Ferlita Plans County Commission Bid
Tampa City Councilwoman Rose Ferlita announced Wednesday that she is running for the Hillsborough County Commission seat held by Kathy Castor, who is running for U.S. Congress.
Ferlita, a pharmacist who owns Rose Drugs, said her “experience as a city-wide councilwoman will help me establish a more regional focus about the many things we face together, county and city.'’
In her news release, Ferlita, a Republican, said she hired Adam Goodman as her political consultant. Term limits prohibit her from seeking re- election to her council seat.
Environmental activist and businesswoman Deborah Cope, a Democrat, has filed for the seat, as has Republican Gary Santti.
She’s hired Katherine Harris’ political strategist and longtime ally Adam Goodman – the same Adam Goodman who “volunteered” in Harris’ Secretary of State offices during the 2000 election fiasco. That alone is reason enough to vote against her. Goodman and J.M. “Mac” Stipanovich are the two partisan hacks who held Harris’ hand as she managed to “rock the world”.
Thursday, August 23, 2001
TALLAHASSEE –Secretary of State Katherine Harris tried to have the state pay $12,000 to a Republican operative who she has maintained was a volunteer working out of her Capitol office during last year’s presidential recount.“You provided support to the Dept. of State and should be paid,” Harris wrote to consultant Adam Goodman on April 9. “I already started trying to work on reimbursement/payment for the recount time.”
She was responding to an April 3 note from Goodman suggesting that she pay him $20,000 from an as yet nonexistent campaign account for his work.
Harris repeatedly has said that both Goodman and J.M. “Mac” Stipanovich volunteered their time in the weeks following the disputed election, but correspondence obtained by The Palm Beach Post shows that, as recently as April, she contemplated paying Goodman. Ultimately, neither he nor Stipanovich got paid.
Goodman, a Tampa consultant who worked for Harris in her previous campaigns, wanted $4,000 per month for the five months starting November 2000. In an April 3 note, he told Harris, who is considering a run for Congress from her Sarasota hometown, he didn’t mind waiting until the end of the spring legislative session, when “fundraising begins in earnest under a new entity.”
“We’ve enjoyed a tremendous experience, and opportunity, together. Now, let’s firm up the terms of our association and continue to rock the world,” Goodman wrote.
While Harris said she wanted to pay Goodman, she told him she didn’t think the money should come from her or a campaign account. “It was not for me personally nor for a campaign,” Harris wrote Goodman. “Consequently, I do not believe I should have to pay (raise the $$) for it when it was for the govt.”
Goodman on Wednesday said that it was not determined whether the “new entity” would be Harris’s still non-existent congressional campaign account or a political action committee she formed in February with Goodman to promote election reform around the country.
The group, American Values in Democracy Project, Inc, or AVID, was voluntarily dissolved a month later, on March 23 records show.
……The role of Goodman and Stipanovich was revealed in a July New York Times article which detailed their access to a “war room” set up in a conference room of Harris’s Capitol suite.
Critics, particularly Democrats, have said it was inappropriate for Harris — herself a former co-chair of George W. Bush’s campaign in Florida — to seek the advice of partisan political consultants when she was supposed to be acting in the interest of all Florida voters, not just Republican voters during the weeks following the November presidential vote.
Harris has countered that both men merely helped her handle media requests and write her public statements, but did not give her partisan political advice. She has also stressed that both were unpaid volunteers and did not receive any compensation from the state.
But in her April 9 reply to Goodman, she wrote: “As we discussed in DC — You said $12,000. I am not trying to be weird about this because I want to pay you what you deserve, but they have been working on this since I returned. Now you say $20,000. I am confused — they will be, too. This is a delicate matter.”
It is unclear in the correspondence who the “they” were that Harris referred to.
……Her role in last year’s election gave her numerous interviews on national television and a loyal following among conservative Republicans who credit her for putting Bush in the White House with a series of rulings that favored him over Democratic opponent Al Gore.
She returned to the headlines last month thanks to The Times article, which reported that Harris’ lawyers said the computers Goodman and Stipanovich used had essentially been wiped clean — a possible violation of Florida’s public records law. Harris’ office later recanted that story and, after initial resistance, allowed a media consortium including The Post to hire a nationally known data recovery company to examine the computers.
That review found hundreds of documents that had been deleted, including a political speech written by a Harris press aide in early 2000 endorsing George W. Bush for president as well as draft memos of a public statement that showed her position shifting over a span of hours from one that favored Gore to one that helped Bush.
Other posts by Norwood.
