Twenty-five years ago, the Sarasota School Board, at the behest of a widely disliked Superintendent, decided to sneak a special referendum on a ballot for July for an additional millage. The school system was on the verge of financial ruin and more money is all the School Board and Superintendent cared about.

But voters were angry, very angry, at what they viewed as fiscal mismanagement and a betrayal of trust for sneaking the item on a special election when most people would not be in town or paying attention.

That referendum failed.

The School Board held a mirror to their collective faces and understood that they had blindly been following a superintendent without exercising any accountability or representation of taxpayers whatsoever. Instead of the taxpayer, they assumed the role of representing government. The School Board fired that Superintendent and soon hired what is now historically loved former Superintendent Wilma Hamilton.

Wilma’s job was to regain trust in the community and straighten out the financial issues plaguing the School Board in a very transparent and collective way. She reached out to The Argus Foundation Executive Director, Kerry Kirschner, who believed Wilma wanted to do the right thing by the students and community.

Kerry and Wilma reached out to the big community players at the time and these groups funded an independent study of the school system. That study aired the good, the bad, and the ugly of the school system. It made recommendations and laid out specific areas where extra money should be spent were a referendum to be passed in the future.

Committees were formed both within the school district and outside of the district to help the school district reform itself. This transformation was public, transparent, genuine, and inclusive of voices outside of the district. Once it was on its way to being transformed, and had a track record of change, the school district decided to try again with another referendum. This time they chose March, when the snowbirds would be in town.

With the help of community leaders and organizations, Wilma Hamilton earned the trust of the community back through a lot of outreach, hard work, transparency and by genuinely listening to the community.

There was a lot to be learned from that saga which was 25 years ago. Unfortunately, the commissioners of North Port appear to have repeated the beginning of that story 25 years later. After a failed referendum in November which would have given the city commission borrowing authority for capital projects, the commission decided to place five separate items on a ballot when they knew voter turnout would be a fraction of what it was in November. They decided to quickly place items on the ballot that they did not have final design plans or updated business plans for – in essence, they had no idea how much money some of these projects would actually cost them in the end.

This was troubling to The Argus Foundation and we were concerned that voters did not have enough information, or, have enough time leading up to these referendum questions to understand the fiscal ramifications and all of the unanswered questions.

Argus asked Florida TaxWatch to perform an independent analysis of the financially related ballot questions, with both pros and cons, and they did just that in a very comprehensive report.

Voters now had a source they could rely on from a trusted historic state-wide organization to understand what they were voting on. The voters spoke loudly, with a higher than normal off-election cycle vote, although still very low in comparison to November- all of the referendum questions failed.

The question is, what will city commissioners do now? Will they change their ways, or dig in their heels? Will they punish voters for not trusting them, or will they transform the way they are governing as the School Board did 25 years ago? Time will only tell, but they certainly have a pathway to success established by some of our county’s greatest leaders 25 years ago. Hopefully, they will learn from it.

Christine Robinson is the Executive Director of  The Argus Foundation.