The Chaplain Turns Water Into Whine

By DANIEL RUTH druth@tampatrib.com

Published: Feb 5, 2008

If you're a government apparatchik, seeing Hillsborough County commissioner and resident board parson Brian Blair barging through the door has to be the paper-pusher equivalent of the pol who came to dinner meets Mongo from "Blazing Saddles."

Good grief, this guy appears to have crashed more events than Kato Kaelin, which might explain The Chaplain's presence late last year at an Environmental Protection Commission staff meeting.

The EPC staff members were meeting with representatives of a yard waste processing company, Mother's Organic, to resolve violations of county permitting rules.

After much back and forth, EPC officials and Mother's Organic agreed to the payment of what has been euphemistically referred to as a "benevolent donation" of $18,000, which somehow had begun life as a $60,000 fine.

Blair's Sick Tummy

Also present at the meeting with Mother's Organic was none other than that high priest of the hustings, The Chaplain himself, who did not seem to be in a very forgiving mood.

According to documents describing the meeting, as well as several attendees, Blair castigated the EPC staff for having the audacity to do crazy, wild, bizarre stuff such as protecting the environment, before telling the employees their decisions had made him "sick to his stomach."

The Chaplain then told the EPC staff they hadn't heard the end of the Mother's Organic brouhaha and then stormed out of the meeting, but not before reminding the agency he once was chairman of that it was situations like this that cause the public to think of them as "The Gestapo."

"We didn't feel too good about it," EPC attorney Rick Tschantz said of Chaplain Blair's meltdown. "The staff was simply following the rules.

Now, even if you ascribe the worst motivations to the EPC employees, there is no evidence any jack-booted thugs broke in to the homes of the Mother's Organic executives and dragged them off into the night to be tortured and sent to concentration camps.

For his part, The Chaplain insisted that it was not he who was referring to the EPC staff as Gestapo goons, but rather was simply reminding the employees what other people think of them, to which this space politely suggests is a pile of … poppycock.

Routine Matter?

While serving in his role as a county commissioner, The Chaplain has every legal right to sit in on whatever government meeting he wishes, even if it does seem a bit odd a pol would want to involve himself in a fairly routine bureaucratic matter.

What The Chaplain can't do is attempt to influence the outcome of an administrative decision. That, as they say in Chaplain circles, would be wrong.

So is it all that unreasonable to conclude when a boorish political hack, whose idea of civil discourse is slamming faces into turnbuckles, shows up at an EPC staff meeting and starts bloviating about being sickened by the employees while dropping veiled accusations of their connections to Nazi Germany, that the Chaplain was indeed trying to intimidate the civil servants over whose budget he has a vote?

The Chaplain insisted he was only trying to get the EPC staff to provide "customer service." Hmmm, perhaps in the same way SS book burning was simply an effort to save electricity?

Keyword: Book of Ruth, to read and comment on Daniel Ruth's blog.