A Recent History of Manatee County Politics

As we head to the finish line of this year’s primary election season, campaigns are careening into absurdity, even by the standards of this bizarre decade of Manatee County politics. In the interest of those of you who are picking up the soap opera a few seasons in, allow me to recap the convoluted road that has brought us to this insanity, espcially for those who have yet to go to the polls.

In 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. the FEC that money was speech and corporations were people, it opened the floodgates for a new kind of campaign in Manatee County politics. For more than a decade, developers had gained more than a bit of sway via the traditional route of bundling money and funneling it into their preferred candidates' coffers.

At that time, the machinery of big-money politics did not exist as it does today. Special interests could certainly tilt the scales toward a preferable opponent, but it was not really possible to run patently unqualified candidates with no roots in the community while relying on nonsensical attack ads unrelated to the race or office in question.

In 2012, in the first Manatee County Commission election after Citizens United, developers spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on dark-money PACs. They already had control of the board; mind you, it had just gotten too close for comfort. In District 2, sustainable growth/good government candidate Michael Gallen had defeated developer stooge Gwen Brown in the 2010 Democratic primary and went unopposed in the general election. Republican Robin DiSabatino, a real estate agent who developers incorrectly assumed would be part of their rubber stamp, won the vacant seat in District 4.

These two new commissioners joined TBT publisher Joe McClash (longtime veteran of the at-large seat currently held by fellow Republican George Kruse) to form a sustainable-growth wing that made developers far too nervous. They backed up the Brink's truck and unleashed a vile campaign of disinformation that sought to paint McClash, a lifelong rock-ribbed Republican, as something akin to Barack “Hussein” Obama’s Manatee County mascot.

It worked well enough for McClash, who had not fundraised for the campaign, to drop the seat he’d held for 22 years to Betsy Benac by a mere 494 votes. Benac had worked as a planner and was being pushed by the same development interests funding her campaign and the PACs targeting McClash. For those of you who remember Betsy fiercely campaigning against the developers in 2024, let’s just say that this was a very different version of Mrs. Benac, or even the version you might recall from her final years in office when she finally got religion on managing growth.

Developer darling Vanessa Baugh won the District 5 seat now held by Bob McCann in the same cycle. Two years later, developers managed to get rid of Gallen in the closest race in Manatee County history, and District 2, currently helmed by Amanda Ballard, has not had a commissioner who was willing to buck developers or champion sustainable growth since. In District 3, Steve Jonnson, who’d been Beruff’s banker, defeated sustainable growth advocate and NPA candidate Matt Bower, with the help of a second NPA spoiler.

By the time Misty Servia, another former Manatee County planner who’d left for the private sector, got elected to the board in 2018, beating then-Democrat Melton Little in the District 4 seat now held by Mike Rahn, developers—particularly Pat Neal and Carlos Beruff—were pretty much assured of getting 80-90 percent of what they asked for when it came to rezones and comp plan amendments. It was not until Big Development decided, for all intents and purposes, to captain the ship itself that things began to come genuinely unhinged.

Former Manatee County Administrator Ed Hunzeker, who arguably did more for Big Development than any administrator in our county’s history, got on the wrong side of Beruff just once. After Hunzeker had irresponsibly spent down the corpus created by the sale of the county-owned hospital to the private sector, he proposed a half-cent sales tax, which he dishonestly marketed as a property tax cut, to pay for the ever-expanding payments to the uber-profitable private hospital.

The only problem was that a Florida county can have only two half-cent sales taxes at any given time, and the financially beleaguered Manatee School District was gearing up to seek one in the next cycle. Only Big Development wanted an infrastructure sales tax to depress the findings of an updated impact fee study, allowing them to pass the cost of growth on to all residents.

Hunzeker held firm, and even though the tax failed nearly 2-1, he was essentially dead in the eyes of Beruff and Big Development, which had previously bent over backward to keep the admin on past his DROP date and pad his retirement with cash and extra perks, all at an enormous cost to taxpayers. They eventually got their way, passing an infrastructure tax and scoring grossly reduced impact fees.

