingfelder resigned last week from the Tampa City Council as part of an agreement to resolve a lawsuit filed against him by a local development consultant

  • Dingfelder was accused of abusing state public record laws

  • The remaining six members of the Tampa City Council will select his successor within the next few weeks

Supporters of former Tampa City Council member John Dingfelder have established a GoFundMe page to help him recoup some of the legal bills he has incurred over the past several months in his battle with a local development consultant. 

Dingfelder officially resigned on March 14. It was part of the legal settlement that he made with development consultant Steve Michelini, where he also agreed not to run for mayor or serve on the Tampa City Council for five years.

Bob Whitmore, a Tampa resident and an advocate for trees in the city, created the GoFundMe page. He said that he and some other local residents had recently convened on a phone call to decide what they could now do to help the former city council member.

"I said, 'Well, what are his legal fees?' Because he had incurred legal fees up until that point where he just couldn't do it anymore," Whitmore said, adding that Dingfelder was not aware of the creation of the site until it went live on Sunday afternoon.

Dingfelder responded on Whitmore's Facebook page, writing, "As a City Councilman, we were paid $52,000 per year. Last September, a developer's representative filed a public records lawsuit against me. The city attorney refused to defend us, so we spent $65,000 on our own attorneys."

This was Dingfelder's second turn as a member of the Tampa City Council. He originally served from 2003 to 2010.

After an unsuccessful bid for a Hillsborough County Commission seat in 2010, he worked in the private sector as an attorney and realtor before he came back and won the citywide District 3 Council seat in 2019 – part of the all-male, all Democratic party member board that took office that year.

Linda Saul-Sena served on the council with Dingfelder during his first tenure in office. She says he's a valuable voice for the neighborhoods who will be hard to replace.

"Many city council members are really attentive to neighborhood concerns, but John had the particular knack for crafting strong, defensible recommendations, and that's a skill that in his absence will be lacking," she said.

Saul-Sena adds that the allegations against Dingfelder that he did not comply with public information requests were serious, but doesn't obscure the fact that "he was a tremendous advocate for neighborhoods."

Dingfelder's resignation also stunned Hillsborough County Commissioner Pat Kemp, who is unsatisfied that part of Dingfelder's legal agreement is that he cannot publicly discuss the basis for his resignation. "It's a terrible threat to democracy what happened to Councilman Dingfelder," she says.

And Kemp invoked the recent situation with the Sumter County Commission, where two former county commissioners were arrested in December and charged with perjury for allegedly lying under oath during a Sunshine Law violation investigation (Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed two replacements for those commissioners on Monday). Kemp notes that the two were part of three Sumter County Commissioners who voted to increase impact fees in an effort to get the Villages and other developers to pay a larger share of infrastructure costs (as reported by the Villages-News.)

"I think that it's a tactic to go after elected officials that they (developers) have differences with," says Kemp, who survived a bruising re-election bid to the Hillsborough County Commission in 2020 despite development backed groups spending hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to oust her from office.

Saul-Sena says that she fears that the "balance of power" may be shifting when it comes to protecting neighborhoods from rampant development in Tampa.

"On a state level, we have no ability these days to protect our trees to come up with a number of rules that we used to be able to develop on a local level that would protect us," she says. "We've had a really great city government, and I'm concerned that the balance of power might shift."


GoFundMe.com, or any other third-party online fundraiser, is not managed by Spectrum Bay News 9 or Spectrum News 13. For more information on how GoFundMe works and its rules, visit http://www.gofundme.com/safety.