COLUMN

A Sack Of Hubris Dropped On His Head

By DANIEL RUTH

Published: Oct 2, 2007

If you were one of the 300 full and part-time government employees who recently lost your job due to budget cut-backs, Wednesday morning's county commission meeting ought to be especially galling.

For that's when commission Chairman Jim Norman's pet project, the $40 million Chumpionship Park, will be voted on by the full board.

As public works boondoggles go, think of this hooey as the Maginot Line of jockstraps.

No money for 300 county workers. No money for public access television.

But apparently there are gobs of cash to be found in the leather chairs of the county commissioners to pay for Jim Norman's conquest of common sense.

Ever since the commissioner woke up one morning and had a sack of goobers dropped on his head, he has led the charge to spend - and let's use all those zeroes to appreciate the full Monty of money involved here - $40,000,000.00 to build a playground with a gland problem out in the middle of where Moses lost his knickers.

For The Children

Of course ever since Norman woke up and had a sack of shot puts dropped on his head, he has played the "… it's the children, it's all for the children" card in trying to justify spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on a glorified sandbox.

And at the same time, the commissioner has touted financial numbers claiming to show Schlumpionship Park will be a veritable mother lode of money flowing into the public coffers.

But by now, most Hillsborians who have lived through the smoke and mirrors promises of what a financial bonanza stuff like Super Bowls and the construction of Hellooooo Sucker! Stadium are supposed to be, know full well such claims are about as realistic as Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad showing up on the cover of Men's Vogue.

This proposal, after all, is a publicly funded vanity project being pushed by a county commissioner who woke up one morning and had a sack of hubris dropped on his head. In short, we're all doomed.

Crisis? What Crisis?

Recently Norman decried the sad, sorry state of youth sports facilities, noting the dearth of playing fields had reached "crisis" proportions. Oh really?

Not having enough law enforcement officers would be a crisis. The lack of nursing personnel in public schools is a crisis. The loss of wetlands to all those developers who contribute to Jim Norman's political career - is a crisis.

However, adding more facilities for youngsters to play games so that their aging parents can vicariously relive their own lost youth hardly qualifies as a "crisis."

So the commissioner cares about the precious children, does he? Is that so?

What better betrays the hypocrisy of Norman's ham-handed edifice complex than a vote he cast two years ago?

In 2005 The Source Teen Theater, which travels throughout Florida staging plays exploring AIDS prevention, gang violence, teen pregnancy, drug use and peer pressure, sought a two-year $40,000 county grant.

Norman, who never visited the group's offices on Busch Boulevard to learn more about The Source, said no to the modest funding.

So much for truly caring about the children, especially if it distracts from the legacy building of Bumpkinship Park.