Are Special Interests Gunning for County Administrator?

At Tuesday's Manatee County Commission meeting, what would have normally been a routine item regarding County Administrator Cheri Coryea's annual performance evaluation erupted into tense exchanges between commissioners, at least one of whom sees a larger proxy battle in the works.

Coryea had given over three decades of exemplary service to the county when she was named acting county commissioner in March of 2019, following the somewhat abrupt retirement of Ed Hunzeker, who'd been recently beenreprimandedand had his spending authority reduced by a board he'd once held an enormous amount of influence over after ignoring commissioners' directives with regard to the location of a proposed emergency services tower.

Hunzeker's peculiar rise and fall is instructive, as to the way the politics of our local government really work. He was hired as Manatee County Administrator in 2007, just months after he had been abruptly dismissed as the administrator by the county commission in Osceola County. Once in Manatee, Hunzeker went to work on a relentless agenda of streamlining the development approval process, much to the liking of politically-connected developers.

The culture of the planning department and building services changed drastically, as allegiance seemed to be prized much more than excellence. Much of the staff's collective institutional knowledge evaporated with the help of a major staff downsizing during the Great Recession and, in general, it got easier than ever to build what you wanted in Manatee. However, in a testament to just how much fealty is demanded by the development community here in Manatee County, Hunzeker still managed to run afoul of at least one of its CEOs, Medallion Homes' Carlos Beruff.

While Hunzeker was certainly a friend of the highest order to builders, in terms of making it much easier for them to get controversial comp plan amendments and rezones for their developments approved, he stopped short of taking direct marching orders from them, particularly on non-development issues. Things first started to go sideways between Hunzeker and Beruff when the former began championing an ill-advised "indigent healthcare sales tax" in late 2012.

As I wrote at the time, the tax was something of a boondoggle for for-profit healthcare providers which stood to make millions via payments to the county for an ever-expanding range of services provided to mostly homeless and otherwise indigent citizens. What's worse, Hunzeker wasn't honest about the tax itself, which he traveled all over the county selling as a "property tax reduction."

At this point, I should offer a bit of context. Manatee sold its county-owned hospital (Manatee Memorial) to private interests in the early 1980s and put the massive windfall into a corpus, the interest of which would be used for indigent care, in accordance with state statutes. However, rather than manage the scope of services in order to align with the money available, as had occurred in the first couple decades and could have gone on indefinitely, vastly expanded services in the later years saw the county begin to eat into its principle until it was predictably spent down to nothing.

Rather than have an ongoing conversation about how that should play out, citizens were told that a half-cent sales tax would create more than enough money to maintain the status quo and that the excess would be used to reduce the millage rate for property taxes. Even if the first part were to prove true, a sales tax cannot be used in place of property taxes and neither the existing or future boards would be prevented from increasing spending elsewhere, so the idea that a citizen's vote in favor of the referendum was a vote for reducing their own property taxes–which Hunzeker explicitly stated–was patently untrue.

The referendum failed by a nearly 2-1 margin with the help of an expensive (and arguably equally-dishonest) dark money PAC campaign, mostly funded by development interests. As I reported at the time, someone directly involved with the PAC told me that the developer donors' real interest had nothing to do with the tax itself, but rather in preserving the option for an infrastructure sales tax, which would help pay for all of the quality of life necessities that the county's unwillingness to collect tens of millions of dollars in development impact fees during Hunzeker's time as administrator had inhibited.

Florida counties are allowed to have up to one additional cent in sales tax rates above the state-mandated six percent. Optional half-cent taxes can be used for education, indigent healthcare, and infrastructure–provided they are approved by voter referendum. At the time, there were no additional taxes in place, though the school district, which had just seen its books cooked to the tune of tens of millions of dollars in hidden deficits masquerading as a surplus, had already indicated that it would be asking voters for both the half-cent tax and a voluntary millage increase.

Suffice it to say, no one wants to compete with "money for our teachers and kids," so the healthcare sales tax was seen as a threat to an infrastructure tax, and, once it was defeated, referendums for both a half-cent education tax and infrastructure tax were later passed, after developers cut a very public deal with school board members to promote their half-cent tax in exchange for ... you guessed it ... the continuation of reduced school impact fees.

Because a dollar in growth costs about $1.25 in services, impact fees are one of the ways that Florida counties pay for growth-related costs, which is particularly important in a state that doesn't have an income tax. Developers hate them because they take away from their bottom line. While they attempt to scare the public by claiming it's passed onto the buyer and therefore leads to a dearth in affordable housing, the reality is that, in a free-market, houses sell for whatever the market commands and anything that is included in the total purchase price and does not go to the seller (such as a tax) lowers the profit margin. If that weren't true, builders wouldn't go through so much cost and effort not to pay them, and if the affordability of workforce housing were a concern, they'd actually show interest in building some.

