This much we know:
*Hillsborough County Administrator Pat Bean’s budget proposal includes a tax hike, the first one in 14 years.
*Bean’s plan also proposes to slash the budget by some $140 million and eliminate hundreds of employees and as many as 1,000 positions.
*Bean had given her top six deputies, each of whom makes six figures, raises ranging from 7 to 17 percent. There was no public notice. Some had taken on extra duties; some had received promotions.
*To a skeptical County Commission, Bean recently explained: “I had to be able to compensate them in order to get them to take on the additional work.” She also noted that even in a down economy employees are not precluded from receiving raises.
She may want that public rationale back – certainly in the context of those who are flat-out losing their county jobs in a region with 10 per cent overall unemployment.
*Rookie County Commissioner Kevin Beckner, who wasn’t on the board when those Bean pay raises passed county muster, recently called for a comprehensive analysis of how exactly Bean goes about — and gets away with — her down-economy pay raises.
*Fellow Commissioner Rose Ferlita took considerable umbrage at Beckner’s call for a public vetting. After condescendingly addressing him as “young man,” she accused Beckner of “grandstanding” and not seeking information in an “adult way.”
Not unlike Hillsborough Administrator Bean, Ferlita may also want an ill-advised public utterance back. But it’s too late. Look for it to show up in some form on somebody’s mayoral-candidate brochure next year.
That much we know.