Is Tacy out or in?
City Councilman Rick Tacy has been, and apparently continues to be, very seriously ill; city has been silent so far on whether or not he is coming back, which begs the question: Is city hall and the CQG riding the calendar to avoid Tacy's replacement's name appearing on a ballot?
-- editorial, 08/26/07

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Is Councilman Rick Tacy out for the count? Is he coming back to sit on city council or is council merely trying to hold onto the seat until after the election sign-up period is closed so that they can appoint someone rather than let the voters have their say?

Those questions have been circling around city hall for some time. An attempt last week by this web site to get some clarification from city hall as to Tacy's health status and his future on council has so far been greeted by silence.

Tacy has missed the last two (possibly three) council meetings due to an unspecified illness, one that landed him in Venice Regional Hospital's intensive care unit recently.

According to City Manager Marty Black's office, Tacy is still too ill to attend this coming Tuesday's council meeting.

Neither Tacy or city hall have released any information about Tacy's prognosis.

According to some political observers, if he misses one more meeting in a row, his seat has to become open, which would mean an additional slot on the ballot for a one-year term to finish Tacy's term. Venice Florida! dot com left word with Black's office asking for a clarification of the rules last week, but no response has been received so far.

Black's office stated that the city is planning on having Tacy attend this coming Tuesday's meeting by conference call, this in an apparent attempt to keep him from missing three meetings in a row.

Upon learning this, Herb Levine of the Venice Taxpayers League stated that he would be immediately start looking into the legality of attending a meeting by conference call: "He needs to be physically present to vote, doesn't he? Does a conference call attendance legally count? I want to know these answers."

The possible ramifications of this are huge. As this web site currently understands the situation (again, city hall has so far declined to clarify the situation): If Tacy resigns after the election filing closing date, council can pick and choose their own replacement for Tacy. If Tacy is out before the closing date,  the remainder of his term is up for grabs on the November ballot. With three other seats up for elections on the same ballot, this has the potential for a majority sweep on election day, a thought that has to scare the bejeebers out of the city manager and the powers that be in the Citizens for Quality Government.

To Levine, this is a replay of three years back when Councilwoman Virginia Warren became terminally ill with cancer. Like this present scenario, Warren's illness took a turn for the worse in the months and weeks leading up to the election filing date. Warren managed to (barely) attend just enough meetings to beat the election calendar before passing away, which allowed Fred Hammett to be picked by council as an appointee rather than the voters selecting a candidate.

Hammett took office on December 1, 2003, less than one month after the 2003 election. He has served three years on council without having his name appear on a ballot.

There is one distinct difference between then and now. Warren's diagnosis and prognosis were both public knowledge at the time. Presently, both Tacy and city hall have kept his diagnosis and prognosis as a closely guarded secret. This, then, sets up a ghoulish ethical dilemma between the rights of a person's privacy versus the public's right to know about what is going on in their government, a line that this web site is trying to tread very carefully.

One rumor that came our way was that Janis Fawn had already been tapped by the CQG to replace Tacy by council appointment as soon as legally possible. Fawn currently sits on the city's Planning Commission and she has served on the board of the Venice Historical Commission. Fawn has also been a steady financial contributor to the CQG.

In a phone conversation last week, Fawn acknowledged that she has been approached by the CQG to run for council sometime in the future, but denied that she had been tapped as Tacy's replacement.

Tacy's and city hall's silence on the matter so far is more than beginning to have the appearance of an attempt to thwart and bypass the election process and the will of the voters.

It doesn't need to be this way.

Tacy has one more year to serve, then he can either run for a one-year term, but only if one becomes available, or he has to sit out a year before running for election again, this due to council term limits.

If Tacy's health is presently as bad as feared, he could resign now, open up the seat for election, spend a year recuperating, then come back in 2008 with a clean term limit slate. If he agrees to hold on to his seat just for the sake of bypassing an election, a whole different picture would emerge that would likely spell political doom for Tacy in the future -- nobody wants to run for election while being tagged as someone who helped to thwart the will of the people.

We urge Tacy, city council, and the city manager to step forward and inform the public about this very important dilemma. While talk of Tacy's prognosis can sound a bit ghoulish, the plain fact is that he is one of our city leaders and as such, we do have a right to know what, exactly, is going on with our city leadership.

Moreover, if Tacy indeed has already made the decision to resign because of health, he should do so now. In spite of a few hiccups, his political legacy is generally a pretty good one. Thwarting the will of the people by preventing an election is no way to swan song a political career -- history will remember and it will likely not be kind.