By George Niemann PoHo contributor and R-LAND and UCAN activist
In April 2009, former Hillsborough Commissioner Brian Blair opted to go for a full hearing before an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) to settle the charge of accepting illegal campaign contributions from Hillsborough Planning Commissioner Hung Mai and another political supporter. In February 2009, the Florida Elections Commission found “Probable Cause” that Blair intentionally violated campaign laws.
The final hearing was set for Wednesday in Tallahassee before ALJ Jeffrey B Clark. But a source there tells me that a one-time 30-day delay may be granted in the case. [UPDATE: On Wednesday we learned that is exactly what happened. The judge in Blair’s case just issued a ruling on the motion filed to send the case back to the elections commission. He denied the motion and set the new court date for Sept. 9. And get this, the trial is being moved to Tampa!!!]
Our FLA senator, Mel Martinez, center, chums it up at with Tampa Chamber visitors recently.
By George Niemann PoHo contributor and R-LAND and UCAN activist
Since we’ve got such a budget crunch looming that we have to close public facilities and lay off Hillsborough County workers, I wonder if Hillsborough’s economic development “donations” to the many chambers of commerce ended up paying for the Tampa Chamber’s trip to Washington, D.C.? And if so, how much did it cost to send this delegation to the capital to discuss legislative business impacts on our dime?
By Kelly Cornelius PoHo contributor & R-LAND activist
In a Hillsborough County Commission meeting last week, Commissioner Rose Ferlita brought up those clandestine raises issued by County Administrator Pat Bean. When Ferlita holds up a mountain of paperwork indicating that she has done her research that usually isn’t good news for whoever might be on the other side of that paperwork. Ferlita didn’t think that Bean had fully informed the Commission prior to giving those raises, and because proper procedure had not been followed, the board’s decision to approve those appointments back in November could be null and void. During the discussion, Ferlita cited agenda documents and ordinances (article 6 section 1) and she even brought up a similar situation from way back in 2005, before she was even on the board.
Other commissioners echoed similar complaints about not having the full information, and this is not the first time they have hammered Bean about this raises. Commissioner Kevin Beckner brought it up several weeks ago. But Bean held firm during Wednesday’s meeting stating she felt “we” had done everything “we” were supposed to (is there a Co-County Administrator that “we” don’t know about or does “we” just mean herself and Commissioner Jim Norman?) Read the rest of this entry »
By Kelly Cornelius PoHo contributor & R-LAND activist
Remember when the whole idea behind the Cone Ranch possible sale was because Commissioner Ken “Half-Truth” Hagan wanted to “preserve it” after being asked by big-time Republican donors to subdivide and sell off Cone Ranch [more than 12,000 acres of publicly owned land in Northeast Hillsborough County]?
The county now has an advisory board pondering this deal. You can read my take on their first meeting here. This second meeting started with County Administrator Pat Bean addressing the panel lobbing threats about the state of the county water utility which owns the land. Wasn’t this panel supposed to be objective? Yet here we have the County Administrator throwing in her 2 cents. She did admit that the land was already preserved though, glad we got that cleared up. Recall the earlier threats that the Florida Environmental and Conservation Group (FCEG) (the group pushing the sale) made implying that the alternative could be commercial or residential development. Read the rest of this entry »
Hillsborough County commissioners will discuss dropping conservative activist Ralph Hughes’ name from the county’s Moral Courage Award on Wednesday.
Commissioner Rose Ferlita put the controversial issue on the agenda for discussion weeks after the federal government said Hughes died owing $69 million in unpaid taxes.
Ferlita told the Tribune on Tuesday that Hughes’ son Shea has sent a letter to the commissioners asking that his father’s name be removed from the award.