Hunzeker was pushed out in early 2019, and developers wanted to hire a stooge to replace him. This is where some of the commissioners drew a line. Former commissioner Carol Whitmore, who’d held the countywide D6 seat, and Reggie Bellamy—both of whom were amenable to developers in just about every other way—joined Benac and D1 Commissioner Priscilla Trace, who’d managed to beat a developer stooge in 2016, to insist that Coryea, a deputy county administrator with a 30-year career within the administration and by far the most qualified candidate, be hired.

Jonsson and Servia initially resisted, voting against her in a preliminary vote, but when the final vote came up, and it was clear where it was headed, they joined in making it unanimous. That’s when developers went scorched earth. In 2020, Big Development backed Kevin Van Ostenbridge (running against Matt Bower) in D3, George Kruse (running against Hunzeker), James Satcher (running against Trace), and the reelection of Baugh. They spent big, played dirty, and swept the races. They had a solid majority, with just Whitmore, Bellamy, and Servia remaining to offer any modicum of resistance, which was fairly minimal.

Initially, George Kruse resisted the effort to fire Coryea, and the motion failed 4-3, but only until the developer faction outsmarted Kruse, who was having a semi-public extramarital affair and drinking heavily, convincing him that she and Carol Whitmore were conspiring against him. Kruse flip-flopped; Coryea was gone; a mass exodus of institutional knowledge followed; and the county has been going downhill ever since. To say that the top tier of Manatee County Government is a hollow shell in comparison to what Kruse and company inherited would be a massive understatement.

Kruse crashed his pickup truck into a tree around the time he was starting to question some of the policies the development cabal was pushing, and soon he was on the outs with Van Ostenbridge and company, but not before campaigning for developer-sponsored, Pedicini-run candidates Amanda Ballard and Mike Rahn, who got on the board along with Jason Bearden in 2022.

Kruse voted against the wetland policy and impact fees ahead of the 2024 election, which saw Van Ostenbridge run an unsuccessful developer-backed campaign against him for the countywide District 7 seat. But if Coryea had not been fired and Ballard and Rahn not been added in 2024, Manatee County would almost certainly not be facing its current inability to reverse those decisions, a feat that was achieved by state-level preemption bills passed by Florida Senator Jim Boyd, Rep. Will Robinson, and, most of all, Rep. Bill Conerly, another candidate supported by Kruse.

This time out, Kruse is once again supporting Rahn and Ballard as they seek another term in what is increasingly looking like more of a battle between who gets rendered irrelevant, Kruse or D5 Commissioner Bob McCann, who has been taking the lead in the sustainable growth wing of the party. The impressively credentialed field consists of a bunch of business-as-usual pro-growth candidates and several less-polished candidates from the citizen-activist community who, Kruse says, would rather “burn it all down.”

McCann has backed citizen activist Liz Arnold in the D1 Republican primary to replace the late Carol Felts; his former aide, Ed Bailey, in the D2 Republican primary against Ballard; and citizen activist Glenn Gibelina in the D4 Republican primary against Rahn. In the wide-open District 6 Republican primary, Kruse has backed Congressman Vern Buchanan’s district chief of staff, Tara Poulton, while McCann has backed businessman John Calovich.

TBT has endorsed Arnold in D1, Bailey in D2, Gibelina in D4, and former Manatee County Utilities Division Manager Ed Ference in D6. We’ve also endorsed retired Coast Guard CWO John Phillips in his Republican primary against Rep. Conerly and Melton Little in the Republican primary for the seat being vacated by Robinson. Boyd is unopposed in his primary. 

It is unclear whether any of this can reverse the enormous damage that began with Coryea’s ousting and the establishment of the bulletproof developer majority in 2022. What is certain, however, is that Manatee County cannot afford even two more years of the status quo with a board and administration that has allowed Big Development to continue picking the bones of a community it has all but laid to waste.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of our weekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County government since 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Click here for his bio. Mitch's new novel, Fish Kill, is currently available here, along with his previous books. He can be reached at editor@thebradentontimes.com.