Headlines on PNJ.com: This is the news from Wednesday, August 7
What’s next for Maritime Park in Pensacola? Plus, vote for the best high school linebacker!
Republican voters in Escambia County’s 1st District will decide on August 20 whether Jeff Bergosh will remain on the board for a third term or whether Jesse Casey or Steven Stroberger will be elected as new commissioners.
If there were three candidates in the race and no runoff, a winning candidate could be chosen with only 33.4% of the votes cast.
Although Bergosh has never won an outright majority in a primary, he easily cleared the 33 percent hurdle to win a three-candidate race and plans to do so again.
The race has already sparked controversy because Casey previously worked as Bergosh’s county assistant and the two candidates who are not entering the race have close ties to Bergosh. The entry of the candidate who is not entering the race rules out the primary for independents and Democrats.
Bergosh is running for a third term
Bergosh is no stranger to controversy. He may be the most outspoken member of the five-member commission, but he’s also probably the most productive. Bergosh has used his position as a crucial third vote for a nearly unspoken alliance between Republican Commissioner Steven Barry and Democratic Commissioner Lumon May that controls county government. The position has resulted in Bergosh getting most of his priorities passed.
Bergosh told the News Journal that he has implemented much of his 2020 re-election plan, called “Next 4 Escambia.”
“I’ve implemented about 75 percent, about three-quarters of those initiatives, including a widely accessible salary database,” Bergosh said. “You want to know what people are making. We have a widely accessible salary database, that was my plan, and we’ve done it.”
Bergosh said he has also implemented about 80 percent of the 100-day plan he proposed in 2016.
“You’re never going to get 100% because you have to work with other people and you need three votes,” Bergosh said. “Some things people don’t want to do.”
Bergosh said he is running because he cares about the community and wants to see the projects he helped start completed.
“I’ve found that it takes five, seven, 10 years to get these big projects done, and that’s why I want to see them through to completion,” Bergosh said. “… We have a lot of momentum right now, and I believe I’m the qualified guy, with the experience and the relationships – the personal relationships – with the people who can get things done in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C., to help get the big funds back on track and get these projects underway.”
The county recently learned it will receive $240 million to fund a new Interstate 10 exit at Beulah Road, a project Bergosh has long championed. The project has the potential to ease traffic congestion on Nine Mile Road and open up vast tracts of currently undeveloped land north of I-10.
Stroberger challenges Bergosh
Stroberger said he was running because he felt obligated to do so.
Stroberger is a retired Navy pilot and joined the military as a Marine. Stroberger left the military in 2007 and then worked in the aerospace industry in the Northwest while earning an MBA.
He moved to Pensacola in 2019 because he fell in love with the community during his many stops in Pensacola. He had previously attempted to run for District 2 in 2022, but his home was moved to District 1 in the 2021 redistricting.
Leaked text messages from a backup of Bergosh’s phone showed that Bergosh believed at the time that Stroberger had “no chance of winning.”
Previously: Candidates who cannot be registered in the Escambia Commission’s 1st District race have ties to Jeff Bergosh
Due to the boundary changes, Stroberger was forced to drop out of the race for the 2022 presidential nomination. He became Mike Kohler’s campaign manager and helped Kohler defeat a much better-funded opponent and win the 2nd District seat.
After the 2022 race and after getting a firsthand look at county government as Kohler’s assistant, Stroberger said he had no plans to run again until he saw the text messages published in the News Journal.
“I step forward to do things like that. I was telling people the other day that I joined the Marine Corps when they were bombing the Marines in Beirut,” Stroberger said. “I had never been a Marine before. And I didn’t know what was coming, but I did it. And I was glad I did it. And I feel like that’s what I’m doing now. I’m stepping forward. I’m doing something I’ve never done before.”
Casey did not respond to the News Journal’s request for comment, but in a written candidate questionnaire sent to all candidates, Casey said he is running because he wants to help people.
“As I have always said and emphasized in every one of my candidacies, I want to help the people of Escambia County,” Casey said. “Back in 2010, when I first started running for office in 2012, I kept talking about our infrastructure and how it needed to be fixed. Nobody listened to me. And now you see, people are angry and frustrated.”
Single-member constituencies and term limits
This election cycle, Bergosh has a new plan called “24 Forward Escambia,” which lists his plans for the next four years and includes “big ideas,” including restructuring county government to hold countywide elections and rewriting the county’s all-important land development law. Bergosh has proposed similar ideas before, but they were one of the few issues he has failed to get two votes on.
Bergosh said his plan for his office is a concrete plan to show citizens where he stands.
“It’s not nebulous platitudes like Mr. Stroberger,” Bergosh said. “It’s not bullet points that are just opaque, like use better strategies or develop better leadership. I don’t know what that means. It just sounds like gibberish to me. As you can see from my plan, it’s specific. It’s measurable. And it’s very, very clear exactly what I’m going to do.”
Bergosh said he believes a change in how commissioners are elected is “much needed” and that statewide elections, like most other Florida counties, would help the county improve.
Escambia County introduced single-member elections after a civil rights lawsuit determined that statewide elections left black voters without a voice in county government.
He describes his proposal as a “hybrid plan” that would require approval by the Florida State Legislature but would essentially result in District 3 remaining a single-member district, but the other four districts being elected by all voters in the county.
“The citizens in the minority district, District 3, are the only ones who get to vote for their commissioner,” Bergosh said. “But this is going to be better for the minority population, they get to vote not only for their guy, but for any other commissioner. And I think that strengthens the minority district and gives them a bigger voice.”
Bergosh said he wants to update the building code to include parallelism in the building code and increase the reporting requirement for residents living near new developments.
“We’re doing the best we can with our local sales tax option, but what I’ve said and what’s true is that every large county in the state has some form of local sales tax option at this point,” Bergosh said. “We’re not unique. At one point, we were unique. Now, everyone has them, but the difference is that all the other large counties also have some form of development fees, mobility fees or something additional to regulate growth and make sure that the construction of infrastructure is more in line with the construction of new housing and new businesses and new development.”
Stroberger said he supports the idea of changing single-member districts, but that it should be done in the same way as other counties.
“They all need to have the opportunity to elect the commissioners of all the districts, not just their own,” Stroberger said. “Otherwise we get these little fiefdoms or little kingdoms … and that kind of politics just doesn’t work very well.”
Stroberger said he does not believe the court rulings that forced the county to switch to single-member districts are still binding, nor does he believe holding statewide elections would be legally problematic.
He said the county should go a step further and advocate for the implementation of term limits, either at the state level or by advocating for a charter government to implement its own term limits.
“I want a charter government so we can have voter-driven initiatives and things like term limits,” Stroberger said. “And I want statewide elections. But we can’t even have term limits unless you’re a charter government. We can’t have term limits, and these people know that. These people, the other commissioners, aren’t going to vote for this unless it’s their last term and they decide they don’t want to do it again.”
Stroberger said the commission’s majority is Republican and should support reforms such as term limits.
“They’re supposed to be for term limits,” Stroberger said. “They’re not really for term limits. It just blows my mind what people say but don’t really believe. And Jeff is one of those guys. He says he believes in these things, but he doesn’t believe in any of it.”
