Booker T. Washington High School is celebrating its girls’ basketball team winning the Class 5A state championship. The team edged Blanche Ely 56–54 to bring a state title back to Pensacola for the first time in 26 years.
Escambia County should have been more fully included in the celebration if not for Escambia Clerk Pam Childers refusing to cut a $1,000 check that the Board of County Commissioners had authorized to support the program. Childers denied the payment because her position was that the disbursement did not have “a clearly identified and concrete purpose as the primary objective purpose.”
Commissioner Lumon May made the request in November.
- He stated, “Booker T. Washington Girls’ Basketball Team serves a direct and identifiable county public purpose of supporting the holistic development of young women and strengthens community connections through athletics; promoting the health, safety, and social and economic wellbeing of the youth in Escambia County.”
The commissioner agreed it served a public purpose and voted unanimously in favor of the request.
American Legion Check Blocked, Too
Last summer, several county commissioners expressed their frustrations concerning the discretionary funds after Childers refused to cut a $500 check to reimburse the American Legion Post 33 for sending two teens to the Boys State program at Florida State University, even though full board approved the expenditure.
Outlier: Commissioner Kohler said Childers’ restrictive approach to community support funding has made Escambia County “a complete and utter outlier” compared to other Florida counties. Commissioner Steven Barry questioned the distinction between “public purpose” and “county public purpose,” calling it a “made-up difference.”
Board Decision: County Attorney Alison Rogers stated that determining public purpose is fundamentally a legislative decision for the commission, not an administrative one for the clerk’s office.
- “What serves the public purpose is not the counsel to the clerk’s decision to make,” Rogers stated. “You guys are the ones who are supposed to decide what serves a public purpose, and you have very broad discretion to make that legislative finding.”
Childers has ignored the County Attorney’s legal opinion and continues to refuse to cut checks.
City of Pensacola Disburses Checks
Meanwhile, the Pensacola City Council continues to approve its members’ discretionary funding allocations.
On March 12, the council approved:
- Councilman Charles Bare’s request for $1,000 for the Pensacola Humane Society.
- Council President Allison Patton’s requests for $500 for the Pensacola Historic Society and $500 for the Studer Community Institute.
- Councilwoman Teniade Broughton’s request for $500 for the National Coalition of 100 Black Women Pensacola Chapter.
Resolution
Childers has not provided the Board of County Commissioners with any information on how Florida’s 66 other counties deal with discretionary funds for community support. Yet we hear that Commissioners Steve Stroberger and Ashlee Hofberger are pushing to drop the community support funds from the budget, based solely on the Clerk’s position.
- County staff should conduct research and present a report on every Florida county and how each county clerk handles such disbursement.
Let facts drive the resolution.
Thanks Rick, Hopefully Escambia County Citizens will wake up! But 90% are just struggling to pay the bills. Some of the Commissioners forget who they took an oath to represent!
This is a voter issue as much as it is an elected official issue.
Citizens really need to wake up to the fact that obstructionism just for the sake of it is *not* reform.
Special interest in kow-towing to the wealthy and their wants over the general public, and worse still those in low income brackets, is *not* responsible stewardship.
Rudeness and disrespect of public speakers is *not* efficiency.
When the clerk blocks 2000 dollars for worthy causes, it has no material impact on the budget; it simply makes turning down funding for worthwhile community causes a game of optics, with only the lower-income or general public recipients hurt.
When Stroberger prides and self-aggrandizes himself on placating wealthy condo owners who don’t even live in Escambia County to the detriment of the citizens of Escambia County and his own constituents, it isn’t championing private property rights, but his obsession with wealth and status, just like his interest in foiling and personal sky boxes–while bringing nothing of any real value to his district, other than realizing that he had hit a brick wall in his cherry picking of a developer for OLF8.
When Chairwoman Hofberger chirps off speakers mid-sentence like she is dealing with elementary school children, it isn’t efficiency, but an incredibly rude form of governmental gaslighting. When she answers public outcry curtly with “we’re just gonna be at status quo until things change,” it isn’t pragmatism, but gibberish.
It’s no secret that the clerk and the BCC chair want to get rid of Commissioner Kohler and put a plant in his place so that Hofberger and Stroberger have a more malleable third vote to get their business done, which of course includes running a program for Downtown of hobbling the County in every way possible to weaken it so the combined charter folks can get their wish; the City can have direct access to more State funding; they can solidify power; and then raise taxes on the unincorporated areas to fuel their grand designs to turn Pensacola into a 9 percenter playground. (It wouldn’t surprise me if Stroberger is in on it against Kohler also, but keeping a lower profile.)
Citizens need to wake up to what is *really* going on–what the bigger goals are that all these petty grievances are masquerading for. I doubt that most voters in Escambia County would be down with this program to shake up the BCC just for the sake of chaos making if they understood that it is *not* about reform, but digging into their pockets deeper, tapping the already exhausted middle income tax payers to suck the last penny out of them for playthings they will never have access to.
Here’s hoping that as it gets more and more difficult to put meat on the kitchen table and gas in the tank, and as healthcare becomes a luxury for the wealthy rather than a basic need, Escambia voters will wise up to the reality that the reason it has become so difficult to provide is *not* because we don’t yet have enough obstructionism, chaos, and gaslighting out of our elected officials. Until that happens, County officials who are gaming for a combined charter are just going to keep rolling with their programs, and selling it to the voters as having their best interests at heart.