I hope you still have your muckers on because the shit associated with the Cone Ranch Advisory Panel a.k.a. C.R.A.P. just got deeper. To review, Commissioner Ken Half Truth Hagan brought forward an idea to sell Cone Ranch (over 12,000 acres of publicly owned land) to private investors in order to "preserve" it by subdividing it (uh-huh). The group that was doing the asking was a bunch of big time Republican donors (uh-huh). So the Hillsborough County Commission appointed a volunteer panel to knock this idea around and equipped them with county staff (on your payroll) along with other other agencies to provide reports and attend the six C.R.A.P. meetings. Recall I did a public records request to Ms. Edith Stewart, the county's highly paid lobbyist assigned to the panel, after the October meeting of the C.R.A.P. to see how much this whole scheme cooked up by Hagan was costing us in staff time.
There are many county departments and several outside agencies associated with the C.R.A.P. discussions and yet by the November meeting the only one I had heard from regarding my request was the EPC. They seemed to fully understand my request and sent me an email listing the staff involved with the Cone Ranch panel, which meetings they had attended and for how long. They also gave me the hourly wages of each of those staff members. Not rocket science, not even speed hump science.
Then a few of the others started trickling in. Mr. Pete Fowler of the Parks Dept thought sending his calendar should suffice? The Water Resource Dept didn't know how much staff time their employees had contributed. In an email response from Mr. James Roberts, listed as a General Manager II, he writes in part:
I could not easily estimate the time that I have devoted this year to developing reports, presentations, and responses to inquiries regarding the Cone Ranch property or to supporting related staff activities.
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2009.