Johnston Makes Bid To Get Back On City Council

Former Mayor Joe Johnston III wants to get back on the city council.

To do it, though, Johnston will have to unseat Vice-Mayor Frankie Burnett, who has filed for reelection.

Johnston has filed to run for the Group 3 council seat that Burnett has held since 2004. The two men served together on the council for two years until Johnston stepped down in 2006. He was first elected in 1993.

The qualifying period ended at noon Friday. The Brooksville election is Nov. 4.

Johnston was vacationing out of the state Friday and could not be reached for comment. Burnett did not return a call.

Johnston, 56, does title work for Johnston and Sasser, P.A., a Brooksville law firm founded by his father, former state senator Joe Johnston Jr.

Johnston's candidacy could provide an interesting dynamic for the campaign if he chooses to resurrect a proposal he made toward the end of his term in 2006 to turn South Brooksville, a historically African-American community, into an industrial park.

The city would take advantage of grant money to build new residential developments for residents of the area and offer fair prices for the land. Johnston said his main motivation was not industrial development but to improve living conditions for residents in the area.

The plan, Johnston said then, would boost and diversify the city's industrial tax base while at the same time help an area where residents, as Johnston put it in his proposal, "are essentially trapped in structures which are economically neither feasible to sell nor to repair cost effectively."

The idea wasn't well-received by residents who saw it as a land grab and argued their roots in the area are too deep to pack up and leave.

"It's doesn't leave a good feeling with people," Burnett said at the time.

Also making a bid for the Group 3 seat is Jason Sharp. Sharp, 31, owns a small yard maintenance company and is a married father of three.

Sharp, who was born in Brooksville and raised in Hernando County, told Hernando Today last month he's running to give back to his hometown. He said he's "not a political mind," but knows what it means to stick to a budget and find ways to make ends meet and would work to ensure the city grows wisely.

Pugh has two challengers

Mayor David Pugh Jr. has two challengers for the Group 2 seat.

Yvette Taylor, 38, is currently a member of the Brooksville Housing Authority board and works as a dispatcher at the Wal-Mart distribution center in Ridge Manor.

Taylor was born in Fort Myers, graduated from Fort Myers High School and spent four years in the U.S. Air Force. Her great-grandparents settled here, and her mother was born here. Taylor moved to Brooksville in 1996, lived in Spring Hill from 2000 until last year, when she moved back to the city.

Taylor said she has been pondering a bid for city council since friends asked her to run. A single mother of four who lives in Hillside Estates, the Brooksville Housing Authority apartment complex on Continental Drive, said the city needs more programs for youngsters and seniors and should be more aggressive about bringing federal grant money here to help fund them.

"There is more we could do," she said, noting that a mentoring program for the city's children should be a top priority.

The other challenger is Cecil Davis IV, 28. Davis owns Cecil Davis Enterprises Inc., a machining business on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Davis ran unsuccessfully for a council seat in 2006. During the campaign, Davis said the city should build a natural gas-fired cogeneration power plant that he said would provide electricity for residents and pad the city's coffers through sales of the extra power.

Pugh, who has been busy putting up his blue and yellow signs throughout the city, said he welcomes the opponents so voters can have a choice.

"That's the democratic way," he said.