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.

From the Gov’s Office:

GOVERNOR CRIST APPOINTS EARL LENNARD AS HILLSBOROUGH SUPERVISOR OF ELECTIONS

July 14, 2009

CLEARWATER – Governor Charlie Crist today appointed Earl Lennard of Riverview as Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections. Lennard previously served as Hillsborough County Superintendent of Schools from 1996 to 2005.

“Earl understands the importance of elections in our democracy and has a fundamental sense of fairness,” Governor Crist said. “Dr. Lennard has served the Hillsborough County community well, both as superintendent and as a community leader, and I am confident he will once again serve the people of Hillsborough County well.”

Lennard, 67, served as a classroom teacher and administrator before being appointed as superintendent. A 42-year educator, he received the Ellsworth Simmons Good Government Award earlier this year from the Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners. He was named Florida Superintendent of the Year in 2003 by the Florida Association of District School Superintendents.

Lennard’s community service currently includes serving on the boards of directors for the Brandon Community Foundation, the Hillsborough County Fair, the Riverview Chamber of Commerce, the Boys and Girls Club of Riverview and A Kid’s Place. He earned bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from the University of South Florida and a master’s from the University of Florida.

Lennard is appointed for a term concluding November 8, 2010, to fill the vacancy created by the death of Phyllis Busansky last month.

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.

A roundup of the media coverage after the jump:
(photos courtesy of Stehlik Photography)

TBO.com: Mourners praise Busansky as true leader

Tampabay.com: Despite the weather, a full house for Phyllis Busansky

ABC Action News: Family, friends remember Phyllis Busansky

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.

Phyllis will be well remembered in our hearts for her brave leadership, for her open, gregarious style and for her ability to fix problems that were tough to tackle. Her legacy as the primary author of the Hillsborough County Health Care Plan lives on every day in the improved health of our neighbors and our community. She was truly passionate about making sure those who least could afford medical services had an advocate on their side. She already was showing that passion as Supervisor of Elections, working to guarantee that voters’ rights were protected in Hillsborough County. My thoughts and prayers are with her family. She will be sorely missed.

From Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio:

I am shocked by the death of Phyllis. How sad that death claimed her just as she was embarking on a new challenge that she loved very much. The public needed her and this was her calling. I had the pleasure of serving with Phyllis on the County Commission and her passion for helping those who needed help the most was something I always admired. This is a great loss to both her family and to our community.

From Congressman Gus Bilirakis, who Busansky ran against, unsuccessfully, in 2006:

Phyllis Busansky was a dedicated public servant, whose work benefited many people in our area. I am saddened to learn of her passing, and my thoughts and prayers are with her family.

The Pasco County Democratic Party:

We are so saddened by the death of Phyllis Busansky, Supervisor of Elections of Hillsborough County. We have been so proud of Phyllis – of her committment to public service and her generous heart and spirit. She passed away in the night while at a conference in St. Augustine. She will be missed by us all.

Congressman Kendrick Meek of South Florida, the leading Democratic contender for the U.S. Senate in 2010:

This morning I was personally saddened by the news of the sudden death of a remarkable public servant, Phyllis Busansky. She was a friend of mine and her passing is nothing short of tragic. Phyllis put public service first and she helped improve the lives of countless people in her community and beyond. That never ending desire to serve others made Phyllis a remarkable leader of the highest order. May her family be comforted by the many members of a tightly knit community that admired her which spans Hillsborough County and the state of Florida during this incredibly sad time.

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.

The St. Petersburg Times weighs in with this info:

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:

It is with great sadness the Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Office announces the passing of Supervisor of Elections Phyllis Busansky. Mrs. Busansky, 73, was attending the Florida State Association of Supervisor of Elections conference in St. Augustine with members of her staff at the time. She passed away sometime during the night. The cause of death is not known at this time.

“Phyllis,” as she was known to everyone, was an inspiration to generations of Hillsborough County residents and a champion of good government. Over the last six months she brought order, focus and vision to the Elections office. Her entire staff is deeply saddened by her passing. However, they will continue to perform professionally and deliver the kind of election services Phyllis was determined to have.

[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.

There is a mis-editorial in yesterday’s St. Petersburg Times claiming that early, mail-in voting is causing frustration in several municipal elections in Pinellas County:

Some candidates were surprised, too. Local election campaigns don’t typically kick into high gear until about six weeks before Election Day. But in mid-January candidates, started hearing from residents who had ballots and were frustrated that they had seen no information about the people running for office. Candidates scrambled to try to connect with those voters, and in some cases had to order more campaign materials — and incur extra costs — for a campaign season that grew by weeks.

I’m sorry but if the only frustration with Supervisor of Election Deborah Clark’s promotion of voting by mail is with candidates caught off guard by early balloting, then spare me the hand-wringing. Serious candidates for local office should hire political consultants and staff knowledgeable enough to help prepare them for the accelerated election calendar.

As for voters who cast their ballot early, that’s their prerogative, and to assume that they will be uninformed when doing so is the typical kind of elitist thinking that believes voters are too stupid to make the right decision. After all, no one’s forcing them to turn their ballots early. In fact, in my experience, early voters are usually the most passionate about current political events. Remember, they proactively sought out the opportunity to vote early, so why assume the worst?

I once had these similar concerns about early voting when I wrote this op-ed for the Tallahassee Democrat FOUR YEARS AGO:

“Absentee voting is dramatically changing the nature of elections – and not necessarily for the better. Campaigns must begin earlier and spend more time and money to “track” absentee ballot requestors. As an example, each county’s election supervisor typically produces for campaign managers a daily list of the voters who request an absentee ballot. The names on these lists are quickly input into databases, so that each receives a first-class mailing, a candidate visit or telephone calls. Obviously, this is an expensive operation. In fact, in the campaigns I’ve worked for, the tracking program described here is often the second-highest expense behind television airtime. When it comes down to it, identifying absentee voting by that name is a sham.”

Some candidates got ahead of the curve and have been pushing their supporters to vote early. Now the participation in early voting is overwhelming. Just look at the overwheling response early voting has had already. The Supervisor’s office posts a running tab of how many ballots have been turned in. Across the county, OVERALL turnout is already at 25 percent — a number much higher than previous turnout figures.

So turnout is up, voter participation is increasing and candidates have to run fuller, more expanded campaigns that cannot rely on last-minute negative attacks, all the while decreasing the pressure and financial burden on the SOE’s office. And this is bad for democracy?

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.

In an audit released Tuesday, former Hillsborough County Elections Supervisor Buddy Johnson went over his budget by almost one million dollars last year. The report says he then violated a state law for failing to reimburse the county.

The audit was conducted by the accounting firm Ernst and Young.

According to the audit, Johnson spent more than he was allotted for elections equipment and operations. It’s not clear how the $940,000 was spent.

Read the full story here.

The entire audit in .pdf format is downloadable by clicking here.

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.

So, why did nobody say anything? They apparently was a’feared of ol’ Buddy:

…As she made the announcement Jan. 16, Busansky didn’t know the ballots had actually been discovered a month earlier.

“My theory is the staff was afraid to say anything until Buddy left,” Busansky said Monday.