Manatee County: Absurdity

On Thursday, I got word from friends that Manatee County had made national news again, this time a Washington Post article highlighting our county commission’s participation in all of the recent theater related to women’s reproductive rights. If you are getting the feeling that our little community of roughly 400,000 is showing up in those platforms more than would seem likely from a statistical perspective, or that we’ve been mentioned almost exclusively for our follies, no you’re not crazy. Manatee County has apparently become ground zero for local government absurdity.

Pressure mounts on Florida Republicans as antiabortion activists eye their next battleground state, was published by WAPO on Thursday and opens with a dramatized recount of Manatee County Commissioner Carol Whitmore (R-At-Large) discussing a 1973 abortion she said was from a "non-consensual“ relationship in a surprising statement during a Sept. 14 meeting. As a pro-choice Republican, Whitmore is among a shrinking breed that seems to be almost exclusively female these days.

The article notes that more than 1,000 people took to the streets of downtown Bradenton last Saturday to protest the county ordinance proposed by right-wing commissioner James Satcher (R-D1) that the commission recently sent to Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, seeking her legal opinion, as to whether it would run afoul of the state constitution. The article also notes that Manatee County doesn’t have an abortion clinic and that while Gov. Ron DeSantis says he’s pro-life, the man who has extremely transparent ambitions to run for president has yet to weigh in on a Texas-style ban.

And that last part is really the crux of the article, the idea that the political third rail of abortion rights will feature prominently in 2024, and that while the political calculus of a Republican being pro-life in Manatee County, or even Florida, might be easy to figure, taking a stance as a national character will not. Nationwide, 59 percent of Americans think that abortion should be legal.

While that number has remained somewhat static in recent years, polling data shows that it has, however, become much more polarized in terms of party affiliation, with Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents 45 percent more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That spread was only 33 percent going into the highly-divisive presidential election of 2016.

This data set is instructive, I believe, not only in terms of the abortion issue but as to why Manatee County keeps winding up in national news. For two decades, Florida and Texas have been legislative laboratories for special interest groups and political think tanks. From the NRA to the American Legislative Exchange Council, there have been dozens of examples of the states playing host to early iterations of extreme legislation because they would be more likely to get by state legislatures, state courts, and state regulatory officials so that they can be tested in federal courts and then sent out to other Republican-dominated states should they survive legal challenges.

Hence, it should be no surprise that Manatee County, given its current political state, would be an attractive place to seed ideas that may be seen as batshit crazy elsewhere. Mark Lee Dickson, a Texas-based right-wing activist and founder of the "Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn Initiative," seemed to grasp that reality when he reached out to Satcher, offering his help in bringing the policy to the Sunshine state. A closer look at the recent spate of appearances our county commission has made in the national news reveals possible indications as to why.

Manatee County jumped into the pages of The New York Times Magazine last October when the publication profiled the absurdly Trumpian nature of the expensive 2020 Republican primary for the district 6 BOCC seat, in which Commissioner George Kruse was battling former Manatee County Administrator Ed Hunzeker. The feature-length article lampooned the cartoonish nature of the Hunzeker-Kruse race and the way in which competition over who loved all things Trump the most totally replaced any sort of honest debate about the actual matters of governance that come before the board.

The race was, of course, not unique in that regard, as Kruse’s campaign cohorts Kevin Van Ostenbridge and James Satcher also came into office on the same ballot thanks to the same kind of dark-money PAC-funded attacks on their Republican opponents not being MAGA enough for Manatee County. Big money kept local issues out of the race while allowing candidates who ran on Trumpian causes to wrap the actual matters of local governance within their agenda in Trump-inspired keywords like deep state in order to build support.

No sooner was the new board seated, it seemed, that Manatee would be back in the news for all the wrong reasons. This time, our community made international headlines when the board’s chair, Commissioner Vanessa Baugh, manipulated the pool of potential candidates for a COVID 19 vaccination pop-up site and then created a special "VIP list," that included herself, friends and supporters, who would be vaccinated without even having to be selected from the lottery pool. Vaccinegate made our county commission the local government laughingstock of multiple continents for weeks on end.

The spin-off controversy related to DeSantis’s threats to respond to the story by threatening to redistribute vaccine doses slated for the Manatee event elsewhere and whether Republican commissioners Misty Servia and Whitmore supported the governor landed Manatee back in the national news, with each story reminding viewers and readers of Baugh’s despicable behavior.

Just about the time those stories began dying down, our environmental crisis at Piney Point landed the entire cast of characters–including DeSantis–back into the national spotlight, once more as a cautionary tale. Given the persistent red tide that continues to plague a county that has largely avoided the economic downturn experienced by other communities over the past two years precisely because so many Americans have recently discovered its beautiful beaches and other environmental treasures, I somehow doubt that story won’t yet bear an epilogue or two as well.

It’s hard to say exactly what the current infamy of our county says about the quality of our local government beyond the obvious: that it’s fairly low, even by Florida standards. That said, this is Manatee County, where the most appropriate slogan may well have become: Sit tight, things are about to get worse.