A legacy of business well-finished

Column

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the fourth in a series on the top stories in Pasco County during 2011 as selected by The Pasco Tribune staff.

Only because, at last, Steve Spina developed calluses on his ego that freed him to regard setbacks philosophically, are we even tempted to needle him – six months after his final day as Zephyrhills' longest-serving city manager – one last time over unfinished business.

Why, it's a Christmas Day plum and a year-end salute all in one cheerful poke!

Spina never got his downtown traffic circle, so Zephyrhills will never be mistaken for Paris. Despite his best efforts, the town still lacks a street named, officially, for civil rights martyr Martin Luther King Jr., so Zephyrhills lingers, in certain high-minded precincts, as some unenlightened backwater.

Finally — are you sitting down? — kids of a certain age still don costumes for trick-or-treating on whatever night Halloween happens to fall, and not on the last Saturday before Oct. 31, as was once Spina's (fleeting and altogether goofy) preference.

Well. Roast-worthy as they are, even if we took these lowlights seriously, they would amount to mere quibbles when measured against the broader tapestry of Spina's remarkable tenure. There we see an unlikely CEO and a problematic enterprise growing, improving and succeeding along parallel tracks.

Looking back, the happy symbiosis between Spina and Zephyrhills is so obvious it's a wonder it took us so long either to acknowledge or appreciate it. In this, historians have all the advantages.

As those who lived through it well recall, however, the cheery, mutual blossoming of man and town was in no way mere coincidence, but for the longest time, neither was it guaranteed.

It's true Spina was being groomed for the job. Trained as a journalist, he became more interested in municipal operations than making deadlines while covering Zephyrhills for the local paper. In 1987, then-City Manager Nick Nichols made him head of the planning department, becoming Bobby Bowden to Spina's Jimbo Fisher.

If everyone expected an eventual transition, its abruptness was utterly unanticipated: At 61, Nichols, a runner and the portrait of health who'd hectored Spina to quit smoking, died of a massive heart attack in January 1996.

Spina, then 42, assumed the big chair while the city council weighed its options. But even after the board erased "acting" from Spina's title in early spring, the sense that this was an interim appointment persisted.

As Spina struggled to refine a winning management style, he built a reputation as a high-handed, thin-skinned, uncommunicative dictator. Maybe, nearly a quarter century after his parents moved the family south, there was just too much residual Westchester County, N.Y., smugness in him. Public safety unions despised him; city hall employees trembled at his approach; and upstart city council candidates won election promising to have him removed.

It turned out, however, that this particular Yankee was eminently coachable. As he tended his bedside manner, the city began to pile on success after success reflecting the former planner's vision of a forward-looking small town that still revered its history and traditions.

The downtown corridor got a pleasing makeover. The YMCA lured while he was a planner expanded its operations and outreach. There were careful annexations and the development of a busy commercial district on the town's north side. The police and fire department have modern station houses.

Memorably, in 2001 Spina provided a suitable home in public space — a city-owned World War II barracks — for a show of spellbinding, if controversial, paintings on domestic violence by a local artist.

Meanwhile, Spina underwent a redevelopment phase of his own, emerging from the early tumult dramatically changed and improved. By the time New Steve was compelled to fire two police chiefs and an airport director, his reputation as an honest broker was so thoroughly established the dismissals scarcely raised an eyebrow.

At last, then, when Spina made good — in just his second attempt — on his decision to retire, the only person in city hall happy about the announcement was Spina himself. He'd earned a doctorate in public administration from the University of Florida, stealing up to Gainesville once a week for more than half-dozen years, squeezing out a dissertation from the showdown over renaming Sixth Avenue for King in 2003, only to see the decision overturned by subsequent election results.

Office walls stripped and boxes packed, the newly minted doctor declared in his 57th summer he was eager to tackle novel challenges. Maybe so. But that doesn't prevent his name from being linked — as though he were Urban Meyer before Ohio State dangled its irresistible offer — to every city manager opening in the region.

So he moved on despite a few items remaining on his to-do list. So what? A leading indicator of Spina's triumph in the office that, long ago, was thrust upon him is how quick others would be for him to do for their cities what he accomplished for Zephyrhills. Or, more accurately, what Spina and Zephyrhills accomplished together.