Best of 2015: Broken Bridges, Mean Girls and Crowbar Politics

Posted Saturday, December 26, 2015 12:00 am

John Rehill

This year has surely started out with its share of chaos. News broadcasts have told of terror reports, record rains, record cold and record heat. There have been manhunts and attacks on police being reported like sports scores – and it has only been two weeks! Sometimes it all seems too much to process. Yet in a time when we should be building bridges, it seems that all our local leaders can do is construct walls.

When our local politicians practice their brand of it's our way or the highway civics – the way the majority of our Manatee County Commissioners do – it shames the process of our democracy and the very notion of representative government.

To say our local leaders have a self-serving agenda would be in error; what we have is something similar to what has been destroying sovereignty over time and throughout history.

"We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others." - Will Rogers

Day by day, one can chart the marginalization of citizens' needs by commissioners for the pleasures of their already privileged constituents; yet members routinely complain about how tired they are of public opinion.

Commissioners want to ban those who disagree from the public forum, stop citizens from addressing issues and property rights, and if one disagrees? Too bad, "Get over it," as BOCC Chair Betsy Benac recently told her supposed constituents.

Commissioners attack one another when one of them goes off script and wanders from the strict loyalties of their alliance. This was displayed when Commissioner Robin DiSabatino made the injurious mistake of being photographed with a Democrat at a bipartisan dog adoption event.

Commissioners Whitmore, Benac and Baugh tried to have DiSabatino thrown off of the Republican Executive Committee. Next, they snubbed her by straying from protocol and denying the second-term commissioner a single officership. To this day, the so-called "mean girls" badger her every chance they get. The message seems to be: get in line or saddle up for a very rough ride.

Their antagonism seems to be contagious to the other panicky, insecure Republicans.

In Sarasota County, Christian Ziegler, one of the leaders of the local Republican Party, is pushing a resolution that would enact punishment on any Republican who is seen to support Democrats in any possible way by banning the traitor from party activities.

How far will this brand of crowbar politics go? I don't know, but I am glad I didn't follow my first attempt for a career as a cartoonist.

The Manatee County hierarchy has intimidated staff by pink-slipping those who don't support their agenda, so much so that not all, but at least some staff members seem willing to lie about specific facts and navigate around particular duties that favor influential applicants, as we saw at Thursday's meeting.

The same has occurred on many occasions, too numerous to name in a single article, but are documented in our regular coverage of the BOCC, and so far this year – like the rain, the cold and the heat – they seem to be coming in record numbers.

Saddle up citizens, it's going to be a very rough ride.

Commissioners claim ignorance to rules they have sworn to uphold which are clearly stated on the very first page that depicts their commandments, right under their picture on the county's website. They then exercise their misinformation to swindle citizens of their civil rights, as they did in the recent attempt of residents from east Manatee who attempted to speak on their opposition to an approved project Tuesday, at the very last opportunity to do so.

Now the threats to chastise those who are insubordinate have targeted the county's planning commission.

"It doesn't matter whether they let you sit at the counter, if they won't serve you a hamburger." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The BOCC appoints those who sit on the planning commission, and developers and planners are the dominant ingredients in the stew. When Manatee Planning Commissioner Matt Bower didn't support one of the BOCC's pet projects, Commissioners Baugh and Benac quoted Bower's comments from a recent news article as to why he didn't favor a board-friendly project, publicly belittling his position.

Bower now claims that commissioners are trying to get him tossed from the board altogether. That's not hard to imagine considering that at Tuesday's meeting, Commissioner Carol Whitmore followed Baugh and Benac's comments by asserting that the board needed to get rid of such voices on the planning commission.

The planning commission is an advisory board. They have no actual authority, but hear proposed land use plans and issue recommendations to the BOCC before it votes on final approval. The problem is that citizens opposing a project or amendment can point to the lack of a recommendation or dissenting comments to strengthen their case, and in what amounts to little more than a rubber stamp process of BOCC land use decisions, that just won't do.

Bower, like DiSabatino, is feeling the heat, but neither are surrendering to the malfeasance that dominates the BOCC.

A democracy is a high maintenance, hands-on government, worthy of participation by all. If not, it will be hijacked, as the current BOCC demonstrates well.

Apathy ferments abuse. The next time you go to the grocery store, put your wallet on the hood of the car before you go in, and when you go to check-out, tell the cashier you're going out to get it. That's the same position citizens put themselves in when they don't watchdog their government and are left hoping that honesty and decency prevail.

Show up at the meetings, show up at the polls, and take back what is yours. You pay the bill whether you participate or not.