UPDATE: County commissioners did just that. The vote this morning was unanimous.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 14, 2009, at 12:01 pm
Earl Lennard, right, with Commissioner Ken Hagan earlier this year after winning the 2009 Hillsborough Good Government Award. Credit: Hillsboroughcounty.org
It is not a worst-case scenario for voters or Democrats who hoped that Gov. Charlie Crist would appoint a good adminstrator (and Democrat) to replace Phyllis Busansky, who passed away suddenly a few weeks ago. The choice of Earl Lennard is not wildly ideological, as he is not a fire-breathing conservative, nor especially partisan, as Lennard has been both a Democrat and Republican (or at least considered running as both/either for the State Senate in 2006, a race he entered as a Republican and later dropped out of) and spent much of his public life as an appointed nonpartisan leader.
But it is not, as many had hoped, the choice of Democrat Craig Latimer, who was Busansky’s chief of staff and the driving force behind the planned changes at the office.
Lennard makes sense in terms of a picking a relatively nonpartisan administrator who has run a large organization and who understands how to gear up for really big work days (first day of school vs. Election day). Some may grouse about it, and there are Lennard haters out there, but Crist surprised me with this pick. I expected something that would please conservatives more.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 29, 2009, at 10:22 am
Reporters are gathering at the Hillsborough Medical Examiner’s Office for a noon newser at which a preliminary report into the death of famed TV pitchman Billy Mays is set to be released. We’ll pass along coverage on Twitter (follow @poho) and over at the Daily Loaf blog.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 26, 2009, at 3:20 pm
Call it Phyllis Math: a gathering of Phyllis Busansky’s “five closest friends” numbered nearly 1,000 at her funeral at Temple Schaarai Zedek in Tampa on this dark, rainy Friday morning. It was a running joke throughout the tributes to the late Hillsborough County supervisor of elections, how Busansky had told so many people that they were one of her three or five or seven closest friends.
For some, that would be duplicitous; Busansky, however, meant it and was close friends with just about everybody she met, forging an instant connection, building communities and circles of influence, her longtime friend Jeannie McGuire told the gathered mourners. McGuire had one of my favorite lines of the funeral, talking about Busansky’s sense of fashion as not quite classic but “classic — plus dramatic.”
There were more laughs than tears.
Tampa Tribune columnist Steve Otto, who long held a valued spot on Busansky’s speed dial and in heart, called his politician-friend “a tornado with hair.” Busansky’s daughter, Rebecca, read a 2005 e-mail that came to Busansky’s husband, Sheldon, from a woman that Phyllis had helped in the 1960s get into a college. The woman was hoping that Sheldon was related to Phyllis so he could pass along her thanks.
Most touching was the remembrance of her son, Alex, who said he was happy to have had 47 years with his mother. “I am my mother’s son,” he told the crowd, which flowed over into a separate room and outside, where monitors were set up. “If you’ve met her, you’ve met me.”
The room was full of politicians and elected officials, from Mayor Pam Iorio to the county commission, city council and constitutional officers — including Gov. Charlie Crist. Even the man that Busansky vanquished in the 2008 elections, former Elections Chief Buddy Johnson, attended, making for an uncomfortable moment when Rabbi Richard Birnholz said he had endorsed Phyllis in that election because it was the community’s only hope to clean up a hopelessly bungled office. Johnson later shook hands with people in the parking lot.
For progressives, it was a trip down memory lane, a viewing of some of the people who helped Tampa and Hillsborough County make great strides during an eight-year period, from 1988 to 1996, when social conservatives began their destructive takeover of county government and the rise of suburban development gave them the numbers to consistently beat urban progressives at the ballot box. Busansky’s quarterbacking of the county’s landmark indigent health care program, part fiscal sense-part social justice, that was a highlight of that era.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 23, 2009, at 3:52 pm
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.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 23, 2009, at 9:42 am
Phyllis Busansky was a friend of mine, and I worked on her various political efforts, including her stint as the director of welfare reform in Florida, so it is with great sadness I pass along news of her death today, from ABC Action News:
Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Phyllis Busansky has been found dead in her hotel room in St. Augustine, according to Pam Iorio.
