Colon has Work Cut Out for Him on Manatee School Board

It took Florida Governor Rick Scott long enough to appoint someone to the Manatee County School Board vacancy created by the passing of Mary Cantrell, and when he did, the selection wound up being no surprise. John Colon, who was the front-runner from the outset, was sworn in ahead of Tuesday's meeting and will need to get up to speed quickly if he's going to have a meaningful impact on the oft-troubled board.

Colon, who lost to Vanessa Baugh in a bid for the east county district's BOCC seat in 2012, is a politically-connected Republican who lives in the district and had managed to secure an appointment from the governor to the State Board of Education.

Governor Scott's two biggest political allies in Manatee County are developers Pat Neal (Neal Communities) and Carlos Beruff (Medallion Homes), and the word through the political grapevine from the get-go was that both favored Colon as the appointee. It didn't take much guesswork to figure that if one of the nearly two dozen applicants vying for the temporary appointment had both home builders in their corner, they would get the seat.

This is despite the fact that Julie Aranibar, who held the seat from 2010-14 and was the candidate who had received the most support from voters in the district in the last election, was also a loyal member of the governor's party and an applicant for the appointment. Given the school district's shaky condition and the board's utter dysfunction, appointing an experienced veteran who was instrumental in what little meaningful reform the district's been able to achieve in recent years should have been an easy choice.

Governor Scott, however, has a long history of making political appointments by purely political means and rarely seems to consider qualifications or experience. For proof, look no further than Beruff's recent appointment to Scott's "commission on healthcare and hospital funding.“

Then again, maybe I shouldn't single Beruff out, as none of the governor's nine appointments to the commission that was to generate ideas on how to break the legislative stalemate on indigent health care had any discernible experience or expertise on the subject. In Scott's world, it seems as though anyone who's made a ton of money and has the good sense to break him off a sizable chunk at campaign time must be inherently smart enough to solve any problem that comes along.

That doesn't mean Colon is a stooge. In fact, unlike many other issues, when it comes to schools, the interests of builders like Neal and Beruff are naturally aligned with most taxpayers (with the exception being school impact fees, of course). A school district that tends to see its dysfunction splattered across the front page doesn't do much for the glossy brochures of their master-planned communities. In short, the Manatee County School District has not been helping them sell homes in recent years, and I imagine they'd like to see that change (though not at the expense of school impact fees and higher property taxes, if it can be helped of course).

In 2012, Colon was clearly the better-versed candidate when it came to county commission issues. He couldn't come close to raising as much money as the retail jeweler and lost a close primary that was the gateway to the heavily Republican-leaning district's seat (Baugh went on to beat former Bradenton City Councilman James Golden by 30 points in the general election). Colon demonstrated a good grasp of the issues and a fairly run-of-the-mill, pro-business, Chamber of Commerce type platform.

Soon after, Colon was appointed to the State Board of Education. Sources close to Colon have told me that he was often embarrassed by the dysfunction displayed by his home county's school board and was not a fan of the direction it has taken in the last 9-12 months, which has seen the brief progress of 2013/14 mired down in political grudges, lawsuits and a near complete absence of focus on classroom-level issues.

Colon will have a very short time to learn a rather complex position. The seat he's temporarily filling will again be up for election next August, giving him less than a year to have an impact. During that period, the board will have to make great strides in order to win public trust ahead of a planned referendum next November, when the district says it will ask taxpayers to extend the half-cent sales tax for 15 more years, raise school district property taxes and accept hundreds of millions in additional debt to fund the construction of new schools.