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Iorio Wants Grammar-Challenged Banner Replaced

Tribune photo by MICHAEL SPOONEYBARGER

Mayor Pam Iorio has asked the Tampa Downtown Partnership to correct the wording or remove the sign.

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By CHRISTIAN M. WADE | The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 21, 2009

TAMPA - Super Bowl visitors entering the city's downtown next week will be greeted by this message: "Welcome to Downtown Tampa: There's so many reasons to love it."

Sounds like a nice message. But there's a problem. The banner, at Franklin and Platt streets near Channelside Drive, contains a glaring error: The subject and verb in the second part don't match.

Grammatically speaking, "There's" should be "There are" or "There're."

The banner was paid for by the taxpayer-subsidized Tampa Downtown Partnership as part of a welcome campaign for visitors to the Feb. 1 championship football game.

Mayor Pam Iorio has asked the nonprofit group to correct the wording or remove it.

"The sign needs to be replaced as soon as possible," she said Wednesday. "It's grammatically incorrect and doesn't reflect well on the city."

Christine Burdick, president of the partnership, said the group is discussing replacing the sign or retrofitting it with grammatically correct wording.

Burdick said she didn't know how much the banner cost.

"We're going to fix it," she said. "We certainly don't want to appear uneducated."

Reporter Christian M. Wade can be reached at (813) 259-7679.

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