Commissioner Ronda Storms' father taught her to defend herself. Politics gave her a place to do it.
By BILL VARIAN
Published April 26, 2004
TAMPA - The Air Force brat with the cleft lip learned early how to silence her foes.
When a classmate taunted her one day, the girl named Ronda answered with a slap in the mouth, driving the seventh-grader's braces into her cheek. Afterward, Ronda's father told the tormentor's parents to expect no apology.
"We can see what our daughter did to your daughter,"' she recalls him saying. "But we can't see what your daughter's done to ours. Tell your daughter not to harass our daughter, and we'll tell our daughter not to respond."'
The teasing faded into a painful memory. The girl grew up, married her teenage sweetheart and became Ronda Storms, a teacher, then a lawyer and now the appropriately named commissioner from eastern Hillsborough County.
She is still smashing mouths.
Smack. "Incompetent," she calls the county's former top administrator. Smack. She dismisses two fellow politicians as "an androgynous Chicken Little." Smack. She writes off an adversary as "an emperor with no clothes" who is "fat and ugly," and "a bully, too."
Defending her looks as a kid only added to her natural feistiness, Storms says, looking back.
But it prepared her well for politics.
"This is a rough business," Storms says. "It's not for the faint of heart, and it's not for pansies."
A lover of classic literature, she hurls language with the rage of King Lear.
Her roundhouse style and rapier tongue have put Storms, 38, among the bay area's best known political figures. In a little more than five years, she has become the face of the Hillsborough Commission.
It's a face ruled by nimbus blue eyes and Cling Cherry lipstick, framed in black locks.
On many a governmental body, Storms' combative ways and unyielding Christian conservative stands might land her in political purgatory. But she represents a constituency that is decidedly not Tampa with its secretive men's clubs and expensive, next-Olympic-city dreams.
On balance, her supporters favor smaller government, straight talk and Wednesday night church choir practices.
Many look at Storms and see themselves.
"When she stands up and tells you she will do something, she will do it, or she will come back and tell you why she won't do it," says Dee Williams, head of the Sun City Center Republican Club. "There's a lot of people who like that combativeness. They like that she'll stand up there and tell them where to go."
* * *
In many ways, suburban Hillsborough County is like the eccentric uncle avoided by family until he wins the lottery.
As city governments grapple with tight budgets and limited space, the county is flush with its own brew of Texas tea. It holds much of the region's water supply, mineral riches and plenty of wide-open land.
It wants respect.
That's especially true in east Hillsborough.
Solidly Republican in a county that still leans Democratic, the population here is growing at rates that far outpace those in Tampa.
Storms is the ambassador, and she carries the mantle like a woman not invited to the cotillion.
"I do like to deflate arrogant and puffed up people," she says. "I don't always do it in the most effective way. I might do it with a swipe rather than a gentle something or other."
Her definition of arrogant includes almost anyone from the Tampa power structure.
In contrast, she speaks of her constituents in the warmest terms, unabashedly saying she represents them first, then the rest of the county.
On a given day, Storms' office fields protests over watering restrictions, tips about drug deals in rural Wimauma and demands for sidewalks outside new schools where tomato fields once grew. There's an occasional report of a dead cow in the road.
Her own interests are just as varied. One moment she's quoting MacBeth. The next, she's raving about the fried chicken gizzards at Big D's Deli.
Her district is dotted with clusters of seniors, migrants, farmers, MacDill Air Force Base commuters and carnival workers.
"Salt of the earth people," she calls them.
She has lived among them since high school. She grew up in Germany, Turkey and Alabama, shadowing her father's military career. She taught English at Bloomingdale Senior High after graduating from the University of South Florida, then left to get a law degree, hoping it would lend more cache to her politics.
If she's not meeting with constituents at their homes, Storms is greeting them in her office, painted in day-care colors after her aide gave birth. Storms talks to them from a rocking chair or a couch, a quilt over her legs.
Her Valrico home, on her husband's 20-acre family homestead, backs up to a former orange grove, now a new subdivision. Until last year, she and her husband, David, who installs landscape irrigation, lived there in a mobile home for 15 years.
Their daughter's footprints are captured in a concrete walkway. Storms also carved a biblical quote from Psalms: "Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain who build it."
It's all quite different from the urbanized Pinellas peninsula or the old-money neighborhoods of South Tampa.
Tampa has Gasparilla, where costumed pirates trade beads for glimpses of bare breasts. Storms' district has the Plant City Strawberry Festival, where people get riled up over shortcake.
