After filing last year to regain his old Tampa City Council District 7 seat, New Tampa’s Joseph Caetano ended up not running, saying he had a change of heart.
Now, he says, he is following his heart.
Caetano is one of five candidates who have (so far) filed to replace Carol Kurdell in the District 7 seat on the Hillsborough County School Board in 2016, returning to what he says are his roots.
Caetano says he was a school board member in Woburn, MA, from 1981-85, and he plans on taking some of the things he championed then and using them to build his platform now for the District School Board election, which will be held during the Primary Election on August 30, 2016.
(Note-Unless one of the five Dist. 7 candidates garners at least 50-percent of the vote on Aug. 30, the two candidates with the most votes will advance to a runoff during the General Election on November 8, 2016.)
Specifically, Caetano, 82, says he will run on vocational education, which he says was the backbone of the school district he served up north.
“I know vocational education is a dirty word (to some people),’’ he says. “But it’s a very good system.”
Some other concerns Caetano said he hopes to tackle: the financial woes of the Hillsborough school district, graduation rates that he says remain far too low and increasing the pay for the District’s bus drivers.
This won’t be the first time Caetano has run for the Hillsborough School Board. In 1996, he was unsuccessful in a deep field of nine for a countywide that included winner Sharon Danaher, although Caetano says he received 20,450 votes.
“I know they (the voters) are going to end up loving my message when I come out again,’’ he said.
“They” had better love him, because Caetano already faces four other candidates for the District 7 seat — a little less than a year before the Aug. 30 Primary Election.
If he ends up following through this time on his filing, this will be Caetano’s first campaign since he served on the Tampa City Council from 2007-11. He was unseated in March 2011 by current District 7 Council member Lisa Montelione, finishing third of four candidates and attracting 19 percent on the vote.
Caetano, a longtime Tampa Palms resident now living in Grand Hampton, owned the Bostonian Hair Studio in the City Plaza at Tampa Palms shopping center for more than two decades (and a second salon in the New Tampa Center plaza for several years), before filing for bankruptcy in 2008 and closing both of those salons. He later opened and closed two salons in Wesley Chapel and helped his daughter, Jacquie, open the Urban Renewal Hair & More salon in the Pebble Creek Collection a couple of years ago.
The always-colorful Caetano promises that his age won’t hold him back. He said he works out at a gym every day and is in top shape.
“I think I can make a difference; I’m a hard worker,’’ Caetano said. “I’m going to win the election, I’ll tell you that now. I’ll work my (butt) off. And I’m running from here down to Apollo Beach. I’ll be knocking on doors and advertising.”
Caetano said he plans on forming a committee in the coming months to plan his campaign and begin his fund-raising efforts in earnest.
For more information, email Joseph Caetano at caetanobim@aol.com.
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