The Political Whore

We hadn’t heard much from Ralph Hughes recently, not since he built a $4 million home off Tampa’s Westshore Boulevard and moved in. Ralph had been so quiet — none of his trademark letters or e-mails in the past few years — that you almost forgot what a force he remained in Hillsborough County politics. It seemed like he was laying low or just enjoying life, having made millions and millions of dollars, first in concrete and more recently in buying up ailing alt-fuel and med-tech companies.

So when he died last week when I was away (I read his obit online on my laptop in a hotel in Chapel Hill, N.C.), I was pretty shocked. For the conservative movement in Hillsborough County, his death is a great loss. Combine that with fellow GOP strategist Sam Rashid’s self-proclaimed withdraw from the political stage due to disappointment with politics and you have a Hillsborough Republican Party that has lost much of the team that brought it to power in the 1990s.

I reported on Ralph at two different newspapers (including this one). I found myself working on political campaigns with him and against him during my tenure as a political consultant. Ralph was shrewd in a street-smart way; his issue was impact fees and lower taxes and opening government to more voices. He believed the community would prosper if only taxes and fees fell. (Of course, you would expect that pro-growth attitude from somebody who made his fortune selling pre-cast concrete used in constructing new commercial and residential buildings.)

He was not a complex man, but from reading the various obituaries and columns in the wake of his death, I’m not sure anyone got it quite right: Ralph the puppet master, they wrote, pulling the strings of conservative pols while penning numerous letters and e-mails issuing his agenda and pushing his conservative views. And he was that, but he was much more, as well as symbolic of the way that Hillsborough County moved away from a Tampa-good-old-boy dominated form of government. (Not that what Hughes replaced it with was any better.)

Ralph was a tough guy and could be very intimidating. He could also be very sweet and gentlemanly. And the truth was those “puppets” he elected did not always dance to his tune. Once they got into office, they liked big projects and big budgets, sometimes angering Hughes, who would call them privately and chew them out.

When it became clear in the mid-1990s that he would be outed as an ex-con, Ralph revealed the news himself, as a 1996 St. Petersburg Times article detailed:

Ralph Hughes, the government gadfly, regularly shares his views on  government waste and development regulation through his unsolicited mailings  to local officials, civic leaders and journalists.

Faithful readers who were expecting another essay on impact fees, however,  were surprised to learn Tuesday that the subject of Hughes’ latest letter was  none other than Hughes himself.

Hughes disclosed that, when he was a professional boxer and a much younger  man, he hit another man in a bar, broke his jaw, and didn’t stop Hughes’ own  companions from robbing him – events that earned Hughes a stay in prison.

Why was he admitting this? Hughes wrote that he had received an anonymous  telephone call from a purported supporter of Hillsborough Commissioner Ed  Turanchik, threatening to tell all unless Hughes quit fighting Turanchik’s  re-election campaign.

Truth be told, Hughes nearly beat the guy to death. It was a story that lay buried in the Tampa Tribune archives when I ran across it in the early 1990s while a county reporter there; I was nixed when I said we should write about it, the story being deemed “decades old news.”It never saw the light of day until that 1996 campaign. It didn’t even make the Trib’s news story about Hughes death. (full disclosure: Turanchik was a client of my former political consulting firm. I played no role in the release of Hughes’ violent past, nor did I know anything about whether campaign supporters made calls to Hughes.)

Ralph turned himself around from his early violent days, into a successful businessman. He won a lot of people’s respect. He never acted smarter than he really was. He knew his limitations. More than that, he knew the electorate. By 1996, with a Republican revolution raging across the country, Hughes hooked up his money and take-no-prisoners approach with other GOP strategists/fundraisers, including Rashid (the two eventually had a nasty falling out); and anti-abortion activist and convenience store millionaire Lorena Jaeb, to name a few.

He eventually became one of the most prolific contributors in Hillsborough. In 2006, he ranked third on my list of Money Men in local county races. I wrote about him this way:

In 2006, Ralph Hughes went himself one better. Long known for mailing (at his own expense) letters touting conservatives, excoriating liberals and railing against higher taxes and fees, Hughes changed tactics. He set up his own political committee, Let’s Make the World a Better Place Because We Have Been Here, and seeded it with the single largest donation on record in the electronic archives of the Florida Division of Elections: $1 million.

Hughes plays to win in local politics, and he has enjoyed the ear of — if not flat out controlled — a strong majority of county commissioners in Hillsborough County. He is already close to incumbents Brian Blair and Ken Hagan; this year, he, along with his many companies, his partner’s companies and family members, gave direct contributions to winning candidates Jim Norman ($6,300), Kevin White ($5,500) and Al Higginbotham ($5,000). The only commissioner he doesn’t have ties to is the newly elected Rose Ferlita, who said during the campaign that she spurned Hughes’ support when she came to realize that it came with strings.

