Issue link: https://newsleader.uberflip.com/i/320652
the game, and people accepted that. It never did filter up to the level of the policymakers, which kind of stunned me. It never rose to the level of the elected officials, and our elected officials are supposed to be the people who manage the store. Well, all of that fell apart in 2011. Even after all that, the voters seemed to not even notice that the people they elected to oversee this process hadn't caught this earlier. It proba- bly was a systemic problem for many more years before that. They did finally correct the course and they did finally let the administra- tor go, but the board as it's set, it's five people who are all Republicans who pretty much come from the same political cloth and the same philosophical cloth. In 2006, if I had heard these rumors, I wouldn't have let it go for five more years. SNL: How would your journalism background affect your decision-making? RP: People have different ideas of what jour- nalism is. A young person turning on the news may not understand traditional journalism. If you go from Fox News to MSNBC, you think, "I'm getting a whole different story." That to me is more entertainment. Back when I was at the newspapers, commu- nity newspapers, normally, if I wrote a story, it would have at least two sides. We'd put out the newspaper and the following Monday I'd get calls from the city council, and they'd say, "Your story was completely off-base." Then you get a call the next day from someone in the public, saying, "You're always siding with the city." That's what a balanced story is. You let the public decide. As a journalist on a board, you can ask the right questions; you can bring other people in, investigate it, find out what you need to find out. If the county administrator says there are no problems in the Procurement department, you don't accept that on face value. The per- spective of a journalist is a much different perspective than a businessman. You want to minimize your difficulties, your conflicts, in business. SNL: Has the county handled the process well of revisiting Sarasota 2050? RP: There's going to always be pressure from the development community to do what they do. They develop. Any corporation is going to try to get an advantage so they can maximize their profits — that's what corporations do. When you talk about major developments of regional impact, you need to have years of planning done and have financing in place, and in order to do that, they must minimize risk. They must have some sort of predictabil- ity. That's understandable. You have to have some sense that you're not wasting all this time and money. I understand why they want to modify the plan. I'm not totally in favor of that. It's just the reality of the way that sys- tem works. You can kind of summarize me as, "I see a lot of gray areas." I see the benefits of develop- ment, putting these things in place, bringing jobs here. On the other hand, you have to have the right kind of scrutiny: Is growth paying its fair share? Sarasota News Leader May 30, 2014 Page 17