Ms. Busansky was supposed to be participating in a conference in St. Augustine. When she didn’t show, coworkers came looking for her, and found her dead in her hotel room.
Foul play is not suspected.
I spoke with a mutual friend who mentioned that Phyllis had a health problem earlier this year in which she was hospitalized but that they thought it was simply hyperventilation. Busansky did battle lung cancer in 2007 but told friends she was cleared of the disease after surgery.
She was 72 and had battled lung cancer. She died in her sleep, said Sigrid Tidmore, spokeswoman for the Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections office.
“Honestly, this is all I know,” Tidmore said.
Tidmore was with Busansky last night, before she went to sleep about 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. She said Busansky was not complaining of any pain. When Busansky didn’t respond to phone calls this morning after not showing up to today’s conference meetings, hotel security went to check on her and found her dead, Tidmore said.
(Busansky’s office says she was 73, but the Times says records show she was 72.)
Tidmore went on to say that everyone connected to Busansky was in shock, that she was very vibrant and had lots of plans for the office. I can attest; I ran into Phyllis two weeks ago in Bamboozle in downtown Tampa and she was her usual exuberant self, eliciting a promise from me that I would pay a call on her to hear about her innovations at the office in a few weeks, after she was done traveling.
Busansky was a mainstay of local Democratic politics for the past two decades, after winning a seat on the Hillsborough County Commission in the late 1980s as part of a reform effort that brought progressives to that board.
Under state law, Republican Gov. Charlie Crist will appoint a successor until voters choose a new supervisor in the 2010 elections.
UPDATE: This statement just in from the Supervisor of Elections Office:
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 22, 2009, at 4:34 pm
Elaine Silvestrini over at the Tampa Tribune has a great story to go with all the Brian Blair news today: One of Blair’s benefactors, the late Ralph Hughes, a top Money Man and power broker in Hillsborough County politics and business, died owing millions of dollars to the Internal Revenue Service.
The agency has filed a claim with Hughes’ family trust seeking more than $69 million in unpaid income and business taxes and interest for the years 2003 to 2007.
Hughes’ beneficiaries – his widow and two of his three children – are contesting the IRS claim, arguing Hughes paid millions in taxes.
After Hughes died at age 77 on June 27, 2008, Hillsborough County commissioners voted to rename the county’s Moral Courage Award for him. The decision was controversial, with detractors accusing commissioners of repaying their benefactor and injecting politics into what was supposed to be a nonpartisan award.
Brian Blair, the former pro wrestler and Hillsborough County commissioner, is facing child abuse charges after he allegedly got into a scuffle with his teenage boys.
Blair, 52, was arrested his home on 12702 Boulevard N shortly after 5 am and booked into the Orient Road Jail at 12:45 p.m, jail records show.
According to Hillsborough Sheriff’s spokesman Larry McKinnon, Blair got into an argument with his two two teen-aged sons that turned physical, sheriff’s Deputy Larry McKinnon said.
“It was a family argument between him and his sons and during the altercation at least one was battered,” McKinnon said.
The Times adds these details from the arrest report:
By Catherine Durkin Robinson PoHo contributor, “feminist mother of twins” and a political blogger, working under the title Out in Left Field.
Hillsborough County, like most of the country, is facing a budget shortfall. Officials have to come up with ways to cut at least $144 million in spending. Unfortunately, they won’t go after no-bid vendors or other white-collar prostitutes fleecing the Bay area. Instead, commissioners target programs serving our children and abused animals.
Because who cares about them?
The other night, several hundred concerned residents showed they cared by turning out to speak before the Hillsborough County Commission and voice support for these threatened programs.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 6, 2009, at 3:10 pm
You recall last week that PoHo contributor Kelly Cornelius commented on the unusual deal being mulled over by the Hillsborough County Commission: sell a piece of publicly owned ranch land in order to prevent it from being developed into a subdivision. Not that it is being threatened for such development, since the county already owns it and is keeping it undeveloped.
