We are pleased to provide our readers with The Bradenton Times’ primary endorsements for the Manatee County Commission and Supervisor of Elections. Going forward, we will shift our focus to Manatee County School Board and Property Appraiser.
We believe that the current Manatee County Commission, under the direction of Kevin Van Ostenbridge, has been the most destructive board in Manatee County’s history. It has been singularly focused on cloaking itself in right-wing rhetoric while doing the bidding of the rich and powerful developers who have bought them their seats. We fear that if this dynamic continues, our community will suffer irreversible damage, leading to a lower quality of life for residents on several fronts.
There is a clear difference between the candidates in each race we have analyzed. They are either on team Big Development, where developers pour money into their campaigns and dark money PACs do the dirty work and attempt to cloud the issues by focusing on national hot-button talking points, or they are running a grassroots campaign focused on the real issues affecting Manatee County residents.
Manatee County’s population has exploded in recent years, and developers are counting on the manipulation of low-information voters, many of whom are new to our county, to turn out based on rhetoric and ultimately outnumber the engaged citizens who understand the game that is being played and are impervious to such bush league strategies.
We are encouraged at the amount of citizen engagement that we have seen in this cycle and are optimistic that the number of citizens who have invested the time and effort to research the candidates will reach a critical mass in this year's elections. If you are reading this column, you are almost certainly among them. However, we encourage you to think of those in your circle who might benefit from our analyses and forward them today's email or this link to our endorsements.
The Manatee Herald, a developer mouthpiece propaganda site that promotes low-brow developer narratives, recently ran this column. While we typically do not like to give oxygen to such sites, I believe it is instructive as to how desperate the development cabal has become and just how stupid they think Manatee County voters, particularly their fellow Republicans, actually are. I suppose when you have run a con on a community for so long, you get to a point where it becomes impossible to construct a coherent argument, and you become a mere caricature of yourself. A developer-funded PAC disguising itself as the "Make America Great Again PAC" recently issued its endorsements. We are proud to inform you that they are the exact opposite of those issued by TBT in every race.
Manatee County is a unique community with vast environmental resources, which is precisely why many of us are here. But such places require balance, and that principle has been sacrificed for too long in the name of padding developers' already considerable profits. The time to take our county back is now. We need all hands on deck because the long-term damage that will be done by policies created in the next two years by a board similar to this one will ultimately render our slice of paradise unrecognizable.
Mitch Maley
Editor in Chief
The Bradenton Times
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. His 2016 short story collection, Casting Shadows, was recently reissued and is available here.
