http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20141117/COLUMNIST/141119699/2416
The flagrant conflict of interest some see in Christine Robinson getting the executive director job at Argus while serving as a Sarasota County commissioner might be just imaginary.
Sure, Argus is a pro-business group of wealthy and influential wheeler dealers who formed the organization to collectively focus their political clout in the guise of a nonprofit, neutral, good-government watchdog organization.
Yes, many of the alleged government watchdog members are the kind mostly on alert for steaks they want tossed their way. Neutral they are not, I concede.
Soon after my arrival in Sarasota during the early 1990S, for instance, Argus started clamoring to dump the county administrator. Argus usually worked behind the scenes to push the views and interests of its big-shot members, who had each paid $5,000 just to join. But in 1993, Argus publicly spearheaded an effort to fire County Administrator John Wesley White.
White, it seems, had not always done exactly what developers wanted, though Argus didn't admit that was the problem. Instead, the Argus director wrote a letter that absurdly linked White to a list of evils that included “rising crime, disease, drugs and delinquency.”
In recent years, Argus championed and financed efforts to promote a strong-mayor system for Sarasota, which voters have repeatedly rejected. It has backed developer-demanded changes to the 2050 land use plan. And Argus has been involved in much more, often behind the scenes.
By the way, that 1993 effort to fire the county administrator failed. White remained in the job another four years.
But what if the executive director of Argus had been on the county commission then?
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