Once again, the muzzle won't fit

Happy Wednesday! The County Commission met for nearly seven hours Tuesday, so there is much to discuss.

— The board voted 4-1 to offer $900,000 for the 3.6-acre Pirates Cove property. Commissioner Janet Barek voted no because she wants a park instead in Citrus Springs.
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You read that right. Expect four years of that logic from this commissioner.

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— Open to the public is still open to the public. I took a bunch of notes, but commissioners seemed to agree changes to the public-input process are not now necessary.

Commissioners will one day learn it’s not smart to mess with the public’s access to them. Past attempts have met a similar fate.

Commissioners still want meetings to move along at a better pace, so expect a workshop in the coming months to hammer out a process.

— Along those lines, Chair Rebecca Bays runs a fine meeting. No doubt who’s in charge up there. During public comments Tuesday, someone I will now refer to as Toxic Guy started taking cheap shots at Kinnard (Toxic Guy’s entire manifesto is based on mean-spirited cheap shots at commissioners) and Bays stopped him.

I hope she continues that approach. We’ve allowed citizens to become far too nasty to commissioners in public. It’s one thing to send an offensive email; it shouldn’t be standard fare for citizens to call commissioners crooks — or worse — at public meetings. Let ‘em write a letter to the editor.

— Speaking of Toxic Guy, I couldn’t help but notice that many people who spoke out against any changes to public comment were charter members of the Library Guy Gang, including the honcho himself. Here’s the thing: Much as I despise these backward opinions, I’m 100% in favor of someone’s right to express them.

Some people just want to gripe. I’m cool with that. I don’t have to listen.

— The biggest conversation of the day concerned competing ambulance companies.

I’m going for the third-grade explanation here, so stay with me. The county issues licenses called COPCN — Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity — for non-emergency ambulance transport. Right now, only one company has the Citrus County COPCN, and that’s MedFleet LLC out of Hudson.

(I’m excluding the two hospitals, which are licensed by the county to transport their own patients to their own facilities.)

Another company, Tavernier-based E-Care Ambulance Inc., wants to compete with MedFleet for Citrus County non-emergency transports.

For the county to issue the license, it must determine the applicant has shown its service is necessary to the community. MedFleet, not surprisingly, opposed E-Care’s application.

E-Care says MedFleet's service is lacking. MedFleet says E-Care has a weak grasp of the truth.

Both companies had 20 minutes to make their pitch. Citrus County medical service providers offered their opinions. The public weighed in as well.

From the Just Wright Citrus skybox, I couldn’t get this thought out of my head:

How could it be bad to have competing ambulance companies? I thought competition is encouraged in free enterprise.

Commissioners voted 3-2 for E-Care. Commissioners Jeff Kinnard and Diana Finegan voted no, though Finegan’s reasoning seemed a little vague to me.

(Just a hunch: Politics have something to do with her opposition. Has that Tidal Wave aroma to it.)

One part of the discussion really drove me batty. The report said Fire Chief Craig Stevens recommended the COPCN for E-Care. Finegan and Kinnard believed that recommendation was based on flawed data.

Oh, my, if only the fire chief were around to explain his recommendation. He was. In the audience with other staffers. Rather than ask him to walk them through it, they talked as if Stevens wasn’t sitting just six rows away.

This is how it reads in my notes:

“Maybe we should ask the fire chief. Should we ask the fire chief? What does the fire chief think? (Mike: He’s in the audience)”

— Highlight of the day: Finegan schooling Barek on being an effective commissioner.

We’re just going to leave that right there.

Have an awesome hump day, friends.

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