A Letter to the Herald

The Bradenton Herald has some unusual ideas about news coverage. For instance, it will cover the entrance and exits of local candidates but won't cover their campaigns. In an effort to fill in some of the gaps, I have created Manatee County On The Move to talk about issues the Herald finds too thorny to discuss.

For starters, I want to share this letter I just wrote to the paper about how taxpayers are assuming the cost of 93 Sherif's Dept. personnel without a peep from the paper, and justified it for a while by creating a "crime box" that had little correspondence with reality.

Here's my letter. I hope they will publish it and let the issue end here. Otherwise, I feel I will have to assemble a group of plaintiffs for a class action lawsuit against the paper and the Sheriff's office for uncritically publishing this spurious information and damaging a stable middle-class community that it has tainted with the shadow of violent crime.

I found your coverage of the Manatee County budget adoption - and in particular the Sheriff's $10 million budget increase - woefully lacking in
information that should be known by every taxpayer.

Due to an error made by the Sheriff, taxpayers are being asked to absorb the equivalent of 93 new personnel.

To recap briefly, the Sheriff ignored a $500,000 consultant study that recommended Manatee county build a jail that would meets its own needs and sustain the county's lucrative 1996 contract with federal immigration authorities to hold 350 ICE prisoners. The Sheriff opted not to follow the consultant's recommendations, and instead built a jail that he was publicly warned would cost Manatee County the immigration contract revenue it has enjoyed for 10 years. When Manatee County lost the contract, 93 Sheriff's employees became redundant. Instead of biting the bullet, admitting his error and letting those people go, aided by the Herald's silence he managed to get a $10 million budget increase needed to cover the value of the $7,750.000 lost contract. That decision was abetted by the vote of District 4 Commissioner Ron Getman, a former FHP supervisor sponsored for County Commission by Sheriff Charlie Wells.

Instead, you ingenuously reported on July 13, "Wells said the 12 percent increase in next year's budget over this year's is not a result of upped efforts inside a "crime box" in the central part of the county. ... In April, Wells outlined a 9-square-mile box in the heart of Manatee County where one-third of the county's violent crime occurs. At that time, he said some of this year's funding would be shifted to tackle the crime box."

The crime box has caused values to drop in neighborhoods that were included without any evidence of crime problems, such as Bayshore Gardens, where dozens of homes have gone on sale since his spurious "crime box" was published in ther Herald as a cheap but clever ploy to justify so much extra funding to cover his error in not following his consultant's recommendation - and where no significant crime rate has ever occurred. In turn, his selfish strategy has cost homeowners valuable equity, tarred the image of a stable, middle-class neighborhood in Ron Getman's district, and put the stability of tha entire Bayshore Gardens corridor at risk.

The Sheriff's duplicity is obvious only to a few. It should not be too much to ask of the Herald that it tell the clear truth to all. When can taxpayers expect full coverage of this issue from you?

Joe Shea
Bradenton
(941)753-1136