As she walks the festival parade route, Storms answers the shouts and returns the hugs.
"Hey, I've seen you on TV," yells one young girl. "That's Ronda Storms, right there," shouts another.
"Stand up to 'em," shouts Dub High, 62, from Antioch.
"We like her because she says what's on her mind," High says. "When she's right, she doesn't mind telling people."
Storms spots a familiar face in the crowd - Dot Butler, 64, a homemaker from Tampa who now lives in Land O'Lakes. Butler was among those who appreciated Storms' battle against pornography on library computers and public-access television.
"She's the only one I've seen take a firm stand on it," Butler says. "We need more like her."
* * *
Against that backdrop, many of the signature votes during Storms' tenure have featured her opposing new spending plans and questioning old ones, especially if the money will be doled out in Tampa city limits.
If her Democratic colleague Jan Platt is Commissioner No for her many lone votes of protest on the board, Storms is Commissioner Hell No, arms flailing. Unlike Platt, Storms has been winning lately, though she sits as part of a three-person Republican minority.
Early in her tenure, she fought using public money to lure a new law school to Tampa, where it would be run by historically black Florida A&M University. She quickly drew attention to her mouth, declaring, "We can get them through law school, but we can't seem to get them to pass the bar."
School promoters called the remark racist. Storms said she didn't mean it to be. It was one of few comments she would later call a mistake.
She has twice helped beat down new taxes for transportation projects. She has supported cuts, later rescinded, to the county's indigent health care plan. And she has repeatedly butted heads with others over drinking water projects.
Unfailingly, she does so with Stormsian flair - during one exchange, telling Southwest Florida Water Management Director E.D. Sonny Vergara, "Don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining."
More recently, Storms ensured that a taxpayer-subsidized redevelopment plan near downtown Tampa brought by the group Civitas died on the vine.
She provided a critical fourth vote to fire then-county administrator Dan Kleman and led the argument to instead accept his resignation, calling a colleague who disagreed "shriveled and mean-spirited and puny."
And she has helped spur investigations of spending at the county's transit agency, in the county attorney's office and in the water department.
"Once I lit the fire, it stayed lit for her," says Gerald Hicks, a contractor who brought allegations of water department bidding irregularities to Storms.
Storms cites many influences, among them Bob Merkle, the late former federal prosecutor known by the nickname "Mad Dog."
She once saw Merkle take part in a panel debate. A woman on the panel took issue with Merkle for his mean-spirited attack of her position.
"He said, "Pardon me, Madam, but if you didn't notice, we are in a debate,"' says Storms, recounting. "And in a debate, you demolish the other person's position."'
To that end, Storms has proven herself a capable pupil. She pores over background material on issues before the board, looking for a nugget to help make her case.
She can bog a debate into oblivion by asserting procedural maneuvers, protocol ignored or violations of Robert's Rules of Order.
Storms studies her colleagues with the wit of a street fighter looking for tendencies and vulnerabilities. Never is that more evident than during election season.
In recent weeks she has surprised colleagues with proposals to support the Patriot Act and to ban extending benefits to gay partners of county employees.
Whether by design or coincidence, the proposals served dual roles.
They helped mobilize her own socially conservative supporters, while casting doubt on Democrat Pat Frank, a Storms adversary who otherwise enjoys support among fiscal conservatives. Frank, who voted against Storms in both instances, has announced plans to run for Clerk of the Circuit Court.
Storms denies any sinister intent.
Others see it clearly.
"She not only wants to advance her own political ambitions, but she wants to damage and destroy the political fortunes of people who don't share her politics through radical right rhetoric," says Rochelle Reback, an attorney and Frank supporter.
"Pat Frank is now for promoting what Ronda perceives is a homosexual agenda and is against our poor troops in Iraq."
Reback was at the center of Storms' signature issue as a board member and lawyer for Speak Up Tampa Bay, the non-profit group that runs the county's public television station.
A constituent had alerted Storms that a show on the station was airing graphic nudity.
Storms launched a months-long campaign to yank funding for the station, with hearing after hearing leading up to the 2002 elections. Christian conservatives joined her cause. Show producers demeaned her in effigy.
Storms contends that exposure to pornography leads to sex crimes and other abusive treatment toward women and children.
The offending show's producer, Charles "White Chocolate" Perkins, enjoyed months of mini-celebrity. Fellow board members accused Storms of grandstanding to mobilize her base.
"There are easier ways to get reelected," Storms says now.
