Yes, It's "Remarkably Bad

At Tuesday’s Manatee County Commission meeting, an IT update broke out into a discussion on the county’s woeful performance regarding public records that then went down a convoluted rabbit hole regarding the possible internal destruction of data related to queries on commissioners and top administrators. In other words, it was par for the course.

The issue was first raised during commissioner comments at the May 10 board meeting when Commissioner Carol Whitmore asked that the matter be investigated. Apparently, someone on the 9th floor had been running queries on emails of various officials and employees, including Whitmore, County Administrator Scott Hopes, and former County Administrator Cheri Coryea but deleted the files that contained the queries and what they yielded.

Hopes acknowledged as much and said that it was being looked into. However, Commissioner Vanessa Baugh, who seemed particularly interested in the matter, said that she assumed IT had "taken it as far as they could," which Hopes also confirmed, suggesting that we may never learn who was snooping for what before covering their tracks.

The matter came back up in Tuesday’s meeting, which included an update from the IT department, which has a new director who was apparently working for the firm that was conducting an audit on the county’s IT infrastructure before being hired away to lead the department. The presentation highlighted changes to the processing of public records that had been made with Hopes celebrating the rapid turnaround that IT’s new role in the process had created.

However, it quickly shifted when Whitmore brought up the disconnect between the less than half-day turnaround time being advertised and the widespread public disagreement from people who were suffering much longer wait times. Whitmore also noted a recent lawsuit the county lost, in which a very clear violation of Florida Sunshine laws by way of not complying with record requests in a complete and timely manner was demonstrated.

Hopes explained that the IT turnaround time did not account for what transpires after they do the work on their end, which includes redacting non-public information and, based on our experience as a publication that has been relentlessly stymied on such requests, likely involves gatekeepers sitting on their hands, slow walking reporters, and generally going out of their way to ensure that public records–particularly those which may not cast the county administration in a positive light–are not accessible in a timeframe that can properly serve the public.

This was most clear when emails we did manage to access through the Clerk of the Courts office showed Commissioner Baugh and the county’s record manager, Debbie Scaccianoce, attempting to track down exactly how our publication got ahold of an email that was part of a public record request they had not fulfilled.

Scaccianoce emailed Michael Gallen, who works in the Clerk’s office, and asked the following:

"Did the Clerk’s office release a copy of Lisa Wenzel’s resignation letter to the Bradenton Times? In her article she stated she obtained it via a Public Records Request, my office did not release it. She canceled her request with me and stated she already received it from another source."

Gallen answered that they had fulfilled the request and presumably told his boss, Clerk of the Courts Angel Colonneso, who emailed Hopes to make it clear that her employees comply with records requests as per statute. Hopes responded that he had not had any conversations with his employees about the matter. However, Baugh emailed Colonneso acknowledging:

"... I called Michael Gallen to ask if you had received a request. I was very interested because we did not send it so I was trying to determine who did."

First, there is no "we" that involves a county commissioner and a request for public records to the county. It is nowhere within an elected official’s purview to involve themselves in such matters which are purely administrative and in no way legislative. More importantly, it is not up to anyone to decide whether it is politically convenient to expedite the fulfillment of such requests. The law makes that part perfectly clear.

There are indeed many reasons that the county would want both the press and the public to have access only to a limited flow of information that they themselves control after assessing the optics of what those records might contain, which is, in fact, the essence of the law’s necessity in informing the public. It's certainly easier to just use your own platforms to tell everyone what a grand job you're doing on all fronts and then tar anything that contradicts it as fake news.

In reality, ever since the developers who bought a seat for a majority of commissioners used their leverage to have a competent county administrator fired, an onslaught of additional firings and resignations have ensued. The goal seems to be to get rid of anyone who has even distal ties to former administrator and Carlos Beruff nemesis Ed Hunzeker, and the toxic work environment that has been described by countless employees has helped prompt an unprecedented exodus from those who either see the writing on the wall or just can’t take the rotten ambiance any longer.

That, however, does not comport with the thank god we’re here, everything smells like roses rundown that people like Hopes and Baugh are trying to foist onto a public that has grown beyond skeptical. But as much as they would like to handle this like a private company whose public information office is a PR firm, this is not a private sector enterprise. It is a massive public bureaucracy with more than 2,000 employees in a state with strong government in the sunshine laws. In other words, the ability to control the messaging is limited, to say the very least.

As a result of all this chaos, institutional knowledge is disappearing from county departments faster than you can say Harry Houdini, and replacements are quitting soon after they arrive–in at least one case–before they even came on the job. The ax is rumored to be over the heads of more directors tied to the past two administrations as I type, and the continued "reorganization" seems like little more than an effort to create a top-down bureaucracy that one person of dubious qualifications can completely control.

In the current state of affairs, the most difficult aspect is determining what is a matter of malfeasance and what is a matter of incompetence, although, in the end, I suppose there isn’t really a difference that matters. Given the state of the multiple crises we face, the county needs qualified leadership and representatives of the public more than any time I can remember. Instead, we have this clown car full of keystone cops performing bad burlesque. Everyone who pays attention wants to throw them out on their cans, but far more people vote than pay attention.