The road to ruin is paved with partisanship

As someone who has analyzed public policy in Manatee County for a long time, one of my biggest frustrations is the ongoing disconnect between voters' expressed concerns and their voting behavior. 

The complaints I hear most often regard the rampant overdevelopment of our community, the impacts unchecked growth has had on flooding, the inability of infrastructure to keep pace with growth, and red tide, green algae, and other environmental degradations associated with a developer-driven approach to planning. 

Yet, year in, year out, those same voters get caught up in the partisan horse race that even the most local elections have become and consistently wind up electing or even re-electing developer-sponsored candidates who are going to reliably cast votes that make all of those issues worse. 

Of course, the 2024 primaries were the only exception in recent years. Pushed over the edge by the developer-driven plan to end local wetland protections, voters tuned in and threw out every Manatee County Commission candidate on the ballot who voted for the destructive decision.

When it came to the state legislature, however, those same voters sent a delegation of developer-backed candidates to Tallahassee, where they promptly backed a bunch of preemption bills to prevent the new board from implementing the will of the people. 

This cycle, voters in Manatee County expressed little concern for either dynamic. In Manatee County Commission District 1, which had been without representation for nearly a year on two occasions since 2024, voters lifted grassroots, smart-growth activist Liz Arnold through a crowded Republican primary, despite developer-funded attack campaigns. But voters in Districts 2, 4, and 6 roundly rejected proven smart-growth candidates in the Republican primary, choosing incumbents in 2 and 4 who had a long history of doing the bidding of builders and a candidate backed by many of the same interests in 6.

Given a second chance on Tuesday, with two smart-growth candidates on the Democratic ticket, District 2 and 6 voters again stuck with the developer-backed status quo. And while Republicans had two smart-growth candidates to choose from in the two state house primaries in August, the big-money-backed developer puppets easily fended them off with the usual assortment of expensive campaign ads and PAC attacks. And if voters in deep red Manatee County weren't taking smart growth Republicans, it was easy to predict that the Democratic candidates would go down in flames like they did on Tuesday.

The bottom line is that this election cycle offered plenty of opportunities to move away from the status quo that nearly everyone seems to be decrying, yet whoever raised the most money as a Republican won every race except Arnold's. When the people who have the deepest pockets can reliably count on that sort of blind partisan allegiance and easily distract those voters with culture war nonsense that has nothing to do with the offices being contested, it's easy pickings.

The impacts of unchecked growth we are experiencing today are the result of votes cast 10-15 years ago. We haven't even begun to see the impact of the free-for-all that began in 2020. In ten more years, when this county is all but unrecognizable, it will be because of the votes we've collectively cast since.

They say that you don't always get the government you want, but you usually get the one you deserve. For many of us, unfortunately, that will mean a community whose environmental beauty and overall sustainability continue to be degraded for the sake of someone filthy rich, politically powerful builder's bottom line.

The road to any sort of meaningful rehabilitation would still have been long, arduous, and uncertain at this point, even if each critical race had turned out differently. The road to ruin, however, now seems to be the only road in Manatee County where things are likely to move at a brisk pace.

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's new novel, Fish Kill, is currently available here, along with his previous books. He can be reached at editor@thebradentontimes.com.