A Slap on the Wrist for Baugh

On Friday, the Florida Commission on Ethics approved a negotiated settlement with Manatee County Commissioner Vanessa Baugh who admitted to corruptly abusing her authority in directing staff to rig a COVID vaccine lottery to benefit herself, some of her constituents, and some of her supporters. She was fined and censured, but the commission stopped short of recommending she be removed from office. If Baugh had any ethics of her own, she would resign. Spoiler alert: she doesn’t and she will not.

Anyone who follows the Manatee County Commission has no doubt heard Baugh go on and on for nearly two years now about how she cannot wait to have her day in court where the truth would come out and she would be vindicated. Well, the truth is out and it reads exactly as we suspected. Baugh, at the height of the pandemic, directed staff to ignore a county policy that dictated vaccine distribution would be given to those who were eligible at that time via a countywide lottery, and instead limit the lottery to just two zip codes in her district.

If that weren’t bad enough, the two zip codes were the whitest in the county and among the three wealthiest. Adding insult to injury, Baugh created a list of five citizens, herself among them, who were to be jumped to the front of the line without even entering the lottery. The commissioner likes to point out that neither she nor the other four actually got vaccinated at the pop-up clinic in question, leaving out the fact that the so-called VIP list had been discovered prior to the event, leaving her no choice by that point.

Humans make mistakes, and there are times when a public official’s misdeeds evoke a complicated reaction in which one has to wonder whether the greater good is served by atonement, lest we wind up with someone less competent or effective in their stead. This is not one of those times. In addition to proving herself to be utterly vacant of integrity, Baugh has consistently shown herself to be, at best, a neophyte when it comes to public policy, despite being the most senior member of the board. In other words, it is difficult to imagine getting something worse than the combination of corrupt and inept that currently represents District 5.

If you are wondering whether the other six members of the board are going to urge Baugh to do the right thing and step down, if only for the sake of the public’s faith in our local government, don’t. As an incumbent, Commissioner Baugh was a very vocal supporter of each of the other six members, all of whom share the same deep-pocketed benefactors and political consultant.

This includes the current chair, Baugh’s self-proclaimed "good buddy," Kevin Van Ostenbridge, who is currently on probation for stealing property from one of his constituents, and George Kruse, who is fighting a blatant drunk driving charge and once used time at a public meeting to discuss an extramarital affair before flipping his vote in order to fire a highly-qualified county administrator and, in doing so, single-handedly delivered Manatee County the hapless Scott Hopes. Thanks a lot, George.

That still leaves a majority of commissioners, but again, they share the same bosses (and I’m not talking about the taxpayers). Besides, they are quite busy in their effort to become the first community in the United States to take down a monument to the Confederacy and all it stood for–and then put it back up. Of course, Governor DeSantis could still remove Baugh from office, even without the ethics commission’s recommendation, but I don’t think we shall see the governor rooting out Republican corruption while he’s busy waging his war on books and drag queen brunches, both of which are integral to his prospective presidential run.

No, it seems as if this is the government we are stuck with, at least for the foreseeable future. If anything, the leniency being shown to these derelicts is likely only to embolden them to dig further into the depths of depravity. Indeed, it may only be once the bulls have broken every last piece in the china shop and the shards are swept away that we can once again walk easy in Manatee County, where justice seems as rare as snow.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County governmentsince 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University, where he earned a degree in Government. He later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Clickherefor his bio. Dennis' latest novel, Sacred Hearts, is availablehere.