Some warm fuzzies over government that's smart
By JAN GLIDEWELL
Published January 8, 2007
I don't often get all choked up with the warm fuzzies when it comes to government, so when I felt a case of it coming on by watching a bunch of Pasco County employees enjoying a Christmas party, it took awhile for me to find a way to tie it all together.
That opportunity came when Florida's new governor, Charlie Crist, in short order named Bob Butterworth the new head of the Department of Children and Families and then Pasco Elections Supervisor Kurt Browning secretary of state.
I'm sorry, I just don't get to use the sentence "That was smart" all that often when writing about government.
I have always had tremendous respect for Butterworth for his practical, commonsense approach to the various jobs (mayor, prosecutor, judge, state attorney general) in which he displayed courage and a knack for getting things done and getting them fixed.
DCF, through no fault of most of the very good people who work for it, has been a bureaucratic nightmare for as long as I can remember. It has had 18 directors in 37 years, the last one resigning after being threatened with jail for the agency's inability to get mentally ill prisoners into the proper facilities. The agency has endured so many scandals that I sometimes thought the word "troubled" should be added to its letterhead.
Crist, a Republican, succeeded Butterworth as attorney general five years ago. He had a chance to see what kind of work Butterworth does and crossed party lines to give him the difficult and important job of trying to fix DCF.
We will probably never know how many Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter) saw who was on the caller ID and hid under the bed when the job was up for grabs, but Butterworth just may be the guy who can fix it.
It is also a smart political move for Crist. If Butterworth succeeds, the governor's nonpartisan approach gets part of the credit. If he fails, he was, well, a Democrat.
My favorite Butterworth moment?
July 2001 when, as others debated the morality and legality of same-sex relationships, Butterworth, who was attorney general at the time, cut through the red tape and awarded $25,000 from a victims compensation fund to Mickie Mashburn, the life partner of Lois Marrero, a Tampa police officer gunned down by a bank robber.
I have known Browning for 32 years, since he was a 16-year-old kid working part time in the Pasco elections office when it was run by his predecessor, Mary Morgan.
"Keep an eye on that one," she told me one night as he labored away at helping add up the vote the old way, adding, "He's pretty sharp."
And indeed he was, getting elected to and holding office with never a really serious challenge for more than a quarter of a century and making no serious missteps along the way.
When the word "Florida" became synonymous with screwed-up elections six years ago, it was a pure pleasure to see him being quoted on television as an expert source on how things should have been done, and that knowledge will serve all of Florida well. I always suspected Browning had congressional ambitions; he always denied it. He was asked to take the job he took, and my bet is that he will do it well.
Back to the holiday party.
This, the spouse of one of the partygoers explained to me as we sipped a cocktail at the bar, was a gathering of the group of people who issue building permits in Pasco County. They were having a good time, apparently really wanted to be there, and, he told me, had paid for the party, including their food and drink and for all of the gifts that were exchanged.
They were also, I had to notice, enjoying themselves - not always the case with government office parties I have attended.
It made me think of the days a couple of decades back when a developer backed a refrigerated truck up to the building department and employees helped themselves to cold duck and frozen turkeys - gifts from a company they regulated - and their superiors were amazed that we found fault with the practice.
Those days are gone, as, apparently, are the days of grand jury investigations, top officials being indicted and a despairing public wondering if someone like John Gallagher was ever going to come along and fix things.
He did.
Shucks, the worst dirt dug up of late on the county sheriff is that he has a nice truck - trust me, that is a switch.
Just as good people often do come along in government, they, alas, also leave us, and I was saddened last month by the loss of two beloved and competent former Zephyrhills city officials - Jim Bailey and Patti Whitfield.
I watched Bailey - good-humored, honest, straightforward and dedicated - help steer the city through some difficult political waters in the mid 1970s, and watched him continue to serve as mayor and council member until the early 1990s. He died in early December after a lengthy battle with cancer.
Whitfield was not quite as well-known as Bailey but served an important role as administrator of the (then) city-owned Zephyr Haven nursing home. She died on Christmas Day.
She came to my attention in the early 1970s when a reporter doing an investigation on nursing home abuses in the state, a serious problem then, told me there had never been a complaint filed against Zephyr Haven.
When I asked Mrs. Whitfield about it, she invited me to drop in at any hour of the day or night to find out for myself and asked me not to tell her when I was coming.
I went three times, and found a clean, well-run operation taking good care of its patients and staffed by people who seemed happy in their jobs.
That, I guess, is the common thread that runs through good government. It isn't anything fancy, just good people doing the right things for the right reasons, and it happens more often than we sometimes get around to telling you about.
Will I eventually snap out of the warm fuzzies and become more like my aging, cranky, curmudgeon self?
Try asking me about the people who ran the Saddam Hussein execution and those in our own government who should be, and apparently aren't, horrified by that spectacle and what it says about all of us - maybe because of what was done, certainly because of how it was done.