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Largo voters have choice: the rebel or his mentor
© St. Petersburg Times When Marty Shelby and the mayor of Largo, Bob Jackson, list their disappointments with each other, there's a trace of something else in their voices -- regret, maybe, or even loss. Not to over analyze, but at times it sounds as though Shelby has rebelled against an older mentor, and Jackson has lost a protege. Oh, well, it's too late now. Shelby, 45, has renounced his seat on the Largo City Commission. He is challenging Jackson, 69, for mayor in the March 4 election. It is the sharpest challenge in decades to a sitting mayor in Tampa Bay's fourth-largest city. You know how, as often happens, a public board has at least one member who stubbornly refuses to go along? Who doesn't mind if the other members roll their eyes while he or she plows ahead, holding center stage, discoursing, finding fault? In Largo, that's been Marty Shelby for the past few years. He was elected to the commission in 1995, not too long after moving here. His skepticism (or as his critics would say, his grandstanding) started slowly, but picked up. There was the city's curfew, which Shelby seemed to support, then voted against. There was his call for the city manager to be fired, which is not something you do lightly, and he did twice. Shelby opposed the automatic hiring of Sandy Mortham as the city's lobbyist in Tallahassee. As Mortham was a Largo product who rose to be secretary of state, this dissent was about as rare in Largo as dissing Elvis in Memphis. He was the main critic of the mayor's mishandling of a dispute with the Renaissance Festival. But mostly, it's been the library. The library! Largo wants to build a $20-million-plus, 90,000-square-foot library to replace its aging and overstuffed building on East Bay Drive. The debt would be paid off from Largo's share of the Penny for Pinellas sales tax. Shelby originally supported the idea of a library, but came to declare the specifics to be too big, too overdrawn, too undebated. Things came to a climax last June when Shelby packed City Hall with library opponents for a public hearing. The library, he said, was a "stealth bomb." It was pretty heated. Shelby kept calling on Jackson to "let the people be heard." Jackson's attempts to keep order were booed and shouted down. Shelby accused Jackson of stacking the deck of speakers; when he denied it, somebody filed an ethics complaint against him for denying it. Shelby wrote letters to the editor and made television appearances calling his colleagues arrogant for not putting the library to a referendum. "He was extremely rude throughout the meeting," Jackson says today. Not that he thinks about it or anything, but he happens to keep a videotape in his office of that night. Jackson, a retired school principal, has been in city office since 1974. Jackson says he's been in Shelby's position himself, running for mayor in 1979 and losing. "I ran for the wrong reason. I ran because I didn't think Tom (Feaster) would be a good mayor. You've got to run because you're the most qualified." I had lunch with Shelby. He was sharp and funny and unrepentant. He knows that Jackson and the mayor's supporters see him as a bomb thrower. "It's not going to be my way or the highway," Shelby said. "I'm going to build consensus." (And yet, it is hard to forget, the rest of the commission was "arrogant" for not siding with him on the library.) What, I asked Shelby, if you're flat wrong? What if voters choose Jackson? "Then that's great!" he replied at once. "That's great. I'll go back to making a living. But I'll go with a clear conscience. You respect the voters' decision regardless. But they'd have had a choice."
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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