TBT Editorial: BOCC Needs to Begin Search for Next County Administrator

In 2013, Manatee County Commissioners told citizens that it was too late to consider a search for a new county administrator and that it was imperative that they secured the continued services of Ed Hunzeker–who was in the state’s DROP program and scheduled to retire in 18 months–at all costs. November will mark 24 months remaining on Hunzeker’s existing contract. We feel the BOCC owes it to taxpayers to begin seeking his replacement.

Hunzeker’s renegotiation will have cost taxpayers well over $300,000 in additional compensation and costs by the time his contract expires. Based on the performance of the administration since that time, we see no good arguments to consider exploring the possibility of keeping him on beyond that point and plenty to support going in a different direction. For that reason, we believe it is critical that the board move swiftly in order to prevent the sort of time crunch that commissioners claimed caused their inability to even consider seeking other candidates prior to the last extension.

Shortly after getting a new contract that included an enormous increase in total compensation, Hunzeker embarked on an aggressive campaign for a referendum to pass a half-penny sales tax that would fund the county’s indigent health programs in light of the impending depletion of the corpus that had been created with the county’s sale of its hospital in the early Ô80s.

The funding crisis demonstrated poor stewardship of a fund that had previously covered such spending using only accrued interest and could have survived into perpetuity if that would have remained the case. Instead, the county aggressively expanded such services at times of historic low interest rates, quickly eating through the principal with no real contingency plan for what to do when the funds ran out, beyond hoping that taxpayers would approve a new tax.

Even more troubling than the crisis itself was Hunzeker’s dishonest presentation of the referendum, in which he traveled all over the county misrepresenting it as a property tax reduction. Despite his own admission that the county had "seen this coming for years,“ Hunzeker pushed to conduct the referendum during a special off-year, June election–at a cost to taxpayers of at least $260,000–rather than place it on the November 2012 ballot when it could have been conducted for free with higher voter participation. Voters wisely turned away the proposal by a margin of nearly 2-1. Rather than respecting the will of the voters, the remedy was to merely fund the status quo using millions of dollars in county reserves.

Year after year, Hunzeker also failed to take the lead on conducting impact fee studies that his administration would later claim prevented the county from reinstating the fees each time the authorization for their suspension or reduction expired. As a result, the county has not been collecting school impact fees since 2009, even as development growth in the northeast county–where there is currently no high school–has continued to skyrocket. The school district now says it will have to ask taxpayers for hundreds of millions of dollars in new taxes, debt and debt servicing in order to build much needed schools in that part of the county. Some of that cost could have been offset by collecting school impact fees over the past six years, instead of allowing it to remain a taxpayer-funded giveaway that pads the bottom line of local developers.

Of course, Hunzeker has needed a compliant county commission to carry his agenda forward and an equal amount of blame falls on the BOCC for lacking the political leadership on each of those issues. Nonetheless, it is clear that the county administrator exerts considerable influence among the board, making his continued leadership all the more difficult to imagine as we head into the future.

There is also the matter of morale among county staff. Hunzeker has done very little in terms of resolving the shameful and dangerous conditions that county EMS employees are forced to work under, or the embarrassing scandals within the county’s Animal Services department, where expensive studies and a shuffling of employees has done nothing to make animal rights activists more confident that a humane and competent environment will be established in that department.

As the county’s drug crisis worsens and local bar owners are struggling against a rash of armed robberies, Hunzeker continues to haggle with the county Sheriff over adequate funding of law enforcement in his budget proposals, turning away the Sheriff's requests for needed deputies despite Manatee having both the worst pay and officer-to-citizen ratio in the area.

In environmental matters, the county has taken a hard turn to the right under Hunzeker that continues to threaten essential public resources. While patting itself on the back for "streamlining“ the development process, the county has all but abandoned concern for environmental degradation. Indeed, the primary concern when it comes to most decisions seems to be not colliding with the interests of deep-pocketed developers.

We find all of these matters unacceptable and think the BOCC needs to begin conducting a national search for a highly-qualified county administrator to take over once Hunzeker’s contract expires. Our county faces many critical challenges and needs someone at the helm with a vision that looks well into the future, someone with both the expertise and the fortitude to push forward an agenda that benefits all citizens of the county, even when it creates opposition with powerful special interests–which is something Mr. Hunzeker has not proven himself to be.