Commissioners Delay Interim Administrator Vote

At Tuesday’s meeting, Big Development’s plan to install one of its lobbyists as our "interim" county administrator hit a snag when the county commission was presented with a contract so brazen that even a board choc-full of developer-installed commissioners agreed to hit the pause button, if only momentarily.

At last Tuesday’s meeting, Commissioner/developer flunkie Mike Rahn surprised many when he suddenly moved to initiate negotiations with Jon Mast in order to make Mast the new "interim" county administrator. Mr. Mast is the CEO of the Manatee-Sarasota Building Industry Association, a pro-developer group that Rahn himself was once president of.

The twist was that the county had already tapped Neighborhood Services Director Lee Washington for the gig while initiating a national search to find a full-time replacement for Scott Hopes after his relationship with a majority of commissioners had soured. By all accounts (even that of the commissioners themselves), Washington had been doing a stellar job, and he truly did seem to be repairing much of the damage to employee morale done by the egomaniacal Hopes.

Suddenly, however, a slim majority of the board began complaining about a lack of communication on his behalf and got behind Rahn’s motion, which passed 6-1, with only Commissioner George Kruse dissenting. Kruse expressed utter disbelief that the board would want to replace a high-performing interim with someone else, just months before it was to hire a full-time candidate and during the creation of the next county budget, to boot.

Kruse’s case fell completely on deaf ears and the other six commissioners authorized County Attorney Bill Clague to bring back options to the board, most of whom wished to have a hand in crafting the details of whatever resolution was created. This took place after it was first suggested that the chair be involved in negotiations, and it should be noted that infighting among commissioners saw Van Ostenbridge replaced by Commissioner Vanessa Baugh as chair via a 4-3 vote in the same meeting, only to see him reinstalled two days later.

Commissioners Jason Bearden, James Satcher, and Baugh have steadily complained that Van Ostenbridge is too hands-on with top administrators, while they are rarely aware of plans that are being put in motion before it is too late in the game to have effective input. That said, given Clague’s performance in "negotiating" an interim contract with Sarasota County Commissioner Charles Hines after the board fired Cheri Coryea at the behest of developers in 2021, the board should not have been surprised by what was presented Tuesday.

To be fair to Clague, despite the direction he was given by the board last week, he opened the item by essentially telling commissioners that the contract before them was not really negotiated at all and that the board could either approve of it or seek to alter it, as Mast was present in the chambers during the meeting. The proposed contract called for Mast to make a whopping $225,000 base salary, considerably more than any previous administrator had earned, along with a number of goodies, including a $600-a-month car allowance.

The associated resolution also called for Mast to be given the job of deputy county administrator, should the board hire someone else as the full-time administrator in the future. What’s more, the contract wouldn’t be effective for another month, meaning Washington would have to continue as a lame duck, while the amount of time between Mast coming onboard and the July timeframe in which commissioners were to be selecting a finalist among candidates for the permanent job would be shrunken considerably.

Once again, it was only Kruse who sounded the alarm. The commissioner said that while he still couldn’t understand why the board would want to put itself in such a position in the first place, the exorbitant salary meant that any potential candidate the board wished to hire would be likely to use the interim’s compensation as a starting point in negotiations.

Kruse was also dismayed by the clause that would essentially force a new administrator to accept the current one as a top deputy, a prerogative that is supposed to belong to the administrators themselves. The commissioner went so far as to say that he believed the tactics were being used to ensure that the board would not be able to find an acceptable candidate and default to Mast even if it ultimately went through with the national search.

No other commissioners offered any serious friction, but after a cadre of right-wing supporters dressed the board down during public comment on the item, no one made a motion to approve the contract. Instead, Kruse, who said he would remain in opposition, moved to have Commissioner Bearden, who he saw as the most "down to middle" in terms of support for Mast, be allowed to join Clague in negotiations.

That motion passed unanimously and part of me honestly wondered whether Kruse might be hoping that a couple of hours of Bearden barking incomprehensible word salad at Mast might be enough to inspire the latter to withdraw his candidacy. For Bearden’s part, he apparently has already engaged Mast, as he noted Tuesday, and seemed perplexingly impressed by the fact that Mast has a master’s degree in public administration, which is the very least you would expect of someone being brought in from the outside to be the top administrator of a county of over 420,000 people.

For deeper insight into Bearden’s concerns, I’ll quote him directly.

"I don’t feel our structure is aligned for this organization in order for the board of county commissioners to maximize the management going forward," said the commissioner. "Uhm, and when I had a discussion with Mr. Mast, that was one thing that we spoke about, was how are we going to reorganize the organization because, right now, how it's organized is not working. So with his expertise and him coming on board, one of the things he was gonna help with was the reorganization of the whole organization. What I mean by that is I look at things from a military standpoint, CO, XO, Company Commanders, so on, so that we can manage this process in a whole lot smoother whole lot better way. Right now, it's not working, I just want the public to know that. So, and if it's not working, guess what, it's costing us millions upon millions of dollars every day that we can't get this right. So that's why this is necessary, this is important for us to do this. So, with his expertise, having that MPA degree, he's gonna be able to help with that."

