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It's Going to Get Worse Before It Gets Better

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Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse in Manatee County Government, commissioners convened for a Tuesday meeting. By the end of the day, one of the most experienced senior administrators became the latest in a long list of critical employees to have quit, and the embattled county administrator had gotten a significant raise despite serious concerns about his performance. In other words, business as usual.
In Sunday’s column, I noted that the look on Deputy Administrator and CFO Jan Brewer's face during most meetings suggested it was a minor miracle that the 10-year employee had managed to last a full year under this chaotic regime. That miracle had apparently been totally expended by the time the events of this past weekend played out, as Brewer submitted her resignation just ahead of the meeting, accusing Hopes of directing staff to withhold critical information from her.
Brewer has followed numerous other key employees out the door, including previous deputy administrators John Osborne and Karen Stewart. In fact, Brewer took on a dual role as deputy administrator and CFO in the midst of a chaotic purge in which anyone associated with previous county administrator Cheri Coryea or her predecessor, Ed Hunzeker, were, at best, marginalized.
That’s a hell of a way to start a meeting and, given the concerns expressed by Manatee County Clerk and Comptroller Angel Colonneso as to the way Hopes is running the ship, one who didn’t know better might think that a majority of board members would reconsider whether an administrator with so little relative experience had been the right fit in the first place. But this is Manatee County, where being a real Republican means never admitting a mistake, let alone having to say you’re sorry.
Hopes, who had already seen his base salary rise from $199,000 to $206,752 in just a few months thanks to a cost-of-living adjustment he himself created without adequate presentation to the board during budgeting, was asking for another raise, this time to $230,000, as well as the maximum allowable "deferred compensation," which amounted to another $27,000.
Deferred compensation is a sort of tax shelter in which executives have part of their pay put into an investment account, where it accumulates, tax-free, while they are working. This helps keep their taxable income lower, by "deferring" some of the income until they retire, at which time they will presumably be in a lower tax bracket. For 2022, the maximum allowed by the IRS is $20,500, with a maximum catch-up amount of $6,500 for eligible time for which the person did not receive such compensation.
As was pointed out Tuesday, other employees can contribute to the same kind of account, however, Hopes’ contract provides that taxpayers foot the bill each year. Yes, as was noted, this is a common perk for top executives like county administrators and school district superintendents. However, that alone doesn’t mean that it’s some sort of travesty if some municipality, say, a county commission that will never shut up about how fiscally conservative it is despite all evidence to the contrary, decides that paying someone over $200,000 a year is enough.
Given the state of our county’s government, it’s not like Hopes, who’d been rejected as an applicant for President of USF and Superintendent of Sarasota County Schools before Manatee gave him a job, had much leverage. What he did have, however, was the benefit of being the guy that three completely inexperienced public representatives and a fourth whose experience hasn’t amounted to even a rudimentary understanding of policy, selected after following their paymaster’s instructions to fire Coryea.
That was the subtext in everything that happened on Tuesday. The county would be in much better shape right now had County Commissioner George Kruse not allowed himself to be manipulated into going off half-cocked at a meeting and firing a highly-qualified professional with three decades of experience in Manatee County government just because that’s the way the developers who got this majority elected wanted it.
Kruse was paranoid that the extramarital affair he was openly having would be somehow "used against him" and that fellow commissioner Carol Whitmore was pulling the strings on some sort of master plan to do him in. So, having been the swing vote when commissioners Kevin Van Ostenbridge, Vanessa Baugh, and James Satcher moved to can Coryea months prior, Kruse flipped his vote and chaos ensued.
Yet, despite an Ivy-League education, the irony of chastising commissioners who wanted to fire a county administrator without a thorough investigation and plan of succession was totally lost on him, despite the fact that Tuesday’s events occurred only because he himself had been willing to do just that and to an administrator who, unlike our current one, had not driven morale into the toilet, prompting an unprecedented exodus of institutional knowledge from an enterprise made up of more than two thousand employees.
In the end, commissioners settled on raising Hopes’ base salary to $215,000, giving him the full deferred compensation and dealing with the fact that he’d been driving a new, county-owned, $48,000 SUV as his personal vehicle despite receiving $450 a month, supposedly for driving his personal vehicle to and from work, by making the vehicle part of his new contract and saying, there, we fixed it.
And just when you thought it couldn’t get any more embarrassing to be a Manatee County resident, the meeting devolved into an utterly weird lovefest where the same majority who rescued Hopes spent well over an hour arguing over which one of them loved Governor Ron DeSantis most, lobbing countless superlatives in a cringeworthy display that looked like it was straight out of North Korea.
For the record, Commissioner James Satcher retained his title as the top dog when it comes to gubernatorial brown-nosing. For his part, I imagine DeSantis is thrilled to be the object of so much bro love, having similarly simped for former President Trump in this emasculating commercial.
As for Hopes, let's look at the box score. He’s got the gal who directed Vaccinegate, the guy who just drunkenly drove his pickup truck straight into a tree, the guy who got caught taking policy notes directly from the developer who bought his seat, and the guy who’s wasted countless government hours on stunts like local abortion bans and attempts to allow county employees to carry a firearm on the job all on his side. If ever there were a lackluster majority suited to save someone of Hopes' ilk, this team was born for the job.
What next? Who knows. Maybe aliens will invade and tell us they’re tired of humans not being able to get out of their own way and take over. One thing’s for certain, this year’s elections will not bring improvement. With none of the four majority seats up for reelection, it’s only a matter of how much worse things are going to get. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m taking a couple of days off to dig my toes into the sand and soak up the sun before my head explodes.
 
Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of ourweekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County governmentsince 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Clickherefor his bio. His 2016 short story collection, Casting Shadows, was recently reissued and is availablehere.
 
 
 
 

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