The Times reports that commissioners want to study the deal and are appointing the ubiquitous task force for the, um, task:
A panel of environmental leaders will help Hillsborough County commissioners scrutinize a proposal to sell 12,000 acres of public land in the name of preservation.
Commissioners voted unanimously today to consider a proposal to sell off the Cone Ranch well field — nearly 20 square miles of undeveloped land in northeast Hillsborough.
The county’s water department owns the land, which was bought two decades ago for the drinking water that might one day be pumped from the aquifer.
The group bringing the deal to the table has all kinds of hard-right-wing ties outlined in the Times pieces.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 3, 2009, at 5:56 pm
Swine, errrr, H1N1 flu worries will keep kids out of three public schools in Hillsborough County this week, after students reported symptoms that health officials believe are from the fast-spreading influenza.
An 18-year-old male student at Freedom High School and an 11-year-old male student at Wilson Middle School are among the latest suspected cases of the H1N1 virus reported to the Florida Department on Health.
Both schools will be closed starting Monday, and will not reopen until next week. Liberty Middle School will also close, since it shares its cafeteria with Freedom High School, officials said.
Students are being asked to stay home and avoid public places like shopping malls or movie theaters.
None of the five Hillsborough victims of the flu have been hospitalized, and all are recovering.
Okay, if you were asked which local governments were early proponents of all things green, you may think: Sarasota with its early adoption of green ordinances; St. Petersburg, Florida’s first certified Green City; or Tampa with its initiatives and recent Green City designation. Yes, all good choices, but I bet it would surprise you that Hillsborough County led the pack. With little fanfare, one of the county’s employees has been quietly implementing energy saving strategies. It all started way back in 2000 when the county made the bold move of hiring Energy Manager Randy Klindworth. Back then, all he set out to do was curb expenses. Nine years ago, who would have thought that carbon footprint, sustainability, green, or Energy Star would be part of the vernacular?
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Apr. 2, 2009, at 6:11 am
The controversies in Hillsborough County government continue, as commissioners are asking questions about their internal auditor’s trip to a conference in Las Vegas.
Commissioner Rose Ferlita had wanted to ask Jim Barnes, the county auditor, questions about a little-noticed meeting his staff held in a local condo instead of government offices. But when she summoned him to a meeting yesterday, she and her colleagues on the commission found out he was in Lost Wages.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Mar. 1, 2009, at 11:00 am
Holy crap, just when you thought the Buddy Johnson saga couldn’t get any worse, Jeff Testerman over at the Times’ Tampa office digs up a new low: Johnson hired an ex-con as special assistant to the woman who was responsible his office’s budget. A man convicted of arson, cocaine possession and violating his probation. A man who was a “person of interest” in a series of Brandon arsons that stopped after his arrest. A man who refused to talk with the St. Petersburg Times about what he did for his $21,000 salary over 3.5 months of work.
[William Gaskin] worked briefly as a telephone solicitor before [Johnson's chief of staff and general counsel Kathy] Harris hired him as her special assistant. He had been out of prison eight months.
Gaskin accompanied the elections general counsel to court, handled troubleshooting at early voting sites and acted as a gatekeeper for outsiders who wanted access to Harris, according to the elections staff.
“I knew nothing about his background, but I saw him during early voting at the College Hill voting site, and after early voting started, he was like a buffer between me and Kathy Harris whenever I wanted to reach her,” recalled Sharon Samek, a Tampa lawyer with the Florida Democratic Lawyers Council, a voting rights organization.
Gaskin’s employment ended Nov. 8, two days after a manual vote count determined that Johnson had lost the supervisor of elections job to Phyllis Busansky.
Neither Harris nor Gaskin would discuss his job duties, but the Times points out that Gaskin had been a CPA and had worked for Ernst & Young, the auditing firm that was checking on the office’s finances when Gaskin was hired.
Trouble does not seem to be going away for former Hillsborough elections chief Buddy Johnson.
The FBI is already digging around the finances during his time in office. Now his personal real estate dealings are gaining scrutiny.
