Jeff Bergosh Blog: Making Sausage, Part II

Guidelines

I am one member of a five person board. The opinions I express on this forum are mine only, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Escambia County Staff, Administrators, Employees, or anyone else associated with Escambia County Florida. I am interested in establishing this blog as a means of additional transparency to the public, outreach to the community, and information dissemination to all who choose to look. Feedback is welcome, but because public participation is equally encouraged, appropriate language and decorum is mandatory. Although this is not my campaign site for re-election--sometimes campaign related information will be discussed, therefore in an abundance of caution I add the following : Political Advertisement Paid for and Approved by Jeff Bergosh, Republican, for Escambia County Commissioner District 1

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Making Sausage, Part II

Grinding Meat to Make Sausage is a messy process--that's why most people don't want to look at how it is made from the slaughterhouse to the Publix meat case; people just want to enjoy eating the delicious finished product. Politics, and especially heated debate, is sometimes compared to grinding meat to make sausage---for good reason...

The Escambia Board of County Commissioners recently settled the sheriff's budget appeal, and now that this is behind us, all of the transcripts of our 7 shade meetings are a public record. Yesterday afternoon, board members received the following email from attorney Alison Rogers:

"Commissioners,

Just a note to let you know that Jim Little of the PNJ requested and has now received copies of all seven of the Sheriff’s budget appeal shade meetings.

Please do not email back, but do get with me if you have questions.

Alison"

So this means within the next couple of days, one or more news articles will appear, and more than likely some of the more choice exchanges from these transcripts will be published void of the context that generated the exchanges. In an effort to get ahead of this, I will be publishing all of them, in their entirety, so citizens can read them for themselves if they so choose--in their entirety.

It is like the old saying, these deals are like making sausage--it's messy, stuff goes in, stuff comes out, and most people "don't want to know" how the sausage was made. The internal deliberations of the sheriff's staff will never come out--so in some respects this is not fair. But oh well, at least we got the deal done and we have a 4-year deal.

But because we are a public body, subject to open meeting laws, all of our private deliberations are now fair game for those who want to look. So I'm releasing three more of these transcripts from February and March of this year here, here, and here. Lots of frank dialogue in here, lots of interesting conversations.... (and full disclosure--I wouldn't publish these if they weren't going to be coming out in dribs and drabs void of context in the media in the days and weeks ahead...)