The Hughes-controlled Let’s Make the World hired the conservative Washington, D.C., consultant Red Sea LLC, widely known in national political circles as the polling and television ad brains behind the supply-side advocate Club for Growth. Red Sea’s Jon Lerner was also lead consultant to former Florida Speaker of the House Johnnie Byrd in his unsuccessful 2004 U.S. Senate bid.

Hughes did not return a telephone call to describe in detail the work of his political committee. But state records show that Let’s Make the World spent more than $300,000 of his $1 million donation in this election, attacking Sandy Murman in her primary against Ronda Storms and criticizing Hillsborough school board candidate Ken Allen in support of his opponent, April Griffin (who also got $3,000 worth of checks directly from Hughes-linked contributors). Both of Hughes’ chosen candidates won.

Griffin welcomed Hughes’ support but insisted she didn’t know about Let’s Make the World’s attack against Allen and didn’t approve it. “I will not be beholden to anyone as an elected official,” Griffin wrote on the Seminole Heights blog (seminoleheights.blogspot.com) before election day.

But as the newest member of the Hillsborough School Board, Griffin will find herself right in the middle of the fight over whether to raise the county’s ultra-low impact fees on new homes so it can build more schools. County commissioners voted to do just that earlier this year, but revised growth estimates have caused some commissioners to call for reconsidering that idea.

Hughes, of course, opposes the increase.

Griffin, the maverick Democrat trying to shake up the Hillsborough School Board, had an unlikely friendship with Hughes, as she detailed in an op-ed piece published today:

At first I saw Ralph as a supporter. But it didn’t take long to see him as a friend. He called to critique me, and ask how I felt about issues coming before the board. He stated his opinions and listened to mine, and we debated when we didn’t agree. We had lunch, and he introduced me to people he thought I could team with to make our community better.

I took grief over accepting Ralph’s support. I even had people in my own party tell me to refuse his support. I have no regrets.

During one of our debates he ended our conversation with, “You know April, you have a point. I hadn’t thought of it that way.” I felt like I had just moved a mountain. But I now know it wasn’t much of an accomplishment because he was a much more reasonable man than people gave him credit for.

We shared a mutual respect. I feel so very privileged to have been able to know Ralph the way I did and feel proud that I earned his friendship, a gift he didn’t give lightly.

He liked to say he was glad he was smart enough to know how dumb he really was, and always knew he could learn more. He taught me a lot. I feel a profound sense of loss, both personally and for the community. I never would have thought I would call Ralph Hughes a friend, and am honored to have been able to do so. I will miss him greatly.

Ralph was not the demon that most portray him as. His insistence that government was too big and wasteful was right on the money. The problem is not that he pushed his ideas, but that he didn’t push them far enough or with the right people. When a TaxWatch study (which he helped pay for) suggested more than 100 ways to cut the budget, the Hughes-elected board adopted only a handful. Still today, county government has not undergone a revolution in thriftiness, even as it has had to cut its budget because of tax reform. Hillsborough County still wastes millions on self-propaganda. Where are the conservatives when it comes to cutting their own air time?

Then there are the people that Hughes backed. For the most part, they have been the least interesting, least public minded bunch ever to sit on the board. Jim Norman. Ken Hagan. Brian Blair. Ronda Storms. And how about those stellar candidates he put his full weight behind who didn’t win? Do the names Lunelle Siegel, Tim Curtis, Julie Brown and Brad Swanson ring a bell? It is hard to imagine that if those candidates had won we would be any better off today than we were 20 years ago.

Ralph wanted desperately to be a change agent, but he picked the wrong horses to hitch to the plow. County government could still benefit from some of Ralph’s ideas; it just hasn’t benefited from the people he put into power.

Finally, Hughes fundamentally was wrong about the subject that launched him in the first place: impact fees. He wanted to slash them. They were already among the lowest in the state. But besides putting the county in a hole for infrastructure such as schools and roads, low impact fees were unfair to people who lived here and paid taxes for years to build the parks and streets and other amenities already here. The savings from low impact fees went to developers (yes, sure, homeowners may have saved $1,000-$2,000 because of lower fees, but the current housing crisis isn’t the doing of higher impact fees; it was rampant land speculation) as anti-tax crusaders such as Ralph fought against other ways to pay for infrastructure. He opposed a tax to pay for roads and schools, and its defeat allowed those needs to be bundled with money for a new Raymond James Stadium in 1998, a tax increase which then passed.

He believed that growth paid for itself. At the end of his life, surely Ralph saw that he was wrong about that as Florida’s economy crashed, its property tax system irreparably unfair because of Save Our Homes, its school budgets slashed, its economic investment stagnant. But I know he didn’t, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

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