TECO team members took no shortcuts when reveling in the spirit of community during the 2015 Florida Strawberry Festival Parade – though like just about everyone else in attendance, they did enjoy plenty of shortcakes.
Wearing their red TECO T-shirts, team members from Tampa Electric’s Plant City Operations area walked and drove the parade route through historic downtown Plant City on March 2, tossing out beads to cheering crowds.
For Rick Jackson, manager of Distribution Engineering & Operations with Tampa Electric, the event was a family affair as his wife and children joined him in the parade.
“What can we say? We love being part of TECO, we love this community, and we loved the opportunity to be part of this year’s parade each,” Jackson said.
The Florida Strawberry Festival got its start in 1930, 31 years after Tampa Electric began. What started as a celebration of one of the region’s most popular crops has grown into an 11-day event with world-renowned entertainers, livestock shows and lots (and lots) of strawberry shortcake. Annually, the festival draws crowds of more than half a million people.
Tampa Electric sponsored the luncheon for organizers and participants of the parade – which, with about 20,000 spectators, is the second-largest parade in Hillsborough County after Gasparilla, Jackson said.
He added that while everybody loves the Strawberry Festival, the parade brings TECO and the community face-to-face in an especially rewarding way.
“Our team works hard to maintain reliability, and TECO obviously offers all kinds of solutions for customers, but when parade time rolls around, we like showing a different side of who we are,” Jackson said. “We’re just as much a part of the community as the people we’re proud so serve.”
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