Roberto's fast fall lies squarely at own feet

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By HOWARD TROXLER

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 24, 2000

The way I met Mike Roberto was, he hopped into my Jeep and we tooled around Clearwater while he pointed out the good, the bad and the potential. This was June 1998.

The first-year city manager was energetic, enthusiastic and impressive. He seemed like the antidote to a period of torpor and drift. After only a few months in office, coming from nine years in North Miami Beach, Roberto already had put together a sweeping plan called "One City, One Future."

He envisioned a tree-lined, landscaped Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard leading to a redesigned downtown, a concrete-free waterfront and beach, and plenty of tourists -- pedestrian tourists -- strolling among new shops and cafes.

"This is a 10- to 20-year process," he said that day.

Oh, well.

Just a little more than two years later, Roberto, 44, is heading out the door. He got a final shove from Mayor Brian Aungst, who tested the wind and decided it was time. After some uncomfortable hashing-out of a deal worth about $166,000, it was over.

Let's call it a strongly encouraged resignation.

Roberto's brokered departure came nine days after the voters shot down a $300-million redevelopment plan for Clearwater. It was not a close vote. It was a shout of no-confidence.

How did this happen? How did Mike Roberto go from wunderkind to whipping boy in two years' time?

Maybe he would have lost the battle of ideas eventually anyway. But he sped things along by giving critics enough rope to hang him.

For starters, it's not like the whole city was crying out for a revolution when Roberto showed up. Plenty of people liked Clearwater pretty much the way it was -- a pleasant-enough place, despite its overcommercialized beach, under-used waterfront on the mainland and excess of concrete in all the wrong places.

Yet at first Roberto had momentum and the support (or at least the silence) of the City Commission, so his critics seemed in the minority, painted as sort of a flat-Earth society of naysayers.

The bloom began to fade from Roberto's rose with a series of missteps. For example, he dumped a controversial fire fee proposal in commissioners' laps and hit them on short notice with a tax rate increase. His bosses learned, afterward, about generous perks for top staff.

A top aide to Roberto resigned after his contract was improperly altered twice. Roberto spent millions on consultants, and $15,000 for a staff retreat. By an amazing coincidence, some contracts came in just below the $25,000 cutoff for requiring his bosses' approval. His plan to change the name of Clearwater Beach to "Clearwater's Beach" had the approximate buoyancy of cast iron.

His most visible misstep was the "roundabout" at the beach. The idea was to have a graceful, impressive traffic circle as a signature entrance. The reality was an incredibly stupid traffic-accident generator, creating better than one wreck a day. I almost wrecked there myself the other day, trying to follow the signs as they were posted. It was government at its worst: Do something to make things worse, then blame the public. Those stupid drivers!

Like Nixon going to China, Roberto tried to establish better relations with the Church of Scientology, which was only common sense. But when he became politically weak, it gave his critics more ammunition.

The question now is if his departure leaves Clearwater dead in the water -- if the defeat of the downtown plan was synonymous with deciding to do nothing. Roberto's central premise was that doing nothing leads to deterioration. Let's see if the city's leaders believed it.

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