Readers continue to react to controversy swirling around Manatee Commissioner Baugh | Letters to the editor
Baugh move echos Manatee’s racist past
I am a 1979 graduate of Palmetto High School. Throughout my formative years, the segregationist lines of 1970’s Manatee County were always in plain sight. A street here, literally a railroad track there. I have revisited the county innumerable times over the years and heartily noted racial progress.
However, the nationally reported disclosure of county Commissioner Vanessa Baugh’s brazen attempt to corral allotments of COVID-19 vaccines solely for the richest and the whitest of county residents harkens back to those heinous days of separate but not equal. Her action is especially abhorrent in light of well documented evidence that the poor and people of color are disproportionately debilitated by this hideous virus.
Ms. Baugh’s precept that some people matter more than others echo other supremacist edicts brought forth periodically by county officals during supposedly bygone days. In a 2018 article for the Palmetto Historical Park website, author Tori Chasey Edwards cited that; “Just a few weeks before the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, the Manatee County School Board declared a three-day school holiday for black students so that they could help harvest a bumper crop of tomatoes.” Is this the ugly about-face the people of Manatee County and its commission wish to accept?
Allowing Ms. Baugh to remain a county commissioner consigns the region to the worst of its preceding racial practices that once valued tomato picking over education and now apparently values wealth over health. Hence, I join others in advocating for the immediate removal of Ms. Baugh as a county commissioner and ask that Manatee County officials devise an equitable vaccination distribution procedure based on need rather than zip code.
Malcolm Frampton
Greenwich, Conn.
Keep politicians away from vaccines
My question concerning the controversy that has erupted over Commissioner Vanessa Baugh’s stupid decision to put herself and others on a VIP list is this: Why do the commissioners have any authority in where, when, who and how the vaccination process is carried out to begin with? Should this not be handled by the county health department and medical community?
Let’s face it, COVID has been politicized to the nth degree. We should have learned by now that the motivation of politicians quite often is not of what’s best for whom they supposedly serve but rather how it best serves them. Let the people who have the best knowledge base and experience in these matters run the process, and get out of the way.
Rod Wagner
Bradenton
Remove Baugh from office
Manatee County Commissioner Vanessa Baugh has been known to break every rule she possibly can and lie. Some years ago some of us demonstrated outside an event for U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan. In a letter to the editor published in the Bradenton Herald she accused us of being “paid agitators” who were paid $100 each to go out and demonstrate. She signed the letter and identified herself as a county commissioner.
I replied to the editor and said I did NOT get paid to go to that demonstration nor did anyone else and requested she retract that statement. I never heard from her. I wrote several emails to her county commissioner email address and finally received a response from her secretary telling me that she wrote that letter as a private citizen.
She lied! One lie to me personally so one can imagine how many more there are around. A person who is so callous, who has such dubious character and pretends that everything related to the county is at her personal disposal should not have such a position of power.
Please remove her from her position as county commissioner.
Graciela Greenberg
Bradenton
