Tampa Mayor Iorio Considers Running For U.S. Senate

Mayor Pam Iorio confirmed this morning that she is considering running for the U.S. Senate next year.

If she ran, Iorio would enter a Democratic primary in which there are already two announced prominent candidates - U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek of Miami and state Sen. Dan Gelber of Miami Beach - and more expected.

"It was not something I was considering when there was a possibility that Alex Sink might run," Iorio said this morning. "But since she bowed out, I have had people talk to me about it. So I am analyzing it, and that's where I am right now. I have not ruled it out."

Sink, also from Tampa, is Florida's Chief Financial Officer and was considered the most powerful potential Democratic candidate. But Sink announced two weeks ago she won't run and instead will run for re-election as CFO. Gelber had held off his own announcement, he said, because he didn't want to run against Sink.

Republican Mel Martinez will leave the seat vacant when he retires in 2010.

Iorio said she has no self-imposed deadline for making a decision.

"I don't want to declare any specific timeline," she said. "I'm gathering info and facts and analyzing it."

She didn't want to say whom she's talking to about the race, but said there are no major family considerations in her way.

"Both of my children are in college, and my husband and I are empty-nesters," she said.

Iorio said she hasn't previously talked about her interest in the race because "I have not wanted to have my name out there just for the sake of having it out there."

Iorio is now in her second term as mayor and would leave office because of term limits after the 2011 election. If she won the Senate seat, she would miss only the last year of her tenure as mayor.

Florida Democrats have speculated that Meek and Gelber may split up the huge Democratic voting bloc in Southeast Florida, where about one of every three Florida Democrats live in Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties. That could create an easier path to a primary victory for candidate from the Tampa Bay area.

Iorio didn't deny that calculation is part of her analysis of the race.

Iorio was elected mayor, a nonpartisan post, in 2003. Previously, she served as Hillsborough County elections supervisor from 1993 to 2003 and as a county commissioner from 1985 to 1992 - at the time the youngest commissioner ever elected.

Her husband, Mark Woodard, is an assistant county administrator in Pinellas County.