Johnson is facing a lawsuit filed by a retired couple accusing him of swindling them in a land deal completed in 2007. But now, according to Bay News 9’s partner newspaper the St. Petersburg Times, federal agents are investigating the deal.
A Plant City property appraiser who looked at the land deal confirms the FBI contacted him this month.
Dismissing allegations that they pulled strings behind the scenes, members of Hillsborough County’s Planning Commission voted Wednesday to rehire longtime executive director Bob Hunter, a move that would pay him both a salary and a pension.
Hunter, who has been retired for a little more than a month, also would get to keep a $206,731 lump-sum payment he received in January under a state program intended to encourage veteran government workers to retire.
The decision drew fire from Planning Commission board member Ed Giunta, who said the deal was legal, but raised concerns that it was orchestrated with other board members, a process that would violate the state’s public meetings laws.
The story quotes PoHo contributor Kelly Cornelius, who has blogged in favor of rehiring Hunter, who is not a favorite of developers.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Feb. 16, 2009, at 3:25 pm
PoHo’s activist correspondent Kelly Cornelius wrote earlier today about the issue of Hillsborough Planning Commission former exec Bob Hunter and his possible rehiring.
Hunter was pretty widely respected prior to his retirement, but stories in the local press about his rehiring are focusing on the fact that he would be legally allowed to “double-dip,” or take a retirement check in addition to a salary for returning to his old job.
We have learned the former head of the Hillsborough Planning Commission, Bob Hunter, had worked on a plan for years to get his $145,000 a year job back after he retired.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Feb. 11, 2009, at 3:03 pm
From March on Politics:
Hillsborough County Republican Party Chairman Debbie Cox-Roush says it’s up to the state Republican Party whether Carol Carter can rescind her resignation from a county party post.
“We don’t have the authority to accept or reject Ms. Carter’s resign,” Cox-Roush said in an interview a few minutes ago. “It’s out of our hands and we are waiting for direction from the Republican Party of Florida.”
Carter resigned her post as Hillsborough County state committeewoman last week after it became publicly known that she had forwarded an email joke some considered racially insensitive. Today, she sent state party Chairman Jim Greer a letter seeking to rescind the resignation.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jan. 29, 2009, at 8:58 am
The change in UT policy was announced to the campus in an e-mail Wednesday: the downtown Tampa university has done what Hillsborough County government couldn’t do in offering domestic partners of homosexual employees insurance and other benefits.
A week after Hillsborough County commissioners shot down a similar idea and two months after Florida voters rejected gay marriage, the University of Tampa agreed Wednesday to begin offering domestic partner benefits for homosexual couples.
Beginning April 1, UT will allow same-sex domestic partners to secure health insurance and other employee benefits. The offer does not apply to heterosexual domestic partnerships because those couples are allowed to marry under state law.
“It’s about time,” said Matt Gould, president of the Gay Lesbian Transgender Straight Bisexual Alliance, a UT student group. “I think it’s great that UT is implementing [benefits], but I think it’s wrong that the entire county won’t.”
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jan. 27, 2009, at 8:40 am
Today’s installment of the St. PetersburgTimes deconstructing former Hillsborough Supervisor Buddy Johnson goes like this:
Hillsborough elections officials knew about missing ballots that could swing a close Temple Terrace race a month earlier than previously disclosed.
The discovery came during the week of Dec. 12, when a temporary worker found 440 ballots from two precincts in a ballot box stored in a warehouse, according to a memo obtained Monday by the St. Petersburg Times.
Although a top deputy for then-Elections Supervisor Buddy Johnson was told about the find, nothing was said publicly until mid January.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jan. 14, 2009, at 7:10 am
The state’s top elections chief says former Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson’s $2.3 million cost overrun has caught his eye and might warrant a probe:
Secretary of State Kurt Browning said he was surprised when Buddy Johnson’s office told commissioners in December that the office had more than $2.3-million in cost overruns.
