"Right you are if you think you are", a play by the absurdest genre playwright Pirandello. I think Longboat Key politics have become a community theatre of the absurd.
Community center - the $10 million speculative adventure being proposed by Mayor Brown is encountering a fair amount of community opposition, despite claims by the mayor that "the community is behind" his project. Several taxpayers have pointed out that in these difficult economic times, the town needs to be fiscally responsible. The commission should propose a public fundraising option to build a communty center rather than proceed with using taxpayer funds.
There is no defensible reason not to follow the successful private fundraising efforts used to create the Anna Maria Island community center and Christ Church here on Longboat Key. We are in more difficult economic times than we were when the proposal to build a community center was rejected by a referendum several years ago. The community may once again reject the efforts of our activist mayor and his efforts to spend much needed public funds on this multi-million dollar project. We need to pay down debt, not create more public debt. I wonder what Mayor Brown thinks has changed?
Commercial real estate - the current activist commission is strongly advocating that the town radically change our building codes and Comprehensive Plan, to the extent that the commercially zoned land at the north and south ends of the island will become too juicy to be ignored by developers. We are making it easy for developers to build whatever they please, regardless of the ambience or desires of the resident taxpayers. The commission is planning to give developers public streets, too, as we did at the Conrad Beach development, a project that is still unfinished after more than a decade.
What is being ignored by the commission is all the taxpayers who live at the north and south ends. Does the commission actually believe that legislating a seven story condo-tel at Whitney Plaza will do anything but adversely affect the north end ambiance? Based on what empirical evidence? Have they asked the local residents what they want, instead of assuming what some developer would want? Hand picking a group of like-minded business people and residents to carry out some sort of phony study does not constitute anything but a violation of the public trust. The commission should be ashamed of itself.
It may be time to consider reigning in the practice of the commission of using appointed, unofficial, committees to formulate, and supposedly validate, radical departures form existing town policies. Essentially this is stealth government and should be unacceptable in any community.
Granted the residents of Longboat Key have exactly the government they were too uninvolved to elect. An appointed government has no incentive to be responsive to the people. In our particular case, Longboat voters and residents are so uninvolved in their own local destinies, that the current people in power are relatively sure that their regime will last for decades of appointment after appointment to the town commission and planning board. I believe that most residents have abandoned any interest in local politics. Perhaps what is happening is a natural process that occurs when the residents reach a certain age demographic and are only seasonal residents.
Increasingly, spending $18,000 on a local election, with the major newspaper, the real estate community, the Chamber of Commerce, PIC and the garden club behind the incumbent pro-business candidate, each for their own political ends, is a waste of taxpayer money. The development and business interests now own Longboat Key. The voters of the island appear not to care anymore and have abdicated their rightful role as an electorate. Instead, a few powerful special interest groups effectively control who gets to be on the commission and the planning and zoning board. They even decide who is today's town manager.
Most residents don't know what is really going on in town government. And many residents who vote get their information from a pro-business newspaper and PIC, a sham community organization. Uninterested ignorance prevails, while taxpayers passively accept a stalled real estate market, crippled by the uncertainty of the future of commercial tourism on the island. No one wants to invest in property that may be rendered worthless in a few years as a result of actions being undertaken by the current, predominantly appointed, activist town government.
I am sympathetic with the plight of our new town manager, who daily must live or die by a political sword in the hands of self-anointed, appointed, professed pro-development activists, who control both the town commission and the planning and zoning board. These appointees can have the town manager's head on any given day, as they have recently demonstrated, appointing 4 town managers in a month's time. A town manager can only be effective when allowed to function as a sort of technocrat. As far as I can see we no longer have a stable powerful town manager. That position has been superseded by a self-appointed, political, fairly radical clique within our community.
Ask yourself if your life and financial situation on Longboat Key is better or worse than when the current pro-business commission came into power 2 years ago.
Gene:
ReplyDeleteYour blog is certain thought provoking, although the particular thoughts it provokes are smothered in incredulity. You seem to have forgotten your own history as you write the following: "Granted the residents of Longboat Key have exactly the government they were too uninvolved to elect." I seem to recall that you yourself were elected to the Town Commission, and when your particular logic proved unconvincing, quit. While each of us may have our own definition of radical, given Florida's (onerous) Sunshine Laws and innumerable public hearings on each and every issue, it would seem most difficult for any type of clique to function.
You have been complimentary to me at times in the past, and I recognize your tirelessness and dedication to your ideas. However, it appears as if many of your ideas are formed raw and then hammered by you incessantly whether or not there are empirical facts to support them. Opinions are not facts, and those who differ with your opinions are not possession of "uninterested ignorance". Nor are they crippled, or passive.
If you, or your fellow denizens of page five of the Longboat Key News can not persuade by reason, logic, or facts, please do not cheapen your record of involvement by name-calling or demagoguery. Labeling those with different viewpoints as something they are not just muddies the waters of reasonable discussion, and turns those that do so into--dare I say it--a gadfly.
Your energy is admirable, I simply hope against hope it could be harnessed more positively.
I'll end where I began: you sought election, convinced a majority of voters, had a platform and an opportunity, and abandoned it. To try and reclaim that platform in this manner is a disservice to your record and to the community.
Terry Gans
Terry, thanks for taking the time and making the effort to comment on my current avocation as a political columnist, on the back pages, of what I consider to be the only local news outlet available to Longboat Key residents. I do appreciate your participation in the community conversation and I am also grateful to live in a free society where we are able to speak our minds with one another.
ReplyDeleteMy efforts in the LBK News are those of the "loyal opposition" and an attempt to get people to think about what is going on around them in their community. Mayor Brown speaks of inaccuracy in my writing. People read my column and ask me what are the nonfactual things the mayor accuses me of perpetrating. Specifics, supported by credible collaborative documentation would help everyone to better understand the mayor's accusations. I do try to be accurate. I do not need to dissemble as there is so much to talk about.
I am sure you understand that my main effort is not to chronicle the history of Longboat Key. I am a political commentator and observer. I am at times surprised by the number of people who stop me in Publix, at social event, on the street or in restaurants, to tell me how much that appreciate and like my writing and my ideas. Of course, having been a community activist for the past fifty-two years, I am well aware that to be outspoken is to encounter opposing views. I hope you do not think that I believe I have "the answer". I will disappoint some people and I hope to activate others to become part of the democratic process of free speech.
Now for your assessment of my intentions to regain the role of commissioner. You will recall I resigned. I prefer my role of political columnist, and I believe I am making a more effective contribution to my community than I was afforded as a commissioner under the Florida sunshine laws you reference. However, I am unable to believe that a well reasoned decision was made by the commission, when earlier the mayor assured a resident that there would be no vote on the town lawyer's request to appeal the Key Club legal defeat that evening.
Then the commissioners unanimously supported the lawyer's request without discussion. Amazing considering what had preceded the commission vote to appeal, concerning ten feet of dirt in the Publix parking lot.
Last I want to address what many residents think is bullying by the current clique in power on Longboat. People do not like the ideological cleansing that has been going on every since Mr. Brenner made the famous "penthouse edict" to fix town hall. I see this process as a localized extension of Bush anti-intellectualism, where highly educated and experienced residents are ejected out of the town government process, by a group of less qualified people of like-mind.
Terry, I will most likely continue to write columns as long as anyone will look at my work and I do not have to compromise my beliefs in open informed government.