Organizer pulls plug on recall

The committee formed to recall a Dade City commissioner disbands at the mayor's request.

By ERIN SULLIVAN, Times Staff Writer
Published September 19, 2007

DADE CITY - It started raining outside as Curtis Beebe read his statement.

He leaned into his brown, leather sofa; his gray hair standing up from running his hands through it so much. The light was dim and he adjusted his wire frame glasses. He doesn't look like the type of guy to be behind a grass roots group whose objective was to oust a politician.

Beebe is calculator normal - technology consultant, husband, father of three, dog lover, a man who grew up in Niceville, Fla., and picked Dade City to raise his family because it reminded him of home.

And so, when he called the press to his house Tuesday afternoon to release new information about his group, the Committee to Recall Commissioner Camille Hernandez, he did it in his mild tone.

The statement was two pages, professional, single-spaced.

You had to listen closely, amid all those calm, vanilla words, to catch the nut graph:

The group is disbanding. It's over. Done.

And Beebe is back to being who he was when all this mess started.

That was about six weeks ago, when Dade City Commissioner Camille Hernandez fired off a letter to Gov. Charlie Crist asking for an investigation into some alleged misdoings of Mayor Hutch Brock and former City Manager Harold Sample. Hernandez also sent the letter to the press. In the letter, she wrote that Sample's former role as an adviser to the city was a conflict of interest because he took a position at the Dade City Business Center. She also accused Brock of talking the city out of purchasing a building on Eighth Street so his legal partner could buy it, and silencing the council on a landfill proposed near the city.

In the letter, Hernandez - who could not be reached for comment - also alleged that both men had violated environmental laws regarding the city's water system.

Brock compiled more than 100 pages of records, which he passed out at a July City Commission meeting, which he said disproved all of the allegations.

A formal investigation has not taken place, because Hernandez did not file her complaints the correct way in Bureaucractic Land. You can't just mail a letter to the governor. You have to file specific forms. And Hernandez seems to have dropped her complaints, as she hasn't gone through those proper channels.

Beebe heard about all this hullabaloo and he was angry. He is friends with both men. He, in turn, fired off a letter to area newspapers.

But then his anger subsided and, as he talked with more people in the city, he found others who felt the same way - that Hernandez showed misfeasance in her failure to fulfill her responsibility as an elected official, because she didn't ensure her allegations were truthful, substantiative and accurate.

In short, he felt like she was not acting civilized.

Mudslinging, he says, is not good for the community. And that's what he felt she was doing.

So, Beebe, who has never held an elected position, other than treasurer in his Young Republicans group at the University of West Florida, asked people who were interested in this issue to meet for lunch one day in Dade City. He expected a few people.

More than 50 turned up.

Beebe, who says he's not good with public speaking, suddenly found himself as the core force behind this group. He made PowerPoint presentations. He built a Web site. The group elected officers. They raised money and sent out fliers in the mail and staked signs on lawns.

So things were cruising along in the recall group, until the mayor came over to visit Beebe on Sunday afternoon. They sat on Beebe's front porch on the quiet, shady street and smoked cigars.

And the mayor asked him to let it go.

It's something Brock had been thinking about for weeks. He felt like the energy going toward the recall was overshadowing real issues in Dade City. While he was happy that so many people were enthusiastic about city government - more people have been to recent meetings than in all of Brock's eight years on the commission - he felt that the issue could divide the city.

Brock told Beebe that Hernandez "seems to have tempered her approach to commission business" and that to forgive and move on from all of this is in the city's best interest.

So, Beebe said he would think about it, and he didn't sleep much Sunday night. He paced around his headquarters. He talked with Sample and some other town leaders and members of the group.

On Tuesday morning, he typed his statement, saying that it was done.

He wrote that he hopes Hernandez will "not squander this fresh start."

Beebe said he's not sure where things will go from here. He still has much to do in disbanding the group - from filing expenses to uprooting signs. After this taste of politics, he's not sure if he likes it enough to run for office someday or not. But he said he would do it all over again, though "I'm glad to have it all over with."

Brock, also, was relieved.

"It was something that wasn't advancing the city's best interests," Brock said Tuesday evening.

He thinks that much good has come out of all of this - it's all out in the open and now "there is a chance to continue in dialogue." He says this will make the town stronger.

"This could have spun into such a different direction of total anger and divisiveness and action that nobody would be proud of," Brock said. "I don't want that to be the footprint of Dade City. We've got too many good things here."

Erin Sullivan can be reached at esullivan@sptimes.com or (813) 909-4609.

[Last modified September 18, 2007, 22:23:43]