TAMPA — About every other month, a retired general from Cory Lake Isles sits down at the nearby Panera Bread in New Tampa with Luis Viera, his City Council member, and, as he puts it, solves the world’s problems over coffee.
Remo Butler has met his share of politicians.
“Luis is a politician. Yes. But do I trust him? Yes,” he said. “Most of the politicians, I would smile, chew my food with my mouth closed, and have very little trust for.”
The coffee dates, and countless others Viera has shared with New Tampa residents, are about to become rarer.
Viera’s decade representing District 7, which includes North and New Tampa, ends at 11:59 p.m. Monday, Nov. 2, when his resignation takes effect.
The next day is Election Day in the Democrat’s race for Florida House District 67, which he is expected to win easily.
The council will appoint someone to the seat — which stretches from New Tampa to the Fowler Avenue, Busch Boulevard and Forest Hills neighborhoods — hoping to fill the void until next year’s election.
They will fail, Butler says.
“I have no expectations because I know there’s not going to be another Luis Viera,” Butler said. “There can never be another one.”
Viera has come a long way in his decade as a politician, building a coalition of partners and loyal New Tampa residents.
None of this appeared likely in 2016.
Viera, a lawyer making his first run for office, finished second in the November 2016 election, getting into a runoff with Dr. Jim Davison, who received 30.6% of the vote to Viera’s 22.38%.
He wasn’t sure he could win. He said none of the other candidates endorsed him in the runoff.
But he was everywhere in the next month, knocking on doors, waving signs, showing up to events and, yes, having coffee with the locals.
In the December runoff, Viera won by 65 votes. It was an impressive comeback after earning 2,469 fewer votes than Davison a week earlier.
But it was hardly a mandate.
He spent the next two years courting those who didn’t vote for him.
“I took nothing for granted, and I worked really, really hard to reach out to those people that didn’t vote for me, or trust me for whatever reason,” Viera said.
His first big test was fighting to keep money in the city budget, after funding had been pulled back multiple times in previous years, for the expansion of the New Tampa Recreation Center.
Tampa Palms’ Tracy Falkowitz had phoned him demanding to know what he planned to do about the rec center.
“Ma’am, I’m on it,” Viera replied.
Falkowitz then showed up at Viera’s first town hall, and essentially teamed up with Viera to let the other city officials know they didn’t think New Tampa was getting a fair return on the taxes it paid into the city’s coffers.
Residents in matching red shirts and blazers packed council meetings to press the case.
“I still own that damn red blazer,” said Maggie Wilson, laughing. Wilson is a 37-year resident of Tampa Palms, vice president of the homeowner’s association and an officer of the Community Development District, and was also part of the effort.
Viera faced a delicate balancing act. Then-Mayor Bob Buckhorn wanted to raise the millage rate, and Viera wanted to scale that back while preserving money for the recreation center and Fire Station 23.
The budget passed by one vote.
Falkowitz, a Republican who confessed she didn’t vote for Viera, is now a friend.
Wilson is one of his most ardent supporters.
She said Viera is the most popular, and effective, politician that has ever represented New Tampa.
“Without a doubt. No contest.”
What set Viera apart from his predecessors, Wilson said, was access, which originally may have seemed like a campaign ploy but immediately became his calling card.
“Of the many things that made him special to New Tampa, the principal one was his engagement with citizens,” Wilson said. “He would take any call. He would discuss any matter.”
When the city was working on one end of Compton Drive, she said, he pushed it to finish the other mile. “He can’t do everything, but he got it done,” she said. “A probably stronger watchword for him would be that he cared. You don’t see that much these days.”
By his count, Viera held about 100 town halls, in park and apartment parking lots during the pandemic and behind the gates of New Tampa’s many communities.
When a string of violent crimes had neighbors nervous, he put police chiefs and sheriffs at the microphone instead of doing the talking himself.
“When there was an issue, you knew he would address it,” said Erin Uhler of Cory Lake Isles.
He rarely showed up for his town halls without city officials, with department heads responsible for roads and parks and crime — and even Mayor Jane Castor on a number of occasions — to address specific topics.
After years of feeling that the city wasn’t paying attention, Viera seized on the discontent of some voters. He leaned on the “Alaska of Tampa” line, his nickname for a district he says is easy to forget.
“When you’re in this office, you have to bang a little bit louder,” he said.
And he did.
