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A glimpse of the past and a hint of the future
© St. Petersburg Times Maybe the beautiful decorations and view from a meeting room at the Heritage Springs Country Club in West Pasco, combined with heartfelt expressions of appreciation voiced by neighborhood leaders for their elected and appointed officials, finally got to me. I'm not really a Christmas type, but any period in which anyone even pretends to be in favor of peace on earth and good will toward all softens at least a couple of my edges. I should have paid more attention when I found Kurt Browning and Steve Simon chatting furtively in the parking lot after the meeting, no doubt discussing their impending announcement that they were changing political parties. Former Democrats, they are now Republicans, as soon as they go through hell week or swallow live frogs or whatever the initiation process calls for. Things are about -- after a quiet interlude -- to get interesting again. So much for peace on earth. But earlier, not knowing that, when I got up to speak, I took a few mandatory shots, pointing out how things had changed since I came to Pasco County 30 years ago. Heritage Springs was wilderness back then. Pasco County Administrator John Gallagher, then a New Port Richey City Council member, had longer hair than I did (and do now, what's left of it). County Commissioner Simon, who was 19 then, had more hair than he does now, and Ken Littlefield, later to have a little difficulty in that area, knew where his primary residence was. And Pasco Elections Supervisor Browning, although I didn't mention it to the audience, was a teenager already working in the office he now heads, although his voice hadn't changed. But I got caught up in the moment. It was strange that an association like this one, the Council of Neighborhood Associations, should be inviting elected officials into their midst for praise. A now-defunct previous group, which began as the West Pasco Allied Council, was a little more, er, contentious with public officials, even when one of their own became a county commissioner. But times change, and they were right. Although still not perfect, Pasco government has improved vastly in the past three decades. I noted how Sheriff Bob White, rather than resort to the dodge-the-bullet-at-any-cost tactics of some if not all of his predecessors, simply took responsibility for a tragic error that had occurred in his department and concentrated his efforts on making sure it never happens again. There were representatives of the county's highly professional building department receiving praise from the community they serve. That's a department where, a little more than 20 years ago, the builders association sent a refrigerated truck to deliver wine and chateaubriand to employees there -- the people who sign off on their work -- and, with very few exceptions, nobody but Gallagher was even appalled by it. While some of his peers were busy making Florida a worldwide laughing stock over the past two years, Browning, you will recall, was one of the guys being quoted on television about how his office managed to do things right. Yeah, I know, not everybody in the county likes everybody in county government, and I'm not saying its perfect, but compared to not-too-ancient history its a finely oiled machine and the wheels are lubricated, not greased. And, for a change, I said so, and I felt nice and warm. So much for a good breakfast buffet and the siren song of unanimity turning Scrooge into Pollyanna. The late Richard Daley (the father, not the son) when he was mayor of Chicago, once said, after pulling off a piece of his trademark political chicanery, "Politics ain't beanbag," meaning it isn't a game, and things can get rough. Most of the infighting will be politically oriented, and the good things I talked about probably won't get worse, but if you thought that warm, fuzzy blanket you were wrapped up in just turned into coarse sandpaper studded with cactus leaves . . . you were probably right. And I thought I was going to run out of material.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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