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After a neck-and-neck primary, two Hernando County political perennials grapple for lone School Board seat

 
2018 school board races (left) Hernando County School Board member Jimmy Lodato [Courtesy of Jimmy Lodato] (right) Diane Rowden [Courtesy of Diane Rowden]
2018 school board races (left) Hernando County School Board member Jimmy Lodato [Courtesy of Jimmy Lodato] (right) Diane Rowden [Courtesy of Diane Rowden]
Published Oct. 23, 2018

The two political perennials facing off for the lone open Hernando County School Board seat may ring a lot of bells for residents who keep an ear toward local politics — and after a neck-and-neck primary that led to a general election runoff, it might be the county's most hotly contested race.

One candidate, Diane Rowden, has been a regular political presence in the county since she first took a School Board seat in 1990. She has since run for office several more times, including three successful bids for the county commission. The other, Jimmy Lodato, is running for School Board for the first time. He's thrice run for the county commission, unsuccessfully. And he's been a consistent voice in recent years at School Board and county commission meetings.

In the primary for the School Board's District 3 seat, Rowden led Lodato by just over one percentage point, 40.54 percent to 39.35 percent. A third candidate, Julius Blazys, fell out of the race after earning about 20 percent of the vote. The primary votes for this year's other School Board races proved more decisive, with District 5 incumbent Susan Duval reclaiming her seat and Catherine "Kay" Hatch triumphing over District 1 incumbent Mark Johnson.

Rowden and Lodato overlap on a few positions and qualities: Both candidates said they support expanding vocational education and want teachers to feel less shackled by the need to teach to standardized tests. Both consider themselves strong communicators with a history of bridging ideological gaps.

They also both tended, in interviews with the Tampa Bay Times, to connect their key positions to one major wellspring. For Rowden, that's the mental health of students, a major topic in Florida in the wake of the February school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.

Rowden emphasized her work with the National Alliance on Mental Illness — her husband, Jay, is the local chapter's president. She thinks the district has taken steps forward by hiring a district mental health coordinator and more social workers, but said there's more work to be done. She wants to station psychologists in every school and to introduce tele-mental health — the option to consult remotely with psychologists or psychiatrists — to the district and its students.

"These kids come to school at 5 years old with anxiety and depression," she said, "and they're anxious when they go home because of the testing."

For Lodato, much of it connects to his vision of a healthy economic future for the county. He believes better schools would entice more corporations to set up shop in Hernando County. And he said that expanding vocational training and giving teachers more room for individualized teaching would put students in better economic positions upon graduation.

Lodato successfully led the charge in 2015 to reinstate a half-cent sales tax to fund capital improvement in schools. He considered such economic groundwork a priority in his Board of County Commissioners runs, and he believed he could eventually attract well-known corporations via his own business connections. He decided to run for School Board this year, he said, after realizing that the schools could be ground zero for the future.

"If I brought corporations in ... people would be happy," he said. "The problem is we didn't have the workforce. ... We didn't have the quality of life people wanted."

The district's financial health has improved in recent years, Lodato said, but he still sees monetary restrictions getting in the way of changes he thinks would better the district. The Hernando Classroom Teachers Association endorsed him, and he advocates for higher teacher pay. He wants vocational learning expanded. He wants to tighten the courtesy busing radius, which means children living within two miles of their school don't qualify for busing.

"A two-mile walk for a kid who's in elementary school is a recipe for disaster," he said. "Since when did money become more important than our children?"

Rowden stressed her willingness to work with other agencies and across political divides. And she said her hands-on experience on the School Board and on the Board of County Commissioners set her apart from Lodato.

"I did that as a woman and a Democrat with four Republicans on the county commission," she said. "I'm not going to be on there with training wheels. I'm going to hit the ground running."

Both candidates must overcome controversies, ones that they dismiss but that are nonetheless relevant given their candidacy.

Rowden was removed from the School Board by Gov. Lawton Chiles in 1993 after she was convicted of two misdemeanors in a Sunshine Law-violation scandal that included the entire board's indictment (no other members were convicted). Rowden has pointed out that the state Supreme Court later determined Chiles had overstepped his power, and she argued in a recent interview that her electoral success since then points toward the community's confidence in her.

And a Tampa Bay Times report earlier this year cast doubt on whether Lodato was living in District 3, at the Weeki Wachee campground address where he registered as a candidate. Lodato dismissed accounts from neighbors who said they hadn't seen him in the campground and said in a recent interview that he plans to live there for the foreseeable future.

Both candidates, for all their differences, present their candidacies as logical plot points in the stories they tell about themselves.

Lodato speaks of growing up poor in Ybor City and of the many mentors who shepherded him through high school and into a successful professional career. He feels a responsibility to do the same for today's kids. He gets teary-eyed when he plays a video, saved on his phone, of a teenager at a National Honor Society induction crediting Lodato with making him want to be a leader.

"I want 23,000 of these," he said, waving the phone.

And Rowden talks about an unyielding desire to better her community, one that carried her through a half-dozen other campaigns and three county commission stints, plus her NAMI work.

"Whether I'm an elected official or I'm a citizen of Hernando County, I'm going to be involved," she said. "I'm going to be making Hernando County a better place to live than when I came here."

Contact Jack Evans at jevans@tampabay.com. Follow @JackHEvans.