Browning said there should be no deficit, considering that Hillsborough received a federal grant meant to cover many of the costs associated with a new voting system.
“We keep hearing that he’s short $2.3-million, and I wonder, ‘What did he spend it on?’ ” Browning said. “I don’t understand.”
Johnson was supposed to provide a full accounting of how he spent the $2.5-million grant by Dec. 31, but Browning said the form explaining the expenditures wasn’t filled out completely. So Johnson’s successor, Phyllis Busansky, has inherited the job of explaining how the money was spent.
Browning said he’ll wait for audits already under way before he calls for a state inquiry. He said he’ll also hold off until Busansky wraps up her own inquiries into the deficit.
The news comes a few days after the St. Petersburg Times called for a criminal investigation into the office.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jan. 6, 2009, at 5:48 pm
A mediator announced a proposed settlement in the case of Tampa Bay Community Networks, the provider of public access programming in Tampa, and Hillsborough County, which some believe undertook a political purging of funding for the station that had been a target of the county’s right-wing politicians.
Guest blogger Kelly Cornelius is a civic activist in eastern Hillsborough County:
And the winner for the best backpedaling of a public employee when his deaprtment is caught with its pants down goes to……….Bob Gordon, director of Hillsborough County’s Public Works Debt.
Recall the recent smackdown citizens gave the county and their paid consultants regarding their ill-conceived study to plow six lanes with a median through rural Lithia, which would devastate our little community and bring with it certain sprawl. We called them out on their lying to us and started our own investigation into the matter. The item was on the agenda for a County Commission meeting two weeks ago, but for discussion only, which means no public input on the issue.
I attended the recent swearing in of Kevin Beckner (so that is what all of you Obama supporters felt like?) Still fresh from the euphoria of seeing a good guy win one (and watching incumbent Commissioner Brian Blair go down in flames), I later headed down to the public workshop that evening regarding the Lithia Pinecrest road widening project in eastern Hillsborough County. I had like six or seven hours in between these two events to just be happy that the people of Hillsborough made a good decision electing Beckner and since Commissioner Kevin “the people have spoken and I am switching teams” White (a longtime pro-development vote) seems to have gotten the message, just maybe NOW the residents would have a majority on the board (so that is what the late Ralph Hughes must have felt like!)
Hey, six hours of hope was good, wasn’t it? Turns out we have been duped by our county AGAIN! When Iand many others attended a meeting last year regarding the widening of Lithia Pinecrest we were told that the rural portion of it (now known as segment D) from Fishhawk to State Road 39 would NOT be widened. The staff assured us…………assured us.
That is why I thought it was fishy when I read this article promoting this year’s meeting that said it could to be 6 lanes all the way through. WTF? In fact, all I remember them talking about last year was possibly 4 lanes and that was only in the urban sections, so to read that they were now talking about 6 lanes all the way through raised many suspicions. So many of us decide to attend this year’s meeting, and it was Beltway deja vu. Lies, circles, and deflections.
There are sections of Lithia Pinecrest that are overloaded by traffic and need relief, but those are in the Urban Service Area, and make no mistake about it, those sections failed because new home construction was approved without appropriate infrastructure. You can thank past and a few current county commissioners for that. The section I am referring to is in the Rural Service Area and it serves us rural types just fine, thanks. Why are we opposed to widening on this particular stretch? Because plowing a bigger road through a rural area is nothing more than a recipe for sprawl. Six lanes with a median is 1-75!
We have been down this road before……..and we destroyed it!
Posted by David Warner on Nov. 6, 2008, at 12:58 pm
Wayne is otherwise detained, but he forwarded this letter from Senator Joyner and Senator Justice to Governor Crist regarding the issues with the Hillsborough County Elections office. Will Gov. Charlie get involved? Stay tuned …
CNN went all Star Wars on viewers election night with Princess Leia stand-in Jessica Yellin reporting via hologram. (Where was Admiral Ackbar??) Help us Barack Obama, you’re our only hope!
