Column

Politics dips into familiar territory

By JAN GLIDEWELL, Times Columnist
Published August 13, 2007

Sometimes I am glad to be 2,000 miles from home.

That would include now, when it seems to be Dade City's turn in the spotlight at the Perennial Nasty Politics Rodeo and Disorderly Conduct Seminar.

One of the city's commissioners, newly elected, wants to challenge what she portrays as the improper shenanigans of certain city officials. The critical commissioner has written the governor, who has virtually nothing to do with municipal officials, and whose name she can't spell, to make accusations she neglected to bring up in any other forum. And, as the horse racing folks say, they're off.

The first thing I want to say is that two good men - Harold Sample, who recently resigned as city manager, and Phil Thompson, who recently retired ending a 32-year career in law enforcement - had the tail ends of their careers caught up in the beginning wind flurries of the upcoming political storm.

Having known both men for decades, and having watched changes in Dade City politics and law enforcement for decades, I want to point out some things before what others say about them, or even possibly what they may have to say about each other, muddies the waters.

I have covered Harold Sample for more than 30 years in his multiple capacities in government, the courts, law enforcement and city management, and we haven't always been on the same side in the sorts of confrontations that develop between public officials and journalists. But I have never had any reason to doubt his honesty, decency or loyalty to the people who employed him.

It is the same with Thompson, who is responsible for the quality of the modern, well-ordered Police Department the city has today.

If either man has had minor bumps along the way, it is because those things happen when you are in the business of regulating the interaction between large, or even small, groups of people.

To appreciate how minor those ripples have been, you would have to have been around long enough to remember the days when a city police chief was a fugitive on multiple felony charges (of which he was later convicted) and when a city manager was accused of being drunk and creating a disturbance at the scene of a suicide. You would have to remember the time a high-ranking police officer went to prison on charges of having sex with an underage girl and trying to hire another officer to kill a third officer who he thought was a snitch.

During those years, I heard accusations against city officials including, but not necessarily limited to: arson, drug running, posing for gay porn photographs, grand theft, murder, child molestation, bribery and public drunkenness.

Pretty heady stuff compared with City Commissioner Camille Hernandez's assertions about alleged misuse of power at City Hall. (Hernandez accused Sample of having a conflict of interest for serving as a consultant for the city while also working for the Dade City Business Center. She was also upset with Sample for asking Thompson, who has Parkinson's disease, to retire.)

If I have a message, I guess it is that Dade City folks should take heart. Municipal mud wrestling on the North Suncoast is part of the fine tradition of what former New Port Richey City Attorney Jack McPherson used to call "head-knocking, gut-busting" Florida politics. When it isn't Dade City's turn, it is Brooksville's or Inverness' or those old reliable standbys, Port Richey and Crystal River.

Zephyrhills had a flap in 1976 that resulted in two City Council members being removed in what was only the second successful recall of city officials in the history of Florida. (A group in Dade City voted last week to start a recall effort against Hernandez, although it remains to be seen how that goes.)

Traditionally one or more newcomers, either political or geographical, comes to town and decides for a variety of reasons ranging from good to nefarious that things need a good shaking up, and that they are the ones to do the shaking.

What follows is a few months of character assassination, shouting sessions at council or commission meetings, a few (14 in the big Zephyrhills flap) firings, maybe a round or two in court and an election or two.

Eventually either the reformers are unsuccessful, and slink quietly away - or they stay around to become the new power structure, which will eventually invite new reformers. In small towns like Port Richey, they have to take turns because, generally speaking, hardly anybody wants to be on either side.

The names on the marquees change, but it's always pretty much the same movie, usually rated PG, sometimes R and inclined heavily to farce.

So, from where I sit on the side of a mountain, being kept informed (some would argue misinformed) by the Internet and occasional phone calls from family and friends, I want to observe that it will undoubtedly get worse before it gets better but that this too will pass.

And I want to thank Sample and Thompson for leaving the city and Police Department in better shape than they found them (far better in the case of the Police Department) and for two lifetimes of public service.

[Last modified August 12, 2007, 21:19:09]