TAMPA — Before its December meeting, the Florida State Fair Authority got a two-hour training session on the duty to conduct the public's business in the open.
Apparently, the state attorney who gave the presentation on Florida's Sunshine Law didn't make the intended impression.
At the end of the meeting, Chairman Sandy MacKinnon told fellow board members he had been meeting with people who want to develop part of the 330-acre, publicly owned fairgrounds east of Tampa. He couldn't go into detail, he said, but mentioned a possible sports complex. Though it was a public meeting, he ended with an admonition: Don't share details.
"If there is such a thing as keeping it under our Stetson — for guys that ride horses, they know what that means there, I think," MacKinnon said, according to a transcript. "Don't go talking to the media or anything at this juncture because I think it would just … confuse the issue."
Word would finally leak in February about a prospective development that could include a baseball stadium if the Tampa Bay Rays decided to leave St. Petersburg.
MacKinnon's efforts to help the developer keep quiet about remaking the state fairgrounds suggests a disregard for the spirit, if not the letter, of the Sunshine Law, said one expert.
Fair Authority records show MacKinnon has been talking with the developer's representatives — including longtime friend and former Tampa Mayor Dick Greco — for more than a year. He has offered them guidance and steered them via e-mail to fellow board members "we can trust to stay mum," including a former publisher of the Tampa Tribune.
The e-mail of board contacts from MacKinnon to Greco and developer attorney David Mechanik is particularly troubling, said Barbara Petersen, head of Florida's First Amendment Foundation. In addition to offering the names of six board members who would keep quiet, it suggests they also could help deliver a favorable vote.
State law prohibits two or more members of the same governing board from discussing issues in private that are likely to come before them in their official duties. It also prohibits people serving as conduits between board members to achieve the same ends.
"We select these folks to represent our interests, and they don't want us to know what they're doing?" Petersen asked. "It's our resources. To try to shut us out of the process? I find that very disturbing."
MacKinnon said he wasn't trying to shut out the public. The development group will make its formal pitch during a Fair Authority board meeting Wednesday at the fairgrounds. The public will have opportunity to weigh in after that, he said.
The authority has been looking for ways to bring in new money, and the proposal could help do just that, he said.
MacKinnon said he has mostly listened, as he said he would to anyone pitching an idea. The developer needed time for the concept to gel before people starting taking shots, he added.
"I know the media like the Sunshine Laws. And I understand the purpose of them," said MacKinnon, chief executive officer for Yale Lift Trucks of Florida & Georgia. "I could never run my business that way."
The Fair Authority board has 21 members, including a Hillsborough County commissioner and state Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson, who appoints the others. Bronson, who also has met with developer representatives, said through a spokeswoman that he will insist on public input as the proposal emerges and may press to invite others to submit development plans.
Greco and Mechanik are working for a group that includes Republic Land Development, a large real estate company based in Fairfax, Va. Renderings show plans for upscale hotels, shops and restaurants, and a stadium — as well as a circus-type venue being pitched by someone else — on 200 acres of fair land.
E-mail records show MacKinnon started talking to the group in early March 2009, with
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