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Speak up, Damato, but listen, too

While we applaud candor in public officials, as opposed to the spin and carefully crafted half-truths that sometimes fall from their lips, Commissioner Dennis Damato's mouth keeps digging him deeper and deeper holes.

In recent weeks, the commissioner's comments have angered real estate agents and their professional organization, several of his fellow commissioners, community groups and individual residents.

Damato shows no sign of backing down from his opinions. While such conviction is admirable, neither he nor the people he represents are being well-served by his refusal to reflect on how his words are being perceived by the public.

Case in point: When a commissioner speaks of sticking a knife in a constituent's throat, he must expect a less-than-favorable backlash.

Damato says that his comments to a reporter about a woman who angered him during a lengthy and stressful board meeting recently were misconstrued and were meant as sarcasm. Damato cannot assume that anyone else would take such a meaning from his graphic portrayal of revenge that is straight out of a gangland movie.

Given the chance to apologize to his constituent, Damato instead offered a limp and unsatisfying excuse that he regretted the comment.

This is just the most striking of Damato's recent verbal missteps, and it continues a troubling trend.

Damato angered the local real estate community by suggesting that agents drove up the prices of homes during the recent real estate boom in order to gain larger sales commissions. This, in turn, pushed up property values, leading to the higher tax bills that homeowners now are protesting and the resulting calls for the commission to cut the millage rate.

Rising property values have had tremendous ripple effects across the board economically, and the real estate community certainly has had a role in this unprecedented transformation. But they are not the only players. Realtors, for example, did not enact the Save Our Homes amendment, which has created the state's taxing inequities. Singling them out for criticism was unfair.

Damato's penchant for bringing prepared remarks to commission meetings has also upset residents, especially those who have appeared before the board on controversial issues.

Residents who take the time to attend board meetings and to argue their points deserve to be heard by commissioners with open minds, receptive to differing points of view. By reading from a prepared text, Damato signals that he has decided these issues long before he has heard from all parties.

He insists that he listens to the public and can change his mind depending on what he hears during the meeting. But time and again, once the public finishes talking, Damato simply reads his prepared text, reinforcing the perception that he is ignoring the public's views.

If this sounds familiar, it should. One of the reasons Circuit Judge Jack Springstead cited in striking down the commission's decision on the controversial Halls River Retreat project several years ago was his belief that the majority of the commissioners had made up their minds before the public had a chance to object.

No other elected official feels the need to rely on prepared remarks, and Damato should abandon this practice as well and give more than just passing notice to the views of residents appearing before him.

Damato has also angered his fellow commissioners by keeping from them certain information that he gathered during the recent space-needs study. Commissioners Vicki Phillips and Joyce Valentino both complained that Damato withheld details they needed to know, to which Damato replied that his two colleagues lacked the smarts to understand multifaceted construction projects.

During the recent search for a new county administrator, Damato pushed to have the interviews with the candidates conducted entirely in private, justifying these closed-door interviews by saying that the administrator works for the commissioners.

Until Damato pays the administrator's salary out of his own pocket, this person works for the taxpayers. There is absolutely nothing that would be said in a private job interview that could not and should not be said in front of the public.

Damato seems to be having more trouble than most elected officials in making the transition to public life from the private sector. The rules, and the roles, for public representatives are much different from those of corporate chiefs.

For example, how would business owner Damato have reacted if an employee had said that she wanted to stick a knife in his throat? The guess here is that he might not see the humor in it.

Because the woman at the commission meeting is a taxpayer, and thus Damato's boss, he needed to show her the respect due to any employer. That includes a profound and sincere apology.

While we encourage the freshman commissioner to continue to speak his mind, he must show more understanding and restraint in his comments to his fellow commissioners and to his constituents.

Mutual respect demands more than the lip service to others that he has shown.

[Last modified October 1, 2006, 07:02:05]