http://pbrla.blogspot.com/2006/12/winds-of-change-on-pensacola-beach.html
[...]
Future Storm Warning
"The first test for the new commissioners is likely to come soon after the New Year when SRIA general manager Buck Lee's contract comes up for renewal. Lee is unpopular with long-time SRIA staff members, beach businesses, and residents. Many have questioned his spending priorities, beginning with his ostentatious leasing of a bright yellow Hummer early in his tenure as the agency's top executive.
The Hummer is gone, now, but not the grandiose impulse that inspired Lee to lease it. Many say he has done nothing since to show he knows or cares how to efficiently administer the $6 million agency in the public's interest.
Buck Lee is at bottom just an under-educated county politician with no real expertise in anything related to municipal administration, finance and budgeting, tourist promotion and marketing, building standards enforcement, environmental protection, or anything else relevant to Pensacola Beach. What skills he has are limited to preserving his own job, even if that means betraying the board to whom he supposedly answers and the agency that he heads.
Ordinarily, the learning curve for new board members is six months or longer. New board members don't have the luxury of that much time. They're stepping into the middle of a windstorm over the future of Pensacola Beach. And they can't trust SRIA general manager Buck Lee to give them a fair and balanced orientation.
They'll have to act quickly, and rely on truly independent resources, to learn the complex history, past policy choices, and alternative future directions facing the Santa Rosa Island Authority. They can turn to no better resource for that than local attorney M.J. Menge, who has lived through and worked on almost every major issue involving Pensacola Beach in the past nearly four decades..."
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