Do Hillsborough commissioners have a conflict of interest voting on deals for campaign supporters?
April 14, 2009 at 10:05 am by Kelly CorneliusI attended a recent sprawl battle down at Collusionville Headquarters the Hillsborough County Center (see my post on that here), where I asked Commissioner Ken Hagan to recuse himself from a vote at hand. I asked because the applicant, Stephen Dibbs, was listed as hosting a campaign fundraiser for him, according to this article.
Sure seemed to me that if one of your fundraisers is asking you to change the rules for his financial benefit that would be a conflict of interest. [Editor's note: A Commission on Ethics opinion has ruled that receiving campaign contributions does not constitute a legal conflict of interest for a public official.] Hagan not only flat-out denied that Dibbs ever held a fundraiser for him but he did it on the record. His exact words, according to the transcripts, were “Mr. Dibbs has never held a fundraiser for me and even if he had that would be a ridiculous standard to try and enforce.” I guess that is why they are called puppets, right? As a review, 5 of our 7 current Commissioners have financial contributions from Dibbs.
After the meeting I did some more digging and was appalled to find out that not only was Dibbs on that invitation listed as a host but so were many of the other players selling sprawl that night. In fact, all of them were. There were two sprawl amendments for the same piece of property: one had Dibbs name on it and one had a usual sprawl-pushing land use attorney, Vin Marchetti. Strangely, Marchetti wasn’t pitching the amendments that night but consultants Todd Pressman and Steve Allison were. A quick review of the host committee for Hagan’s fundraiser revealed a Todd Pressman, a Steve Allison, a Stephen Dibbs and say it with me kids………….a Vin Marchetti. All of them were asking to have the rules waived on their behalf, yet Hagan sees no conflict.
Also disturbing is that Pressman is a board member of Swiftmud. Guess he didn’t get the memo of our water crisis since he is asking for extension of public water utilities to support this sprawl!
Oh it gets worse. During the meeting, a man who was speaking in favor of sprawl made a threat to a citizen speaking in opposition to the sprawl amendments. The thug, Todd Scime, was not removed by Hagan, who in my opinion should have asked the guards to remove him, but that is for another post. Why was this person given favorable treatment? I never heard back from Hagan when I asked him that question via e-mail but guess what I found with another review of that invitation to Hagan’s fundraiser? A Mark Scime……………the SOE site has him listed as a Hagan contributor and it looks like the same address Scime used during public comment. We don’t call it Collusionville for nothing people. Some more digging revealed that Scime contributed to only one Commissioner ………..The New Blair Higginbotham!
Another potential conflict of interest that night is the black cloud over Commissioner Jim Norman and his fellow Sports Authority Board member who also just happens to be a regular paid sprawl-pusher down at 
Sprawl Central County Center, Vin Marchetti (shown here in a photo posted to Norman’s campaign Facebook account). They are responsible for recently forcing out the executive director of the TSA and opponents of this move (who are also TSA board members) are questioning the Sunshine Law on this one. Ya think? If fellow TSA board members think Norman and Marchetti disregarded the rules over at the TSA, then why whould we county residents have any reason to think they don’t do the same thing regarding land-use decisions? Usually Marchetti is pushing sprawl for others (asking the board, including Norman) to change the rules for his clients. In this case his name was actually on one of the amendments as the applicant. Did Norman recuse himself? Yeah, right!
Residents showed up in force against these two amendments so no politician would want to touch them with elections nearing for several of the Gang of 4.5 but my guess is that it would have been very different if we were not there ushering in the Sunshine on their sordid ties. The moral of the story Team Sprawl, is that while it isn’t illegal to take contributions from thugs, paid sprawl-pushers and bottom-feeder developers, be prepared to take the heat when they ask for your blessing to change the rules because it doesn’t look or smell good when you don’t recuse yourself regardless of which way the vote went.
April 14th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Kelly. I am sending this on to several others. You should go to work for the FBI. Your investigations and cooberations are so good. I just hope these embarrassments aren’t elected to anyhing else. I know that several are jockeying around. I just hope more people educate themselves and don’t vote for a familiar name.