When Hunzeker began losing the support of the board, Beruff was eager to see him go. However, he was also said to be very vocally not in favor of Coryea as a replacement. At the time, it was no secret that he and the development community were pushing for Dom Dimaio, President of the Lakewood Ranch Business Alliance, an organization that is closely tied to the real estate/development community. However, Coryea had built very good working relationships with a majority of board members who, despite pressure to do otherwise, unanimously approved her ascent to permanent county administrator, the first female to ever hold the position in Manatee County history.

But this year’s election brought change to the board in the form of three new developer-sponsored commissioners, including two–George Kruse and Kevin Van Ostenbridge–whose seats were all but purchased by Beruff and have proved extremely willing to carry his water even before being seated. Beruff and developer friend Pat Neal are strongly opposed to the county’s planned purchase of land adjacent to its Lena Road landfill to build a much-needed east county operations center, ostensibly to avoid big government overspending (a concern that doesn’t extend to the times when the developers themselves wish to sell the county land for a preserve or fleets services facility or deny its coffers the prescribed impact fee revenue).

The true reason for their opposition isn’t entirely clear, but, given the fact that there was serious dark PAC money spent trying to derail it, you can bet it’s not a simple matter of the local government’s fiscal prudence. Could it be an effort to hang an albatross around Coryea’s neck ahead of the new board being seated, after which a move is made to replace her with someone more to the developers' liking?

At Tuesday’s meeting, Coryea’s performance review was, for the most part, glowing. It reflected the many beneficial initiatives that have been undertaken by her administration, as well as her exemplary handling of the COVID-19 crisis. While the eval sheets were made public, the individual commissioners’ ratings were not. While the vast majority of scores and comments were exceedingly positive, it appeared that a single commissioner was fairly brutal in their appraisal (six ratings of needs improvement and one of unacceptable).

Commissioner Vanessa Baugh, who represents most of the east county and was herself installed by the development community, went out of her way to let everyone watching on Tuesday know that it wasn’t her. Baugh said that the scorecards, which noted seven scores (one per each commissioner), couldn’t be correct, as she had not done the evaluation because she preferred to have her conversation with Coryea privately.

By process of elimination, given the praises of Coryea that have been sung by five of the other six current members, it was easy to guess that it was outgoing Commissioner Stephen Jonsson that had dinged her so mercilessly.

After an awkward exchange about whether commissioners were required to submit evals, in which Baugh seemed ill at ease, Commission chair Betsy Benac, who was in her last meeting before retiring the seat Kruse will next inhabit, noted that while Coryea had forgone the possibility of an upward pay adjustment, she felt it was appropriate to increase the number of rolled over unused vacation days allowed to Coryea to the same as the county attorney (the only other employee hired by the board) in the interest of both equity and respect for the fact that the ongoing COVID crisis had made it all but impossible for her to take days off for any reason.

Voting against the measure, which passed 5-2, were Baugh and Jonsson. Commissioner Carol Whitmore, who at 14 years is the board's longest-serving incumbent, had apparently had enough and finally spoke publicly about the Machiavellian machinations that have been taking place.

"There are people in this community who don't want Cheri in this position," said Whitmore, adding that she'd heard of displeasure with Coryea again during the election cycle. "We all know what's going on," said the commissioner. "It's just not being said publicly. I know for a 100 percent fact this is what is going on."

Whitmore didn’t mention Baugh by name, although the district 3 commissioner immediately got defensive, barking at Whitmore for what she took to be an accusation and claiming that no one does or would tell her what to do or how to vote.

Now, I certainly hope it’s just the cynicism that comes from having covered Manatee County government for the past decade, and that no commissioner in their right mind would be looking to get rid of a county administrator who has proven herself to be as extremely competent, extraordinarily dedicated and fiercely independent-minded as Coryea has. But all of the coordinated efforts to sew mistrust of her administration make me wonder if it’s not the groundwork for doing just that.

Ginning up the far-right element that dominates Manatee County politics on a message of big government overspending and/or overreach isn’t very difficult, and there are a number of ways one could have thought they noticed it being done in recent months and perhaps even at that same meeting. As is often the case when it comes to what I write about in this column, I desperately hope I’m wrong and all of this isn’t connected to getting a more pliable administrator to helm the administration, followed by going after whatever non-puppet commissioners remain in future elections.

After all, one of the more peculiar aspects of Coryea's contract is that she can be terminated with or without cause by only a simple majority of the board, instead of the usual simple majority with cause, and supermajority without. But judging by the cards that are on the table as well as the ones that have been held by tipped hands, the odds seem to be against it.