"The Manatee County rumor mill has been a flutter with whisperings over who will be the next county administrator, and several well-placed sources now claim that Manatee-Sarasota Building Industry Association CEO Jon Mast is the odds-on favorite for the position, possibly coming on as a deputy county administrator in the immediate future."
That was the opening paragraph of a column I wrote just four weeks ago. At the time, at least two Manatee County Commissioners–Mike Rahn and Vanessa Baugh–scoffed at the suggestion. At Tuesday's meeting, Rahn shocked at least one of his fellow Republican board members when, completely out of the blue during commissioner comments, he motioned to direct the county attorney and board chair to begin negotiations with Mast to replace Lee Washington as the interim county administrator.
Washington, who had previously served as the Director of Neighborhood Services, was voted into the position in early February when the board very suddenly decided to part ways with Scott Hopes. Commissioner George Kruse said that he has been nothing but impressed by the job Washington has done and correctly noted that the rest of the board had been falling over themselves to compliment the Marine Corps veteran since he assumed the position.
And they were correct. Despite lacking the qualifications for the position, Washington was an enormous improvement over Hopes and had begun to restore some of the morale that had been decimated under his tyrannical reign. However, Kruse knows all too well that the selection of top county staff under this board has nothing to do with job performance or qualifications.
Like the selection of the commissioners themselves, it has only to do with appeasing the developers who run the county. As TBT recently reported, Mast’s BIA is currently lobbying the county to make a number of changes to its comprehensive land use plan and land development code that would pad developers’ bottom line at the grave expense of our local environmental resources.
Once content to merely run the board and trust commissioners to get things done within the administration, the cabal of developers that own our local government no longer leave such things to chance. Kruse knows this all too well, as he was the one who provided the swing vote to firethe very competent Cheri Coryea as administrator once developers managed to get a solid majority of commissioners who would do as they were told.
Putting Mast in the top job where he will be surrounded by nothing but developer-friendly faces in deputy administrator positions would make it all too easy to ram through a giant wishlist of seismic changes to development rules. Kruse also asked what would be the point of onboarding a new "interim" when the county is already engaged in a national search to find a permanent replacement for Hopes, for which they are to receive a list of finalists in early July.
Well, most likely, it is because the plan was always to find a way to get Mast into the permanent position. Yes, he lives in Sarasota County where his wife Teresa is running for county commission in 2024. Yes, she looks like a clear favorite after using the couple’s development connections to already amass a whopping $180,000 in her campaign account (including several contributions from Manatee County Commissioners). And yes, county administrators must establish residence in a county shortly after being hired while commissioners must do the same in the county they serve, but it is not implausible that the couple could establish a second address in Manatee.
That said, the plan could also be to delay the administrator search so that Mast can oversee as many changes as possible in a short period of time. Either way, developers, who had previously made it clear that they had preferred someone from their industry to Hopes, will get their collective wish. And to understand exactly how incestuous this move is, consider that Commissioner Rahn is the former president of the BIA and is listed on their website as a "Life Director," while Commissioner Vanessa Baugh’s husband is a current board member. And until he got arrested for two DUIs in just over a month, Commissioner Amanda Ballard’s husband was Mast’s number two and was rumored to take over as CEO when he left for the county.
If the white paper isn’t enough of a preview as to what we might expect in the near future, some commissioners hinted during a presentation at Tuesday’s meeting that we can expect them to trot out the same old lame and tired nonsense as to why the county should slash developer impact fees–for the good of the community, mind you, not to pad their sugar daddies' profits.
The only thing that may gum up the machine is the incessant infighting among the commissioners themselves. At Tuesday’s meeting, commissioners Jason Bearden, James Satcher, Ballard, and Baugh successfully removed Kevin Van Ostenbridge as chair, installing Baugh as his replacement. Now, they had some good points, to be sure. There is much to suggest that Van Ostenbridge has been having a lot of communication with the upper administration, giving him a considerable advantage over his fellow commissioners in terms of crafting policy and that was the chief complaint issued on Tuesday.
That said, appointing someone who just admitted to corruptly abusing her power in order to benefit herself during the early days of COVID vaccinations, a person that this community had been calling on the board to remove as chair for nearly a year, is not a good look. But, this is Manatee County where, when county commissioners cry out mirror, mirror on the wall, they apparently see something much different than the disgraceful laughing stock that the rest of us are subjected to.
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.
