Letter: Transparency is a lost ideal in the ‘blue bubble’

Letter to the editor

Last week, a prominent local Democrat publicly named the dysfunction in Gainesville’s city government that so many people have been calling out for years: “We have all begun to recognize the feel of authoritarian times, but I never expected that spirit to reach our fair city’s government,” Robert Hutchinson wrote on Facebook.

His post centers on the latest destruction of trees on City property, with a larger point: “This is happening despite every City Commissioner’s campaign literature and all the blah, blah, blah about the environment, trees, transparency, and listening to the public.”

In all probability, Gainesville is in for four more years of spin to cover city government’s disregard for transparency, accountability, and practicality. Barring intervention, divine or human, the future will follow the trends of deforestation, demolition, deepening debt, bloated budgets, pet projects, fraying infrastructure, punitive ordinances, unqualified hires, overpaid consultants, erratic decisions, quiet deals, overstepped authority, data-mining tech, disrespect for constituents, and a government captive to private and UF interests.

“Transparency and listening to the public” have all but disappeared since 2015 in a rapid dismantling of civic processes at City Hall. Hutchinson wrote that the previous City Manager changed the rules on public notice (which presumably is not within the Manager’s authority): “Whatever her motivation, the practical result was to insulate staff decisions from public scrutiny.”

Public notice, public participation, and especially public scrutiny have been purposely diminished and are not loved by some officials and staff, either. Policy decisions no longer need to be based on experience, discussion, and analysis. Some are made with no public notice, such as scrapping Charter Officer searches and promoting interim Charter Officers to permanent positions — off the agenda, at the end of a meeting, after most people had left. Closing a street and reconfiguring others without a peep to neighbors are among items slipped onto consent agendas that some Commissioners seem not to have read before meetings.

Constituents have been insulted, trolled, and removed from City meetings. One citizen was arrested in 2021 when his face mask kept falling down; he has been banned from City Hall and any contact with City officials since then, while his case sits dormant.

The list goes on and on. Upcoming attempts at further control include a ballot measure in November to let the City Commission, not voters, pick who would fill a Commission vacancy for two years. A similar proposal failed in the previous Commission. This time, it got a unanimous vote to appear on the ballot as a way to save the City $200,000 for a special election, a joke coming from the least accountable, most wildly free-spending two Commissions in City history.

Thursday’s City Commission meeting agenda features the establishment of ad hoc committees for solid waste and environmental resilience. That may sound innocent, but it is more likely that these will be one-topic committees that expend resources and much talk to arrive at foregone conclusions. Staff was working to reestablish standing committees like legislatures have, but that work disappeared in early 2023, and the mayor said last month that he won’t seek to reinstate any. When the standing committees were abruptly disbanded in 2016, the then-City Attorney told concerned Commissioners they could just champion their own issues. The resulting ad hoc committees were formed to pursue those narrow interests, and these will, too.

Housing and neighborhoods in Gainesville have their own sad stories in the past ten years of random deregulation and subsidies for market-rate developments. Animosity from the dais was misdirected, for example, toward 4,000 petitioners and hundreds of residents who objected to density increases in single-family neighborhoods, including the County Commission and 1000 Friends of Florida, to no avail. The mayor is putting “housing” on the August 26 meeting agenda for a discussion that almost surely will not refer to the valuable kind of 2018 housing-summit material that never came up again and even disappeared from the City calendar archive in early 2023. A revival of that level of analysis by housing specialists and real-world input would be amazing; so would not considering it his job to rebut speakers and not telling people to email him instead of coming to Commission meetings.

In Hutchinson’s post, he prefaced his remark about authoritarianism with this wistful confession: “At least, I thought, we still had refuge in our blue bubble of Gainesville.” May the blue bubble pop so those in it can see what’s really been going on at City Hall. People from all parties and no party have been trying to raise that awareness for years, like their warnings about the biomass disaster of incinerating trees at great cost of debt, fossil fuel, pollution, and deforestation, in a Tree City.

Some people who shared Hutchinson’s post seemed too lost in the bubble to get his point about an authoritarian city government. One wrote “TLDR” (too long, didn’t read) above a one-sentence summary of the shared post and then suggested that “country boys” on the City staff might cut trees out of spite: ”Could it be a ‘ha ha let’s cut these trees down and watch the soy boy libtard cucks cry and wail’ situation? … this identity politics culture war self-righteous bs has really brought the bar tumbling down.”

Well, yes, it has — at City Hall, too, but not by “country boys” working for the City. Maybe we should look in the mirror.

Tana Silva, Gainesville

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