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Manager's Conflict Of Interest Damages Integrity Of Vision Effort

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: April 9, 2008

Citizen activists are wary about trusting a regional visioning process backed by a leading business group because they fear it has a hidden agenda to promote sprawl, starting with a beltway through sensitive rural lands in southern Hillsborough.

Turns out the activists have reason to be concerned.

The person hired to manage One Bay also has been representing 20 landowners who own 90 percent of the developable land in south Hillsborough. The landholders include farmers who want to do something different with their land because of the economic challenges posed by citrus canker, migrant labor issues and NAFTA. They've created a coalition to do something big, and have hired Amy Maguire, the project manager for One Bay, to lay the groundwork.

Maguire is excited about the project's possibilities, the details of which have not been made public. Judging by an aerial map she gave the Tribune's editorial board, the development would be enormous. Its boundaries extend beyond Interstate 75 on the east and U.S. 41 on the west. It reaches from the Little Manatee River on the north to the Manatee County line on the south.

The project is sure to be controversial because it lies outside the urban services boundary, the line beyond which the county won't provide public services, such as water and sewer, to contain costs.

The aerial map does not include renderings for roads, but given the project's scope, it will necessitate the kind of four-lane highway that citizens in the area have vehemently said they don't want.

Maguire's work with south Hillsborough's big landholders came as news to Stuart Rogel, president of the Tampa Bay Partnership, the business group that initiated One Bay and brought in other partners, including the Tampa Bay Estuary Program and the Southwest Florida Water Management District. Officials at those agencies said the partnership hired Maguire and that they were unaware she was working for developers.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise that Maguire has ties to developers. She works for Southern Strategy, a powerful lobbying firm in Tallahassee that represents developers and big business, including the St. Joe Co. and Associated Industries of Florida. One of the firm's leading lobbyists, John Thrasher, a former speaker of the Florida House, made news last September for penning a duplicitous letter to Florida voters aimed at defeating a state constitutional amendment drive, called Hometown Democracy, which would have restricted growth.

On its Web site, Southern Strategy says: "With a little imagination and a lot of effort, we guide the decision-making process to achieve a favorable result."

Frankly, that's what concerns us.

When Maguire's conflict was brought to his attention, Rogel met with her and Dan Mahurin, president of SunTrust Bank Tampa Bay, and chairman of the One Bay effort. Together, they agreed that Maguire would sever her relationship with the landowners and continue as director of the regional visioning program.

Rogel and Mahurin fail to appreciate that from a citizen's point of view, Maguire has shown her hand. She's thrown in with developers. In a meeting at the Tribune, which the editorial board called to discuss a possible framework for a countywide public-deliberation process, she expressed an openness to the idea of a south-county beltway.

How can county commissioners like Al Higginbotham and Mark Sharpe, who have defended the integrity of One Bay to distrustful activists, trust Maguire now? How should citizens view her partiality?

Rogel says Maguire's hard work and enthusiasm supersedes her mistake and that the Tribune is "making too much of this." Other partners in the effort agree Maguire's done a credible job.

Nevertheless, the region's visioning process must be trustworthy and transparent. On those measures, Maguire has failed.

She should step aside.

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