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After months of persistent (read: annoy- ing) emails and phone messages from The Sarasota News Leader, Republican Sarasota County Commission candidate Alan Maio this week agreed to sit down with us in his Nokomis home over coffee and cake to dis- cuss his candidacy and the issues currently gripping the county, as well as what the future might hold in store. A longtime local businessman, Maio, 64, has most recently worked as an executive with the engineering firm Kimley-Horn and Associates, a position from which he just stepped down. In the August Republican primary, he will face off against Lourdes Ramirez; and he's already socked away some serious cash — nearly $95,000 as of early April — and has lined up some influ- ential supporters: developer Pat Neal, former state Sen. Mike Bennett and Commissioners Joe Barbetta, Charles Hines and Christine Robinson, among many others. Here's what he had to say. The Sarasota News Leader: Why run now? Alan Maio: I started working full-time in September of 1963, which as I say it to you seems far-fetched, but I came out of a real city environment, the northeastern corner of New Jersey. I was the first person in my family — big old Italian family — to graduate from high school, first one to go to college. If we were to classify people, we were the working poor. I went to work in a factory that made air-conditioning filters in my senior year of high school, quite frankly by exaggerating — I'm going to use that word, 'exaggerating' — my age. I'm very proud of that. I've been working full- time or full-time and going to school for 51 years, so now I get to do something I've always wanted to do. I've helped a lot of my friends with their campaigns, locally here and in the county, and got involved in state campaigns, so it's my time to do that, and hopefully I will convince at least 50 percent plus one that it is my time. You'll get a calm, capable, full-time commis- sioner who's very technically competent and who is not the least bit intimidated by the numbers. I got my degree in accounting; I've been an accountant running an engineering firm, so numbers are something I live with on a daily basis. SNL: What do you think will be the biggest issues the commission will have to deal with after the election? AM: Some big issues will have been resolved by then. The change in county administrator has already occurred and [Sarasota] 2050 has one more series of big meetings that should happen before I'm elected. There are probably a dozen things that none of us are even thinking about that will become big issues. A balanced budget, the amount of taxes coming in from new growth GOP SARASOTA COUNTY COMMISSION CANDIDATE SPEAKS! By Cooper Levey-Baker Associate Editor Sarasota News Leader April 18, 2014 Page 35