For Mayor of Bradenton, We Recommend Bill Sanders

The mayoral race for the City of Bradenton features incumbent Gene Brown and former City Councilman Bill Sanders.

Brown was elected mayor in 2020 after being elected to the Bradenton City Council in 2018 (he had been appointed to fill a vacancy two years prior). Brown has received six-figure funding from various business interests, including developers in both mayoral campaigns.

Under Brown’s leadership, the city has endured several scandals, including multiple whistleblower complaints within the Bradenton Police Department. Its overwhelmed treatment plant has led to sewage being spewed into local waterways at disturbingly regular intervals.

An attempt to quietly push through a highly questionable sale of city hall in a troublingly opaque manner was thwarted. Still, the eventual process raised questions about whether residents are getting the best possible value in the sale and subsequent development of new facilities.

Under previous leadership, construction companies routinely complained that one politically connected developer always got the city’s contracts. Under Brown’s administration, NDC Construction has continued to thrive, and its principals have been generous to Brown’s campaigns.

As a councilman, Sanders raised these issues in an admirable attempt to disrupt the good old boy club that has long dominated the City of Bradenton's politics as well as its spoils. For his efforts, he was ostracized by the administration and suffered a well-coordinated defamation campaign that helped ensure he lost his seat in 2020.

In the time since, Sanders has been a dogged public activist, regularly attending city council meetings to give voice to the opposition. We admire his commitment to effecting change as well as the fact that he’s been willing to put a considerable amount of his own money into a campaign to be competitive with the special interest backing Brown has received.

If elected, Sanders could not single-handedly curb a board whose majority will not change, as only one of the five seats is being contested in this cycle. However, we feel that he would be better positioned to inform the public of what the council is up to, and that might be enough to get at least some of its members to be better stewards of the public’s trust.