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Nov. 5, 2008, at 9:56 pm
In 25 years in politics and journalism I have never seen such a surreal scene as the “counting” of votes going on at the Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections Office Wednesday. I visited the elections counting office out on Faulkenberg Road in Brandon late in the afternoon, nearly 24 hours after the close of the polls and tens of thousands of votes away from having final results in Hillsborough’s elections, including the close race between incumbent Buddy Johnson and challenger Phyllis Busansky.
The veteran reporters there were just shaking their heads as the hours dragged on, watching through panes of glass as elections workers carefully took absentee ballots out of large envelopes and fed them through a counting machine. This happened only intermittently. Meanwhile, there was no Johnson, the elected supervisor, or his chief PR flak in sight. Johnson had not been seen since the night before. The situation was so exempt of information, the elections office so weird and unresponsive, that one TV reporter remarked loudly that the supervisor’s PIO’s (public information officers) were horrible — as one of them sat in the room silently against a wall.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Nov. 4, 2008, at 11:19 am
This from Buddy Johnson’s office at 12:14 p.m. A font of detailed information it is not:
Election Day Report
Hillsborough County- The Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections (SOE) office announces a busy but smooth morning at polling locations around the County. While lines have been reported at a number of locations, wait times have been reasonable and voting is proceeding at every polling location.
The Elections Office anticipated a large turnout and pre-planned for all conceivable issues that might arise with an election of this size. The SOE has experienced minor issues, all of which have been promptly resolved. Precinct Election Officials (PEO’s) have been well-trained to resolve issues at the polls and are knowledgeable of the proper procedural response to ensure a smooth voting process. The Elections Office has an extensive telephone support team designed to facilitate this process.
In the event of an optical scanner malfunction, the Supervisor of Elections office has 15 roving technical support crews to speedily resolve any equipment problems. When confronted with technical problems, all PEO’s have been trained on back-up procedures to ensure that voting can continue uninterrupted until the technical crew arrives. In the event of a machine malfunction, the protocol is to place the paper ballots in the emergency ballot bin. After the polls close, those ballots will be removed by two PEO’s of different political party affiliation and placed in a secure case. Those ballots are then scanned into a fully-functioning optical scan voting machine to be tabulated after the polls close.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Oct. 29, 2008, at 4:00 pm
I couldn’t hold out until Election Day to cast my ballot, as much as I wanted to, but the thought of trying to juggle my journalistic duties with my constitutional responsibility to vote got to be a bit overwhelming. So, I thought, I would pop down the street to the West Tampa Library and vote early.
I lit out of the office at about 11:30 a.m. to vote, and after circling the block once found a parking spot. The entire street on the north side of the library was full, as was the parking lot across the street, in back of the post office. I got in line with what looked like about 60-70 people ahead of me, as Obama volunteers handed out literature and a poll watcher came by with bottles of water. The poll watcher made a crack about not having any Scotch to go with the water, and I damned near left the line to go get one. Would have taken the edge off the cold and the wait ahead.
They let people inside in groups of 15, and each group took about 15-20 minutes to cycle through, so I spent about 45 minutes in line outside and another 15 or so inside until I got to the woman manning the voting computer. “Your picture ID, please,” she said. I had to repeat to her my current address, then read a placard that threatened me with jail if I was bullshitting her about anything, then sign my name on an electronic keypad instead of the old paper record. What a pain in the ass. There was an elderly lady next to me who, I swear, like tried to sign the electronic keypad 30 or 40 times without it registering. She apparently couldn’t get it right or muster enough strength to have the pen make an impression. What a nightmare.
After I did all that song and dance, the poll worker hit a button and my paper ballot started spitting out of the printer. This printing process took about 30 seconds or so, as opposed to the digital cards that touch-screens used to have, which took almost no time to program. I then was handed my two paper ballots inside of a “privacy folder” and was directed to a voting booth. The black felt-tip marker at the booth worked, just barely, and I started marking the two pages.
