MILT THOMAS
Sunday’s newspaper included a letter to the editor from Florida Power and Light’s self-appointed PR man-in-chief, Charlie Wilson. This time his whine list included Linda Hillman and her recall petition. Somehow, it appears, according to Wilson, that anyone with a complaint about anything to do with the city is in actuality opposed to the Vero Electric sale to FPL. Hey dude, don’t be so paranoid. The petition didn’t fly. Maybe your FPL sale won’t fly either, but it’s not because of real or imagined criticism.
In the letter to the editor he included Hillman in the group of “Other naysayers, no-sellers, name-callers and mud-throwers who are attempting by hook crook and subterfuge to kill the electric sale and keep the money flowing to a bloated government bureaucracy.”
Bloated government bureaucracy? I can understand calling the federal government a bloated bureaucracy, but little Vero Beach with its $19 million budget is more anorexic than bloated.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of that infamous vice president, Spiro Agnew and the way he used to criticize his political opponents. Who can forget the “nattering nabobs of negativism’ and ‘pusillanimous pussyfooters,” or the “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” Of course he had William Safire and Pat Buchanan coming up with those terms, while Charlie must rely on his own vocabulary. The end result for Agnew was his resignation and a no contest plea to tax evasion. I guess the moral of that story is criticizing someone with $5 words is more likely to get you into trouble than using schoolyard terms. Agnew referred to his opponents as “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” Charlie Wilson’s opponents are name-calling mud-throwers.
Indian River Guardian 
The only reason that it is appropriate to call the Federal budget as “bloated” is because of the Department of Defense budget. It is also the greatest source of waste, fraud and abuse. A substantial reason that the DOD budget is bloated is because of the over-reliance on high paid contractor employees. This is exactly what the COVB has done by hiring “transactional attorneys” charging exorbitant rates.
The minority in the community who want to emulate this contracting out of services pattern need to study the DOD experience. DOD routinely does as the COVB recently did in outsourcing the lawn maintenance to a non-local company and then allow that company to charge the city for the travel expenses to and from their facillity to the parks in COVB where the grass is not being cut on a regular basis. .
As someone who had the sad experience of living in Maryland during the tenure of Spiro Agnew, I can testify that it is not an experience that you would want to replicate.
If the FPL deal goes south, it’ll more likely happen as a result of the ineptitude of those handling the process. Can anyone really believe a company so enormous as FPL would let a sweet deal (for it) to fall by the wayside because of anyone who questions the numbers? Dream on, Charlie Wilson. Some of us don’t want to wake up one morning and find a lot of undesirable surprises coming from the power plant sale. The blame game won’t work, Charlie Wilson. And by the way this community would be a whole lot better off with more like Linda Hillman – and at least one less of someone like you. In my opinion.
Where is Spiro when we need him the most?