On May 22, I wrote in Outtakes (Tall Tales) that Mike Whitehead should resign as the chairman of the Escambia County Commission. Last night – June 5 – he did.
I had no idea that Whitehead would or if the community would agree with my position. The Pensacola News Journal never took an editorial stand on the issue. From my conversations with the county commissioners, the citizens did agree and the commissioners were bombarded with emails and phone calls asking them to replace Whitehead.
Mike Whitehead was not going to be the commission chair at the end of last night’s meeting. I had no commitment from Kevin White, Gene Valentino, Grover Robinson or Marie Young that they would oust Whitehead, but I knew that at least three of them weren’t happy with Whitehead.
Had Whitehead not resigned, I think the vote to replace him as chairman would have been 4-1. Obviously Whitehead believed that he didn’t have the minimum two other votes to retain the chair.
Mark O’Brien was working hard yesterday to figure out what was going on. Kevin White had let it be known at the end of the morning Agenda meeting that he had an item to bring at the end of last night’s meeting. I believed it was to make the motion to remove Whitehead – O’Brien did get the handwritten speech that White intended to give…..it’s always fun to watch the PNJ play catch up on a story. For some reason, O’Brien seem to believe earlier in the day that Valentino was going to make the motion.
Whitehead made a huge political blunder when he believed that he was invincible. He forgot that he needed to always keep two commissioners happy if he wanted to remain chairman. He was convinced that no one would ever have the courage to challenge him and dare to take it away from him.
Last year Whitehead engineered the chairmanship with the help of then-County Administrator George Touart by getting the others to vote for an automatic rotation of the chair by District number. He saw the chairmanship as the way to redeem his political fortunes and help him defeat Wilson Robertson in this year’s GOP primary. However, he never seemed to care about his relationships with the other commissioners.
Right before he took the chairmanship, Whitehead attacked the character of White, Valentino and Young when he accused the trio of working together behind the scenes to remove Touart.
He repeatedly bullied Grover Robinson after Robinson dared to suggest the commissioners cut their salaries. He privately made it known that he wanted Kevin White defeated in this year’s election. And he topped it off with upsetting the members of the Sons of Italy – an organization of which Valentino is a member – at their charity golf tournament last weekend.
Whitehead had lost the favor of this fellow commissioners and failed to recognized that that favor was the only thing that kept him in the chairman spot.
By resigning, Whitehead avoided public humiliation and may have revived his political chances in the fall primary. It all depends on his next move. Will he try to distance himself away from the rest of the board and try to paint them as the real problem? He could try to promote himself as the smartest commissioner and the only capable person on the board to the business and development communities.
Don’t count Whitehead out.