This week, Manatee County Commissioners sent an egregiously generous contract proposal to perpetually extend the employment of County Administrator Charlie Bishop back to the drawing board. While I’m glad a majority of commissioners were unwilling to sign off on such unwarranted largesse, I think the real conversation needs to be whether they should renew Bishop’s contract in the first place.
Let’s revisit the circumstances in which Bishop was elevated. When developers gained complete control of the board following the 2020 elections, their first order of business was to sack Cheri Coryea, the county’s highly qualified administrator, who was effectively punished for moving ahead with the purchase of the Musgrave property. Never mind that she was fulfilling her job requirement of enacting policy passed by the duly elected county commission.
This massive swath of land adjacent to the county’s Lena Road landfill would extend its life cycle by decades, while also being the future site of several county facilities necessitated by the rampant development of formerly rural parts of the county’s eastern corridor. Developers, who had long sought to purchase the land and build more houses on it, wanted the deal squashed, seemingly to prevent the landowners from profiting by selling it elsewhere…