His resume includes nearly $20 million in new park funding for New Tampa, including the forthcoming K-Bar Ranch Park, a roughly 60-acre park project north of Cross Creek Boulevard
One of his first goals was an All-Abilities Park, which he spearheaded on day one of his first term, and it opened in 2022. Viera considers his advocacy for people with intellectual disabilities among the most meaning work of his decade in office.
The New Tampa Rec Center expansion received $3 million, and the city also made investments in parks and playground improvements throughout the district.
He pushed for fire stations across his districts, including the long effort to secure Station 24.
And when North Tampa was besieged by flooding following hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024, Viera fought for relief for affected families and worked with county commissioners on a review of the area’s infrastructure.
His interests went beyond just parks, roads and budgets.
A history buff, Viera befriended 104-year-old Buffalo Soldier Roy Caldwood, a New Tampa resident, and helped organize several events to showcase his service.
“That’s appreciated by everyone,” Butler said.
But Viera confesses that he didn’t solve every New Tampa problem.
Despite the fire station investments, he said four of the five Tampa fire stations with the longest response times are in New Tampa. And he was wrangling with the K-Bar Ranch cut-through to reduce response times in that community until his final hours.
He said the district still needs someone willing to fight for projects that might otherwise get overlooked.
“I think we have made amazing progress, but we got to do a lot more, a lot more,” he said.
Wilson said his effectiveness will be tough to replace. He had a knack for working with people, even those who may not have agreed with him.
“He was collaborative,” she said. “We would go to folks and say, ‘I have this problem. What can we do?’”
That approach, along with the relationships he developed, helped him build a host of small pockets of loyalists who became regulars at his town halls.
“He’s the politician we all hope we get when we vote,” Uhler said. “He’s there at everything, there’s not a thing he won’t look into for you. And he was consistently doing that, and not just when he was campaigning.”
Not that he had to do much campaigning after 2016.
Thanks to his efforts at turning around those who may not have voted for him, he won reelection in 2019, with 76.2% of the vote.
That was his final campaign for City Council. No one stepped forward to challenge him in 2023.
But it wasn’t all hot coffee and handshakes for Viera.
In 2022, as a public records scandal swept City Hall, he handed over his phone for a subpoena of his text messages. He wasn’t part of the initial investigation, and said he was never accused of anything, but the experience left him rattled.
“There’s nothing quite like going to an office and giving your phone over to get it looked at for some investigation,” he said.
He called it one of his darkest times on council and said he considered not running again.
He also acknowledged that the accessibility that made him popular could sometimes be a liability. Viera’s former aide, Brannon Lazo, used to call it both his strength and his Achilles’ heel.
But it is part of who he is, as were his outspoken opinions, his fondness for police officers and firefighters, and his habit of mixing in quotes from his favorite musician, Bruce Springsteen, or his favorite movie series, Rocky.
He was subtle enough to sometimes sneak them by people who missed the reference, and other times just smiled at the groans it got.
His resignation letter was, well, completely on brand.
Instead of the typical two- to three-line thanks-for-everything resignation, Viera leaned into a five-page goodbye.
Each page had footnotes, with Springsteen, Rocky Balboa and Kris Kristofferson prominently mentioned.
He thanked colleagues, praised the police and fire unions, who were strong backers of his, and saluted the karaoke tradition he started with council member Guido Maniscalco.
He wrote about his work for veterans, working families, flood victims and people with disabilities.
He also compared his first campaign to Rocky Balboa getting into the ring, something he said he had once been afraid to do. Like the theme of the move, he said, it was having the courage to try.
Viera said his own lawyer told him it wasn’t a proper resignation letter.
“It’s my letter,” he replied.
The letter closes with a Kristofferson line from “The Pilgrim,” about the climb being worth the fall.
Before he left, the council threw a going-away party, a two-hour Viera-palooza, as it was dubbed.
“It was a blast,” he said.
Viera still lives in New Tampa and says he will continue to look out for the area as much as he can. He plans to continue to hold town halls and working with whoever succeeds him.
But he will no longer have a direct hand in the city’s decisions about parks and roads and neighborhood grievances.
He admits the move to Tallahassee makes him nervous. The issues will be broader, the political environment likely far less friendly. It’s a different gig.
But he insists he will remain a local politician at heart.
“It is sad to leave,” he said. “But I’m not going away.”
And if you insist on writing his District 7 obituary, he said, then just make sure it includes one line:
“Fighter for the Alaska of Tampa.”