Remembering Phyllis Busansky
June 23, 2009 at 3:52 pm by Wayne Garcia
It’s funny the things you remember — and don’t remember — about your friends when they die. I spent much of the afternoon searching my brain for a tiny detail about Phyllis Busansky among the thousands of bits of info I know about her over the past two decades.
A drink. I can’t remember the last line of a 1991 Tampa Tribune article that I wrote about Phyllis on the night she completed her major opus, an effort to create a decades-ahead-of-its-time indigent health care plan in Hillsborough County. I remember how she gathered allies, the narrative approach the story was written in, the delight in my editors when they read it. The last line had her going out for a drink after the vote (I was along) and detailed exactly what she drank.
But it’s gone, lost in the recesses of my brain and not available online.
Phyllis Busansky — who died on the job at an elections conference in St. Augustine overnight Monday — was a unique political force in Tampa Bay. She was a domineering presence, physically and mentally, smart and savvy, with top columnists’ phone numbers at the top of her speed dial and an unwavering enthusiasm that led to her say the word “fabulous” at least once every 10 minutes.
She will probably most likely be remembered best for her 1991 indigent health care plan, winning a 6-1 vote on the Hillsborough County Commission to raise sales taxes by a half-cent to create a system of effective, preventive health care clinics for the working poor and uninsured. The idea was to provide early care that is cheaper than letting illness settle in and end up at an expensive hospital emergency room, where the public was paying for it after the fact via Medicare or through higher health care costs for the insured.
Busansky’s response on winning the battle to create the groundbreaking program: “I’m just thrilled. I think it’s a great day for Hillsborough County.”
She was one of those politicians you knew only by one name: Phyllis. It became so ubiquitous that she actually incorporated it into her unsuccessful 2006 congressional campaign, the second time she ran and lost in her attempt to go to Washington. I was an unpaid adviser in the first congressional attempt, in 1996, when she finished third to Jim Davis and former Mayor Sandy Freedman.
In many ways, Phyllis was progressive. She was launched into the public eye in 1988, running a reform campaign against big-money pro-development forces in the person of Tom Vann, whose $200,000 campaign bankroll dwarfed Busansky’s cash on hand. She hired a little known political consultant named Mary Repper, who told Busansky to go stand next to Vann at every campaign appearance possible, unnerving the Tampa city councilman with her enthusiasm and guts. Phyllis won, and joined a progressive bloc on the board that included Ed Turanchik, Sylvia Kimbell and Pam Iorio, who would go on to be (like Phyllis) Supervisor of Elections before becoming Mayor of Tampa.
Unlike the right-wing Hillsborough board today, halting runaway growth, restoring voter confidence and pushing conservation programs were priorities during those years. But Phyllis could be exasperating to her friends and allies; many at the time did not understand why she twice voted down gay rights ordinances at the county level that would have given protections in employment, housing and accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation. I never heard her give a solid explanation, and the best description I find now in accounts of that time comes from the St. Petersburg Times, which said she was against it because “it went further than local government should go in instituting social change.”
During the debate over a second vote, the Times reported:
An angry Busansky lashed out at what she called “extremists” on both sides who refused to consider a middle ground that Busansky said was more acceptable to the “moderate majority.”
Busansky bragged that her indigent health program saved $100 million in taxpayer costs in its first four years alone. It became a national model. And it shifted indigent health costs off the backs of property owners and into the broader sales tax, so some would be paid by visitors and tourists.
The move won her 1995 recogntion as “Public Official of the Year” in Governing magazine. She was term-limited out of office by 1996, and after losing the congressional race that year, she moved to spread the gospel of her health plan. Gov. Lawton Chiles sidetracked her from that job in 1997, named her as executive director for Florida’s welfare reform project, called WAGES. I worked as a communications director in that effort for almost a year.
It was a perfect job for Busansky’s brand of networking and cheerleading. She could cross the aisle, as a Democrat, to have allies in the GOP, including her strongest fan in the Florida Senate at the time, Katherine Harris. (This is long before Harris’ evil-nutty phase as Secretary of State and Congresswoman, when she was just a solid centrist Senator from Sarasota.) Phyllis’ job was to bring lots of different people with different ideologies to the same table (including liberals not wild about kicking folks off the welfare rolls and conservatives not wild about having any welfare at all) and get them fired up to exist in a new system in which more job training and accountability was introduced into the welfare safety net.
After leaving that job in 2000, Phyllis largely left the public eye. I was a political consultant in those days, and I recall her calling me and my then-business partner, Mary Repper, every six months or so with another idea of an office to run for. She was itching to get back in, but her brand of progressiveness was falling out of favor as the Bush Administration took hold. She lectured and consulted, keeping up her health-care reform mantra, and bided her time. She tried (and mostly failed) to help start a good-government advocacy group in Tampa.
Why she chose the near-suicidal race against Gus Bilirakis for Congress in 2006 is a testament to both her ego and her unflagging courage. No other major politician wanted a piece of Bilirakis the Younger, whose dad had held the Pinellas-based congressional district for more than two decades. But Phyllis plunged in, and dutifully lost after putting up a pretty good fight, raising more money than I ever thought she could.
After that race, she revealed that she was diagnosed with early-stage lung cancer. After surgery and treatment, she was declared cancer-free.
It set the stage for perhaps her greatest gift to Tampa Bay politics: running against the incompetent incumbent Supervisor of Elections, Buddy Johnson. She beat him in the 2008 elections, waiting weeks for the votes to be counted as Johnson’s office melted down. She was denied an Election Night victory party because of it.
I last ran into Phyllis two weeks ago, having lunch at the popular Vietnamese restaurant Bamboozle in downtown Tampa, where her office was located. She jumped up from her table with energy, insisting that she was doing “fabulous” and saying I must pay a visit to the Elections Office to hear about all the changes she was planning. Call me in a few weeks, I’m traveling until then, she told me.
I said I would.
Monday night, at the Florida State Association of Supervisor of Elections conference in the World Golf Village just outside of St. Augustine, Busansky complained to a colleague of a little indigestion, but put it off to some antibiotics she was taking. The next morning, she did not show up for the start of conference events. Hotel security opened her room, and she was found dead. Foul play is not suspected.
To her husband, Sheldon, and her kids, Alex, Edward and Rebecca, my sympathy and support.
To Phyllis, I say rest in peace. You went out on top of your game. We’ll miss you.
