Just plain wrong

Be sure to check out this story by my colleague Alex Leary in our Tallahassee bureau. It's about a "political committee" established by a prominent member of the Legislature that has taken in nearly $100,000 in contributions from lobbyists and corporations since the Legislature's session began in March.

It's illegal for members to accept campaign contributions during a session -- the idea being that you ought not be able to shower a legislator with cash while he or she is voting on the laws of the state. But it's perfectly legal for committees established by those same legislators to raise dough.

Hence, as Leary reports, the committee of Rep. Stan Mayfield, R-Vero Beach, has taken $20,000 from Progress Energy (remember the "energy bill" that contains many favors for the electric industry), and $20,000 from Florida Power & Light, to name a couple.

Several members of the Legislature have committees like this, with innocuous names like "Floridians for So-and-So Reform." They are basically devices that allow interests with a lot of money to evade campaign-contribution limits.

Thursday's column on Wednesday!

Here's Thursday's print column. I've written on this topic before, but tried to restrain myself so far this year until the Legislature came into session. I get a lot of disagreement from my friends in local government on this topic -- if the government doesn't "educate" the citizens on which way to vote, then who will?

Stop using our money to tell us how to vote

Here is something that ought to be a law in Florida, but isn’t.

Local governments should not be able to take sides in their elections.

What could be more basic? The government is the servant of the taxpayers, not their master.

And yet increasingly, Florida cities, counties and school boards spend public dollars to try to sway election results.

Maybe the government is supporting a tax, such as the Penny for Pinellas, or Pasco County’s local school tax.

Maybe the local government has a strong opinion in favor of or against a particular  amendment or measure on the ballot.

That’s what happened in Pinellas, where cities and the county government spent tax dollars fighting each other over amendments to the County Charter.

I remember opening my water bill, only to see that my city was telling me which way to vote on the charter amendments. Meanwhile, absentee voters received, with their ballot, a propaganda brochure from the county telling them to vote the opposite way.

Stay Left -- No, Right! No, Left!

There are two kinds of people who drive Interstate 275 South through St. Petersburg -- those who don't know where they're going, and are whipsawed back and forth in a panic by exit-only signs, and those who do know, but are in deadly peril from the first kind.

The fiery and fatal crash of a diesel-fuel truck on Wednesday night, which has put the I-375 exit out of commission, apparently occurred after the driver mistakenly exited left instead of continuing southbound.

At that exit, the leftmost lane is exit-only, headed for downtown St. Petersburg. The next lane over gives you the option of exiting left or continuing to the right. I can't tell you how many times I've been in that lane, exiting, when a panicked driver in the leftmost lane has suddenly veered across my path, desperately trying to get back to the southbound side.

Yet immediately afterward, the southbound interstate splits again, with I-175 bearing to the left toward Tropicana Field, and I-275 to the right continuing toward Bradenton and Sarasota. Once again, the wise St. Petersburg commuter knows that at that split, last-minute drivers in the left lanes will panic and plunge back to the right, unmindful of the fact there may already be cars in those lanes.

Oh, and just for funsies, as the road continues southbound from there, the original two lanes each in turn become exit-only lanes (at 22nd Avenue South and 54th Avenue South), so to keep southbound, you have to be sure to keep moving back to the left.

In sum, to tell people how to get through St. Petersburg: don't accidentally go left at I-375. Then don't accidentally go left at I-175. But then you can't stay where you are on autopilot; you have to keep getting over to the left to avoid exit-only lanes on the right.

Now, in a perfect world, if drivers were alert, paying attention and savvy to the signs, can they negotiate this without a hitch? Yes. But in this world, people ignore exit-only signs, they talk on the cell phone, they get distracted, they panic easily, and in that moment of panic they think it is more important to yank the steering wheel than to look first. The question is not whether people ought to be better drivers, but whether we can post enough signs and warnings and signals to keep them from being worse ones.      

Oh, You Wanted To See THAT Evidence There Was Something Wrong With The Voting Machines

Okay, so this is March, four months after the Great Mysterious Undervote in Sarasota County, and only now are we finding this out? Here's the lead of Anita Kumar's front-page story today:

The maker of the voting machines used in last fall's disputed Sarasota area congressional race warned state and county officials that voters might have trouble recording their votes but the company's advice for fixing the problem went unheeded.

It turns out the machines had developed an extra delay of several seconds before recording votes, maybe enough to throw voters off (think about how fast a touch-screen ATM responds).

This is not proof that Christine Jennings won the race for Congress. But it's slap-your-forehead dumb and astounding that (1) the Sarasota elections office didn't do anything about it and (2) nobody since then thought this was worth mentioning, despite all the litigation and controversy.