I apologize for putting you through that, but I didn’t think I could paraphrase the commissioner's words in a way that did them justice without seeming mean-spirited. However, I will note that I have no idea what he meant, how it is costing us "millions upon millions of dollars each day," under Washington, or how such pernicious bleeding would cease under Mast. The county doesn’t have commanding officers and executive officers, it has an administrator, deputy administrators, and department heads. And the last time the board's hand-selected guy set about a "reorganization," we lost an extraordinary amount of institutional knowledge that will take decades to replace, if it can be achieved at all.

Let’s get down to brass tacks and talk about what is really going on here, shall we? At the behest of the developers who actually run things, the county is in the process of rewriting much of its land use code and comprehensive development plan to make it easier and more profitable to develop homes, mostly at the expense of environmental protections. The first move was for Mast to send a list of suggestions to the county, through his organization. I’m referring here to the BIA white paper TBT has previously reported on.

The county has already brought some of them forward and it has done so under the misleading distinction of having been "county initiated," rather than from outside. However, some of the more egregious asks are said to be stalled amid opposition from staff. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to suspect that developers see installing one of their own in the very top spot as the path of least resistance, and we know from past reporting that this would not be the first time they sought to put an insider in the post.

As I wrote last month, Mast was widely said to be their choice and some insiders suggested he might come on as a deputy administrator first. Mere weeks later, a deputy administrator position was advertised and, indeed, Mast was said to be one of the applicants. However, that listing mysteriously disappeared with no notice of anyone being hired. TBT has now confirmed through multiple sources with firsthand knowledge of the events that Lee Washington had directed the post to be closed and that Commissioner Vanessa Baugh, Mast’s most ardent supporter and whose husband sits on the BIA board, was livid that Washington would make such a decision without being told to. Baugh was even said to have demanded Washington's resignation.

If you’re thinking that the board is only empowered to hire the administrator and county attorney, that all other hires are the purview of the administrator, and that individual commissioners have no authority whatsoever to direct staff, including the administrator, you are not wrong. However, there is a reason the board leapfrogged a veterans services coordinator who had only recently ascended to a department head into the interim administrator post, and that reason is likely that they believed he would be so overwhelmed that it would leave him very open to suggestions.

Now, only Mr. Washington knows why he closed out the deputy administrator posting, but if he did it because he saw that the fix was in and put duty and ethics ahead of pressure from above, then I tip my hat to him and only wish there were more people in leadership positions who were willing to do so, despite the considerable cost.

On Tuesday, once again much was made of the fact that county administrators have to reside in the county where they are employed and that Mast’s wife is running for county commission in Sarasota and would have to reside there if she wins. Truthfully, I don’t know whether the plan is to try and weasel Mast into the spot despite having promised a national search–exactly as the board did with Hopes–or as Rahn seemed to suggest in a "saying the quiet part out loud" moment on Tuesday, the county just needs his expertise as it rewrites the land development code and comp plan, after which he'll land softly in a deputy administrator position that, after a "reorganization," will undoubtedly include supervision of all development-related departments.

On the one hand, how hard would it be for a couple making the kind of money we would be talking about to simply maintain a second address, which is all that would technically be required? On the other, considering the scope and audacity of what developers are asking for and the potential benefit it would bring to their bottom lines for decades to come, I could definitely see it being worth their while to get their guy in for the short-term to make sure it all gets rammed through before the board settles on a permanent administrator. Also, it’s not like the board couldn’t drag its feet a bit.

As for Kruse’s suggestion that it simply be put in Mast’s interim contract that he could not apply for the permanent post, which Bearden said he agreed with, I seem to recall Clague counseling the board against such a prohibition when some commissioners asked that such a clause be included both when Hopes and Hines were being considered as interim administrators previously.

Among all of the weird scenes at Tuesday’s meeting, it was quite interesting to watch the far-right-wing MAGA crowd bending itself into pretzels whilegently chastising their beloved commissioners for acting so not conservative yet again. The mental gymnastics that those who needed only to hear about the tyranny of mask mandates and curfews, the glory of guns, the virtue of confederate monuments, and other empty rhetorical talking points during the elections were doing were as impressive as any physical gymnastics I’ve seen at the highest level of the sport.

Is this what it looks like when the wheels start to come off? Is this what happens when the cognitive dissonance gets so great that it begins to fry mental circuits? Or will it simply take a few left-wing boogieman arguments and MAGA mouth sounds to get everyone back in line, licking the same well-polished boots?

At some point, Republicans in Manatee County are going to have to face up to the fact that they’ve been duped, that the same crowd that was railing against the influence of Big Development following the Tea Party wave of 2010 has ironically been coopted into one of its tools for the mere cost of so many glossy mailers and vile attack ads. They'll need to dust themselves off, realize that we all make mistakes, and decide that anyone who rides into a primary flush with developer cash is just going to give them more of the same. Otherwise, we’ll get more of the same until there is nothing left of Manatee County but a decaying husk of what used to be paradise.

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 4th novel, Burn Black Wall Street Burn, was recently released and is availablehere.