School board rights a wrong

​It took three tries, but last week the Manatee County School Board got it right.

Under withering criticism, the board unanimously reversed its misguided decision to discount developers’ impact fees 50 percent if people vote to extend a sales tax for schools. Even Robert Gause, who last November, under the gaze of developers Carlos Beruff and Pat Neal, proposed the connection, voted to remove it.

There’s a lot of credit to go around for this object lesson in good civics. Much of it goes to County Commissioner Charles Smith, who along with Robin diSabatino, voted against the ordinance containing the connection when it came before commissioners in January. Mr. Smith saw an ethical travesty, took a principled stand against it, and has been the conscience of the commission ever since.

School Board members Charlie Kennedy and David Miner kept the issue alive. Finally, Scott Bassett, former chair of the Manatee High School Advisory Council, whose remarks at Tuesday’s meeting set the tone for the board’s vote. If the board didn’t know the difference between right and wrong when he started, it did three minutes later when he finished.

County commissioners should quickly approve the revised ordinance. It enables a clean referendum on a simple extension of a tax we already pay. There’s no excuse to oppose it now, especially since by all accounts Superintendent Diana Greene has the school district moving in the right direction.

I also hope this means the end of gratuitous gifts to special interests, and that future attempts to pervert the public process for private gain will meet with the scorn they deserve. Most people, including responsible business owners and fair-minded civic leaders, want good schools and are willing to pay for them, but they also want good governance.

On May 24, they finally got some.

This story was originally published May 31, 2016 at 4:12 PM with the headline "School board rights a wrong."