Hedging and Funding

Under The Hood

A hotly contested Sarasota County School Board race just exposed a significant schism between Vice Chair Caroline Zucker and an area representative in Tallahassee—and may create new divisions on the board next year. State Rep. Jim Boyd’s political committee, Building On Your Dreams, just dropped $1,000 into coffers for Teresa Mast, the candidate challenging Zucker’s re-election.

I asked Boyd in a short Twitter exchange why he made the donation and he credited Mast’s “conservative, student focused leadership.” When I asked if he worried about creating a rift with the local board, he made clear one already existed, referencing the Florida School Boards Association’s “suing the state (and losing each time) for us giving parents and students Ed options.”

The obvious allusion was to a recent FSBA decision to sue the state over a vouchers program. Interestingly, Zucker as president of FSBA last year encouraged the association to end its legal fight with lawmakers after suffering setbacks in court. “My first motion as president,” she tells me, “was to eliminate that lawsuit, to get us out of that. I thought it was detrimental to our major goal, which is looking out for children.” But she originally supported the suit, and has not forgotten. Mast says she would “absolutely not” have supported legal action in the first place, and welcomed Boyd’s endorsement and his committee’s donation.

Disagreements between state lawmakers and local governments are nothing new, and in a year when candidates for president on down choose to highlight pugnacious messages over unifying ones, Boyd’s actions aren’t completely unexpected. They did, however, create a minor headache for the man who signs the committee’s checks.

Eric Robinson, the most prominent campaign treasurer in the region, made the leap from political player to politician this year when he ran without opposition for a seat on the School Board. This November, he will serve on the body alongside either Zucker or Mast. But Robinson also chairs and acts as registered agent for Building On Your Dreams, a committee that spent close to $3,000 for services with Robinson’s accounting firm so far this year.

Robinson emphatically explains that he doesn’t make calls on who the committee supports. From my short interaction with Boyd, I don’t doubt that. This choice was made by the representative, not the school board member-elect. “It doesn’t bother me if Boyd wants to give money to someone running for school board,” Robinson says. But Robinson won’t endorse in the Zucker-Mast race. He didn’t like when sitting board members campaigned against Bridget Ziegler for an open seat two years ago, and he has no reason to be at odds with colleagues before taking his oath of office. He does acknowledge his work managing finances for political entities could get sticky once he starts serving on the board (though I see little difference with the stickiness we see today), and doesn’t know what he will do when clients spend money to unseat school board members two years from now.

Zucker says she doesn’t care about Robinson’s involvement. “That’s his choice,” she says. “I want to stay in my lane.” Ironically, that’s the problem Boyd has with Zucker and the FSBA—that they keeping cross into the Legislature’s lane.

But Robinson right now is driving two cars on the road. His day job involves assisting politicians as they drag race each other, but as a politician himself he wants to avoid a collision. Now that he’s an elected official, a greater scrutiny will surely come to his outside political activity. It’s time to put both hands on one wheel.

Jacob Ogles is contributing senior editor of SRQ Media Group.

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