For a time, she won out. The station lost its funding. It was a year in which six of seven commissioners were up for election. But a federal court judge ruled the county would likely lose a lawsuit claiming censorship. Funding was restored as part of court-ordered mediation.
The debate opened a permanent rift between Storms and Frank, who opposed Storms' views. Frank, as chairwoman at the time, often failed to halt personal attacks on Storms by people who took the podium to defend public access.
Frank, looking back, says Storms personalized the debate too much.
"I don't know what her own personal interest is about these issues," Frank says. "Perhaps she has some reasons for her feelings."
While a commissioner, Storms has made repeated references to experience with abuse. She declines to elaborate.
"Suffice it to say, I had the opportunity to see the consequences up close," Storms says. "And they're personal and shattering."
* * *
Critics, and there are plenty - largely outside her district - accuse Storms of being more interested in blowing things up than moving the county forward. They describe her as the bully and self-promoter she accuses others of being.
Only reluctantly do they speak openly about her, if at all.
"I guess the most overriding feeling I have about Commissioner Storms is that I'm afraid of her," says Toni Riordon, a consultant who works on water issues and serves on the Tampa Housing Authority. "And I don't spook easily."
Susan Latvala, the Pinellas County Commission chairwoman who served with Storms on Tampa Bay Water, describes her in near petulant terms. The first time they met, Latvala says she put out a hand to introduce herself, only to have Storms leave her hanging, which Storms said she doesn't recall.
"She can be rude and disrespectful to citizens and the staff on a regular basis, as well as us sitting there. And that's not necessary," Latvala says. "She said such hateful things about people and the organization."
For some, Storms cements the image of Hillsborough commissioners as a dysfunctional board more concerned with picking fights than making progress.
"She often ends up needlessly alienating those who could help her objectives," says Bob Abberger, who serves with Storms on the HARTline board. "She clearly creates short-term impacts. But I haven't seen that translate into long-term public policy."
Storms counters that not doing something is sometimes a pretty good thing. Government, she says, should be concerned with "the meat and potatoes" issues such as adequate roads, police and fire protection, and reliable garbage pickup.
"It's a huge thing to have a government that is not bleeding red ink, that is financially successful," Storms says. "Witness every other government."
She acknowledges a quickness to quarrel, even a cunning, but says nothing about her nature is intentionally cruel, a quality she says she deplores above all others.
People who meet her in person for the first time often come away surprised at how personable, funny, self-effacing and self-aware she can be. She recently mailed a tube of her trademark L'Oreal lipstick to the jocks at the WQYK radio station after they devoted a not-so-flattering segment to her makeup.
"I do think I've tempered," she says.
Still, she acquiesces only to her husband, and that she does on many fronts.
She joined the sprawling First Baptist Church of Brandon where he is a deacon because it was important to him, though she can attain no position of similar religious authority there. She caved into his desire to build a house, though it made her feel tethered, because it was his dream.
She even follows his political lead sometimes.
"He's my sounding board. I do what he says," Storms says. "He knows me better than anybody and he loves me."
In 1996, though a political newcomer, Storms narrowly lost a bid for the state House seat ultimately won by Johnnie Byrd. She won her commission seat two years later, tapping the conservative network she helped build as a grass roots activist.
Up for re-election in 2002, she faced a fellow Republican named Arlene Waldron. With no other candidates in the race, the primary was open to all voters, including Democrats.
Storms knew the Democrats might swing her opponent's way because Waldron was comparatively moderate. If Storms could get a friend to join the race as a Democrat or independent, the primary would close to Democrats, assuring her victory. She acknowledges today she did indeed have a candidate lined up.
At 11:15 p.m. the night before the patsy candidate was to file to run, David Storms told his wife it wouldn't be right. She relented.
Like her critics today, Waldron painted Ronda Storms as a person prone to fighting and polarizing people.
"I'm not running for Miss Congeniality," Storms countered. "I'm running for County Commission."
Storms won with 58 percent of the vote.
Fight time nears again.
Storms is up for re-election this year. She faces two Republicans, a Democrat and a candidate with no party affiliation who have only recently entered the race.
At least one of the Republicans, computer consultant Dennis Cadle, has criticized Storms' political style.
"If she's done anything, it's to create a political firestorm wherever she goes," he says.
The other Republican, retired sheriff's deputy James Tagliarini, says he wants to restore respect to the office.
Storms has heard this before.
She polishing off her previous responses.
And she's recalling another lesson from her father.
"One of the things my father taught me is that there's no such thing as a fair fight," she says.
