New BOCC Should Demand Accountability on Previous Wetland Action

In this week's podcast, my colleague Dawn Kitterman and I discussed the ongoing reversal of the previous Manatee County Commission's effort to gut wetland protections. While we were grateful that last year's elections made this critical reversal possible, we agreed that the community deserves an outside audit of the process and possible corruption that led to such an egregious abuse of public trust by both elected and unelected officials.

Over the past two years, Mrs. Kitterman and I have spent enormous amounts of time and energy bringing this issue to the community's attention. It was often with tremendous frustration and even abject anger that we worked to correct a veritable onslaught of misinformation flowing from both official and unofficial channels. While public records shed some light on the flow of directives, there remains considerable mystery as to who was pulling which strings.

Along with much of the public, we got the distinct impression that the matter was driven by the development community, despite being advertised as county-initiated, especially since one particular developer had already unsuccessfully sued the county over its existing policies on multiple occasions. The BIA “white paper” gave additional credence to these pressures.

When the county announced that an outside consultant would be giving the presentation and recommendations to staff, and it turned out to be the same “consultant” used by the developer in an unsuccessful challenge, one could certainly be forgiven for drawing what seem to be obvious conclusions. That said, the public deserves to know, in as much detail as possible, how that was allowed to happen.

It has become painfully clear that developers who pour enormous sums of money into county commission races tend to find those commissioners especially receptive to their desires on development issues, even when they clearly run contrary to the community's best interests. In fact, the county was required to demonstrate an overriding public benefit to reducing buffer requirements. It didn’t even attempt to do so, which was the impetus for TBT Publisher Joe McClash’s since-withdrawn legal challenge.

Legally, a county commissioner does not have the authority to direct staff. However, evidence in other instances suggests that this occurred under the last board. We have also seen evidence to suggest that certain developers enjoyed influence over high-ranking members of county staff, receiving preferential treatment in terms of both the ability to get things done quickly and to obtain exceptions to established policies.

What we don’t know is what role individual commissioners and staff members played in terms of carrying out an initiative that was clearly sought by developers while being opposed by just about every citizen who was not feeding from the trough of Big Development. The public deserves an answer to the following question: What were the roles of County Administrator Charlie Bishop, Deputy Administrator Courtney De Pol, and Director of Development Services Nicole Knapp in taking the highly unorthodox route of sidelining county-employed experts in the Environmental Planning Section in favor of a much less qualified consultant who then recommended an outcome based on the same argument he made in a developer’s unsuccessful legal challenge? If they were receiving undue pressure to perform said actions, we should know from whom it originated.

Was this a case of one rogue commissioner acting as de facto administrator with the backing of a powerful special interest, as some assumed? Or were these county officials, each of whom had been hired or promoted to top-level leadership under that board, receiving their marching orders from elsewhere? We will only find out through an outside audit conducted by a qualified, impartial third party with access to internal communications and the ability to interview pertinent parties.

It may be tempting for the new board to let sleeping dogs lie and just focus on moving forward. However, the public has already borne significant costs and, as we noted Wednesday, will likely foot the bill for more legal challenges that are likely to follow the policy’s reversal. They deserve answers to how and why this happened, and only the board can instigate accountability once those answers are known. What’s more, the county staff who were not allowed to do the job for which they were hired after accumulating significant education and expertise also deserve answers.

Additionally, if high-ranking officials earning significant taxpayer-funded salaries are shown to have been working for someone or something other than the community's best interest, they should be sent to the public sector, where that won’t be a problem. If they were indeed hired and/or promoted because of their perceived pliability or allegiances, the public would not be best served by such figures remaining at the helm as stewards of public resources. Rectifying this massive failure has taken too long, cost too much, and is too important to maintain to allow our opportunity to take a more complete corrective action to pass.

This community is always just one election away from swinging back to the time when Big Development's influence was dominant in terms of setting public policy. Every possible step to prevent that from happening must be undertaken. This is a time for true leadership, which often includes taking uncomfortable but necessary action. 

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. Mitch is also the author of three novels and a short story collection available here.