Darden Rice of the League of Women Voters says the fluoride vote has caused “ripples” within moderate GOP circles in Pinellas. She believes that “what we see here is the fight over the soul of the Republican Party, much more than a Democrat vs. Republican thing going on.”
Justice agrees, citing former GOP county commissioners such as Bob Stewart and Ronnie Duncan who distinguished Pinellas County from more conservative environs in the Sunshine State. And he’s targeting Bostock not just on fluoride, but also for her vote against spending $49,000 from the county’s coffers on matching funds for the Meals on Wheels program. She was the only commissioner who voted that way.
District 3: Neil Brickfield vs. Janet Long
At a campaign forum a couple of weeks ago, Janet Long greeted Commissioner Ken Welch by saying it had been a good couple of days for her. Why? She hadn’t appeared lately in the Tampa Bay Times.
That dip in coverage followed a period of potentially damaging headlines. Most recently, a story claimed that the former state lawmaker had padded her resume by saying that in the late ’70s she had acted as Seminole’s city administrator, when records show she was an administrative assistant and then a deputy clerk. Long dismissed the accusation, pointing out that the work she did was equivalent to that of running the city’s “day-to-day operations.”
But that mini-flap was nothing next to the self-immolating job she did on the anniversary of 9/11. During the course of a nearly 90-minute meeting with the paper’s editorial staff, she said, “The firefighters have really taken advantage of 9/11 and what happened then and capitalized on it and the emotion,” adding that the firefighters “can spin a message like no one I’ve ever seen,” referring to Pinellas commissioners experience in dealing with firefighters and emergency management services.
The blowback has been intense. An anti-Janet Long Facebook page was created, and Long says that firefighters and their families have been “irate and not very kind with their comments.” But she says that’s been offset by her supporters, even though they freely admit that they wouldn’t have used her words or her timing.
But coming from a family of first responders, she admits it’s been a “very painful experience to hear some of the people who think suddenly I’m a totally different person and that my values and my everything has changed because of words in a conversation.”
The 68-year-old Long is certainly brassy, and isn’t reticent to criticize her GOP opponent, Safety Harbor-based Neil Brickfield, saying she can’t think of a single issue in which he’s taken a leadership position.
“If you listen to him talk, he’ll talk about what he’s done to keep taxes down, how he’s put his finger on every line item on this budget. Really? Seriously?” Long asks, referring to his support for increasing the EMS tax rate by 46 percent.
When contacted about Long’s comments, Brickfield sticks with his mantra, saying he’s been a crucial part of a local government that has reduced the county’s budget by 36 percent and improved services. He frequently cites a poll that showed how the citizens say it’s a great place to live and work. “Those answers are my report card,” he says.
The 49-year-old New Yorker still maintains his Brooklyn accent. He moved to Pinellas in 1989 and says he fell in love with the community the first time he drove across the Howard Frankland Bridge and turned off on Ulmerton Road.
A former Safety Harbor City Commissioner, Brickfield also serves on the PSTA board, where he says he’ll support a ballot referendum next year on a possible light rail line from downtown St. Pete to downtown Clearwater.
On the fluoride issue, he says he also wanted to put the highly contentious decision in voters’ hands, proposing that it go to a referendum. But he failed to gather three other votes. He stands by his vote to take fluoride out of the water, as well as his erroneous comment that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said fluoride should not be given to infants or those under the age of 8.
The Dental Association’s Menendez dismisses that comment as “stupid stuff,” and says that Brickfield and the other commissioners who voted for the removal put too much trust in anti-fluoride advocates who “constantly bombard them with half-truths, no truths, and misinformation.”
When confronted with those comments, Brickfield counters with a criticism of Pinellas dentists. When county staff looked at the records of pediatric dentists’ bills, it was discovered that only three out of 632 dentists in Pinellas County accepted Medicaid for kids. “I take exception to that.” (A study last year by the Pew Center on the States ranked Florida dead last in the country in providing dental care for kids on Medicaid.)
