Slurs mar Sullivan signposts

By JEFFREY S. SOLOCHEK

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 27, 2000

HERNANDO BEACH -- To advertise County Commissioner Paul Sullivan's pursuit of a second term, Sullivan's backers began posting campaign signs Tuesday.

By early Wednesday morning, signs had been stolen from two Hernando Beach supporters' yards. Two larger ones on Shoal Line Boulevard had been defaced with an anti-gay slur written in orange spray paint. Sullivan accused the team campaigning for his GOP primary challenger, William "Alonzo" Merritt, of the vandalism, which has been reported to the Hernando County Sheriff's Office.

"Obviously my opponents think somehow that's intimidating. It's not," said Sullivan, who is seeking his party's nomination for the District 5 seat. "I'm leaving the signs up exactly as they are. I want people to know exactly what they're getting."

Merritt denied wrongdoing.

"I'm just as upset as he is," Merritt said. "We did not have anything to do with it. I'm trying to run a clean campaign."

Joe Lentini, Merritt's campaign manager, deemed the idea that the Merritt camp might stoop so low "stupid."

"That would hurt us more than it would hurt him," Lentini said. "In any event, we would never comment about a candidate's personal life. I don't know anything about his personal life. . . . We don't know who did it."

Sullivan, who is married, joked about the word painted on the signs, saying whoever put it there "should have talked to my wife first." He suggested the vandal's word choice probably had something to do with a limited vocabulary.

The people who worked putting up all the signs did not take the matter so lightly. Julia Jackson, who discovered the mischief, said she and others spent hours on their task and were very upset that their work was profaned.

She noted that Merritt signs and billboards, some of which have been up nearly four months, have not been altered or defaced.

"Our signs are up one night and they're destroyed. So I think it's the opposition," Jackson said. "It has to be."

Despite the hard feelings, Jackson said, the sign problems have done one positive thing for Sullivan's campaign -- some once-ambivalent voters are calling for Sullivan yard signs.

"So it's actually going to work against whoever is doing it," Jackson said.

Commissioner Pat Novy, knee-deep in her third campaign for the Democratic nomination for the District 1 seat, called the mystery of the defaced and missing signs pure and simple politics. Candidates spend money on signs knowing fully that some might get ruined, she said.

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