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Leaders at odds on buildings

A county commissioner hunkers down after meeting resistance over his building proposals.

By CATHERINE E. SHOICHET and BARBARA BEHRENDT
Published August 2, 2006

INVERNESS-Several commissioners are drawing battle lines in what will likely be a bitter fight over where to build new government offices.

Dennis Damato, tapped by his fellow commissioners to study the issue, said he stands by his plans for solving county officials' space needs problems.

But Commissioners Vicki Phillips and Joyce Valentino said they want more options on the table before spending taxpayer dollars on a decision that could change the face of downtown Inverness.

Damato said in a presentation to commissioners last week that the tax collector could move to the former Inverness Police Department site, but he said providing detailed information in a public setting was premature and declined to specify other available properties.

A large aerial map on file in Assistant County Administrator Tom Dick's office shows the other keystone property Damato has in mind. For a new 25,000-square-foot supervisor of elections building, he proposes building on several parcels at the northeast corner of Dampier Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

That map should have been shown to commissioners before last week's meetings, said Valentino, along with other proposals Damato had received.

"I don't understand why we had to be kept in the dark," she said. "If proposals came in to the county... we should at least know about them."

One proposal Damato received was for a 20-acre site off U.S. 41, nearly 2 miles northwest of downtown.

In a letter to commissioners July 6, Inverness Realtor Jessie Halverson said the property would be ideal for a government complex because of its close proximity to other government buildings and the availability of central water and sewer lines.

Her asking price was $1.9-million.

"As many are aware, Citrus County has grown and space is much needed to keep our county seat in Inverness," she wrote. "There is also very little in large parcels available for purchase, so we are offering our property to the county for possible use."

But most commissioners didn't receive a copy of that proposal when Halverson sent it. And they didn't hear about that proposal last week.

"All that would have done would have been to cloud the issue even more," Damato said Tuesday. "We're having enough problems understanding my proposal."

That was a surprise to Valentino, who had received Halverson's proposal and expected Damato to bring it up.

"Dennis seems to have made the decision" for the commission, Valentino said. "He's not supposed to be making the decision. ... This is a board that makes decisions together."

She said commissioners weren't briefed about Damato's plan in advance, as is common practice with other items on the board's agenda.

Yet Valentino said people "on the street" were already discussing it.

Damato said that he looked at about a dozen properties during his four months of extensive research. Since his presentation last week, he said county officials have received a flood of other calls about available properties.

Criticism from Valentino and Phillips, he said, is unfounded and unfair.

"It's a multifaceted plan, and we have commissioners who cannot think in terms of multifaceted construction projects going on at once," he said.

He believes his job was to analyze all the possibilities and boil them down into a single plan.

"My ideas can be expanded and expounded upon, but they don't need to be dumped into the trash."

Commissioners are slated to discuss the space issue again at their Aug. 22 meeting.

Phillips and Commission Chairman Gary Bartell could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

But Commissioner Jim Fowler praised Damato's plan and said he would proudly support it.

"The board appointed him to this task. He spent four months of his life doing it. And now we want to micromanage and question his reasoning, his thought processes, his judgment, his logic," Fowler said. "It's just a way to avoid making a decision. That's all it is."

He said he is worried that commissioners "are going to take actions that make them look good today but will not serve citizens in the future."

The recent sparring is the latest round in a fight officials have waged on and off for years as they struggle with the question of where to focus the county government's growth.

For Damato, the answer is clear.

"Inverness is the county seat. Inverness is the center of business. Inverness is the center of medical care," he says.

And he says that's the way the county's constitutional officers want to keep it.

If that can't be accomplished, then he would go to a "plan B," a plan that he hopes Valentino will develop.

But Valentino said commissioners should be willing to look outside the core downtown region to find more efficient and less expensive ways to meet office space and parking needs.

Damato said he was just trying to expedite the process.

"I was charged to do the study, and I gave it my best shot," he said. "Now that that's delivered, they want to expand the debate."

Catherine E. Shoichet can be reached at cshoichet@sptimes.com or 860-7309. Barbara Behrendt can be reached at behrendt@sptimes.com or 564-3621.

[Last modified August 1, 2006, 22:45:19]