Analysis: Bradenton Charter Amendment

On the November 3 ballot, voters in the City of Bradenton will determine the future role of their mayor in an important referendum. If passed, the referendum would remove the role of police commissioner from the mayoral duties and place oversight of the city’s largest budget item with the entire city council, rather than a single individual.

Opponents have called it a city council power grab and there’s even a direct mail campaign warning voters that, if passed, it could allow council members to "defund the police," an absurd notion, given that the city council already has budget authority within the charter.

The ads have been paid for by Florida Citizens for Economic Prosperity, an obscure PAC funded by a single donor, Avanti Capital LLC. Sunbiz lists the Orlando-based entity as inactive and the only person associated with it is an Orlando attorney. The LLC seems to be related to a real estate development group with property in Manatee County.

That’s an interesting factor, given that outgoing Mayor Wayne Poston has been consistently supported by development interests who’ve done rather well throughout his 20 years in office, to say the very least. That said, voters should be very wary anytime outside money that has deliberately been covered by the opacity afforded to such PACs is at play in a small city’s local elections.

Poston withdrew from the race after vetoing the referendum the first time it passed, 3-2. Within hours, Councilman Gene Brown–Poston’s chief ally on the council–filed to run for the office. That move, however, necessitated Brown stepping down from his seat and when Marianne Barnebey–who’d vacated the same seat to run for mayor in 2012–was appointed to fill the vacancy, the motion was revived and Barnebey provided the 4th yea needed to veto-proof the vote.

Poston has argued that the department cannot be overseen "by committee" and has made an analogy to such a situation being akin to Congress overseeing the FBI. Such statements are utterly devoid of logic, however, as the council literally exercises oversight over every other department in the city, while Congress does indeed exercise oversight over the FBI and other intelligence agencies. There is of course a non-elected Director of the FBI who runs the agency, but that person would be the equivalent of the Chief of Police in such an analogy, not the mayor.

In reality, Bradenton’s form of government is both outdated and out of step with the vast majority of cities its size. Some members of the council have pushed to move toward a strong-council form of government in which the more ceremonial role of mayor is rotated among council members for one-year terms. In that case, a highly-qualified city manager would replace the mayor’s current role, which has already been somewhat absorbed by the city's administrator, Carl Callahan.

While Poston has been Mayor of Bradenton for two decades, Callahan has been at City Hall for three. After working as a city auditor, Callahan spent two decades as the city clerk and treasurer before the positions of city administrator and then economic development director were created for him. With Callahan, 64, having announced that he'll be retiring in 2021, and Gene Gallo, who’s spent more than half a century as a city fireman, fire chief, and council member and has openly endorsed the "good old boys" way of doing things in Bradenton leaving the council as well, there's all the more reason for the city to reimagine its government structure in a way that addresses the many ways it has grown and changed in the 21st century.

The idea of a large police force and its chief being under the control of a single elected politician is ripe with opportunities for conflicts of interest. We saw that in the past when police department scandals were brushed under the rug, and then again shortly after current chief Melanie Bevans was hired and then spotted campaigning for Poston’s 2016 reelection. Simply put, a police chief or their officers should never be in a position where they might feel that their fate is tied to the political success of a single politician.

The passage of this referendum would be a very good first step in the city’s move away from an antiquated form of government that has grown to fit that aforementioned good old boys network rather than the community it exists to serve.