April 14th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Let the sun shine in! Interesting that ALL of those in favor of violating a community plan, our comp plan, breaking the urban service boundry, and pushing sprawl have ties to Dibbs. I’m still trying to figure out what they wanted to put there. Various themes were: support for Cheval’s golf couses (read hotels), or convenience stores so that poor single mom wouldn’t run out of gas at 8 o’clock at night with her two small children, or grocery stores so folks wouldn’t have to drive all the way to Dale Mabry. Keep up the good work, Kelly. The citizens need to be informed. Pay attention Commissioners – “Who’s next”?
April 14th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Thanks Linda but I can’t take the credit. I got most of the information from prior articles written by Wayne Garcia, Mariella Smith and Mike VanSickler and just tied it to current events. Thanks for commenting.
April 14th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
hagan owes ms. cornelius a public apology for lying to her and making her look like she didn’t have her facts straight. and she DID. so he should retract his statement and say “sorry!” — holding your breath? don’t.
dibbs is a big string puller in this county but it’s becoming a bit harder for him now that people are paying attention and calling the commissioners out on this crap.
April 14th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
With reference to the above mentioned rules of Florida’s Commission on Ethics, unfortunately the ethics rules are engineered to allow a politician to be unethical without violating the law. You must remember that the laws were created by elected politians, so you can imagine that they are worded to give every possible advantage to the elected official.
For example, if a person lies to his friends, relatives and/or business associates, we might say that he’s unethical. Well, under Florida’s statute dealing with ethics, a public official can lie, mislead, withhold information, purposely give erroneous information, and they cannot be charged with any ethics violation. And that goes for elected officials or state/local employees. The only way we citizens can get the ethics commission to take corrective/punitive action against an official is if we, the citizens, can present convincing evidence to the state that shows that the official used his office in an inappropriate way to convey a benefit to himself or to another person. But conveying a benefit to another person is still not enough. There has to be a money trail and we citizens have to catch the official in the act, basically. The rules make it almost impossible to bring a dirty politician to justice on ethics charges, unless that politician does it in broad daylight. And that’s how our politicians can take thousands of dollars in campaign money from business interests (the bus interests have members of their family, employees of their businesses etc each give the maximum to avoid law voilations but still manage to supply thousands to their candidate) who are getting them elected. And the business interests do it for one reason – to get their development projects quickly approved with no scrutiny. So ethics charges are not an option because you didn’t catch them in a back alley collecting cash. And that’s why Commissioner Hagan can arrogantly dismiss your suggestion that he recuse himself. He knows that even though most of his campaign money came from the same people behind the development projects that he keeps rubber stamping, you can’t catch him taking anything for it, so you’re SOL.
We need Hometown Democracy so we can take the abusive power away from these tyrants!!!
April 14th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Well, I found this little document online that is the Hillsborough County Statement of Ethics. Note #5. Conflicts of Interests which begins by saying
I will actively avoid conflicting interest or even the appearance of a conflict of interest.
http://www.hillsboroughcounty.org/administrator/resources/publications/statementOfEthics.pdf
Thanks for the comments everybody.
April 15th, 2009 at 6:27 am
One more thing about conflicts: state law requires elected officials to vote unless they have a conflict of interest as outlined in the state law [which exempts campaign contributions]. here is the AG opinion outlining the fact that commissioners MUST vote unless they have a private personal financial gain at hand in the issue, http://www.myfloridalegal.com/ago.nsf/Opinions/DBD5C251422373F085256572005F90AD
April 15th, 2009 at 6:28 am
Of course, I always told my clients, go ahead and declare a conflict and don’t vote. nobody is ever going to file an ethics complaint because you DIDN’T vote, only if you did vote, even if legally so. but every city and county attorney I ever covered as a reporter gives their electeds the advice from the above AG Opinion, that they have a LEGAL DUTY to vote. That comes back to bite them in the butt at election time, even if technically their votes are legal. It is a bit of a catch-22 created in state law.
April 15th, 2009 at 7:59 am
It’s legal but it tips the scales.
FixHillsborough has it right: We the People need Florida Hometown Democracy, the equalizer.
When it becomes law, citizens will have the power to vote down privately initiated Comprehensive Plan Amendments that put their neighborhoods and community plans at risk.