Under-the-bus week for many of Hillsborough’s county commissioners
May 13, 2009 at 5:00 am by Kelly Cornelius
photo by Tom (hmm a rosa tint)
By Kelly Cornelius
PoHo contributor and R-LAND civic activist
For all of you mass transit supporters … buses everywhere were busy last week giving you a glimpse of what really goes on down at County Center.
It started with this article in the Observer regarding the complaint against Commissioner Al “the New Blair” Higginbotham and his aide the 8th Commissioner former 8th Commissioner, Jess Johnson. Recall you heard that story here first about complaints that they violated the County Charter but now after months of waiting for a reply from County Attorney Renee Lee and receiving nothing, Terry Flott, U-CAN chairwoman, will take the complaint to the state attorney herself. The link to the article in the Observer only gets you to the first page. Interesting to note on the second page in print they refer to Johnson, as the 8th Commissioner. According to that article Johnson has recently resigned and is now working for former Pinellas Commissioner Ronnie Duncan in real estate.
Up next was this article in the Times regarding Hagan’s statement to me when I questioned what I thought was a conflict of interest regarding a developer hosting one of his campaign fundraisers (and the same developer asking for a land use change down at the County Commission recently). His statement was that “Mr. Dibbs has never held a fundraiser for me” and Politifact found that half true. Helping to throw Hagan under the bus in that article were Democratic and Republican political consultants alike. Michael Van Sickler describes Hagan as combative when asked about Dibbs (that one went well with my Sunday morning coffee). Hagan tells Van Sickler to “ask Hung Mai” who was in charge of the event. Even Hung Mai (an engineer who worked for Dibbs and is also a Planning Commissioner) recused himself from voting on these amendments when they went before the Planning Commission (which is right before they are sent to the Board of County Commissioners who get the final say). The other half of a half true is a half lie. They seem to have a lot of those going around down at County Center The Center for Half Lies. We can only hope shining the light on this crap decreases their half-lives down there as well.
And finally this article about Commissioner Kevin “even my family throws me under the bus” White. Looks like what we thought was a sexual harrassment suit just got way more interesting as this article begins to unearth lucrative land deals associated with this whole twisted tale. Could Commissioner He ain’t got no alibi be in way more trouble than we thought?
