As the picture above states, Bill is the right person at the right time. He narrowly lost to Susan Valdes in 2016, and he is the best candidate in the race due to his wide and varied background. First he served our country in the United States Air Force, then he served Hillsborough County, intially as a teacher, then school site administrator, and finished his career at the district level as a general director. After serving Hillsborough for over 40 years, he is asking the voters of District 1 to help him help us all one more time by coming back and serving on our local school board.

Bill’s main opponent is Steve Cona. His campaign was caught up in controversy last week over emailing HCPS teachers at work and soliciting donations, but his campaign’s actions and subsequent statement–which may as well have come from the man himself–calls into question the ethics of the candidate.

First and foremost, there is an HCPS district policy that prohibits anyone employed by the district to campaign on a school site. While technically Mr. Cona does not work for the district, the same rule applies to sitting school board members as well. If elected officials are expected to be exemplars, shouldn’t the candidates also adhere to the same policies put in place by the governing body of which they are campaigning to join? It only seems logical. Bill has adhered to these policies in good faith, yet the Cona campaign persisted in sending emails at least three times.

Second, and far more problematic, is the statement issued by the Cona campaign:

The very first line in the statement is misleading at best and an outright lie at worst, and here’s why: Enjoli White, the candidate liaison for Craig Latimer’s office at the Supervisor of Elections, said that voter email addresses are primarily collected when voters register to vote by mail, and even then it is optional to provide an email address. Two of the teachers, Laurie Rodriguez and Aron Zions, have registered to vote by mail yet never provided an email address at all, let alone a school district email address.

And LoraJane Riedas? She’s never even registered to vote by mail, making it impossible for the Cona campaign to have obtained the emails in this way.

The second half of the statement is true. There were a total of 74 SDHC email addresses listed among the 212,426 voters; expressed as a percentage of all possible email addresses the Cona campaign could have sent direct solicitations to, it is 0.00000348%.*

Questions immediately come to mind:

How could these teachers and numerous others have received these emails when such a minuscule percentage of all voters even used their work email addresses?

And if his campaign did not get these email addresses from the Supervisor of Elections list, where did they come from and how did the campaign get them?

Something about this doesn’t add up at all.

Leaving aside the issue about the possible illegality of this situation and focusing on the ethical implications should leave every District 1 voter wondering about Mr. Cona:

If his campaign is willing to issue patently false statements, what else is next?

Should voters be concerned about his connections to the construction industry when we all know massive growth is coming to Hillsborough County? His candidate finance search reveals money coming from construction company CEOs all over the state of Florida, not simply here in the Tampa Bay region. Susan Valdes willingly bent the rules by breaking the cone of silence to help her political donors, so is it possible that Steve Cona might be tempted to do the same? One would hope not.

The last thing District 1 voters and all of Hillsborough County needs is another unethical elected official.

Bill Person, on the other hand, is the candidate who wants to truly do business in the sunshine. He is the one who brought many of the corruption charges against Susan Valdes to light, and every citizen in Hillsborough County should be grateful that he did. Bill is a stand-up guy who will always be honest with his constituents and fellow board members, and we need that now more than ever.

If voters would like to learn more about Bill Person, they can listen to his appearance on the Teacher Voice podcast, Like or Follow his Facebook page, follow him on Twitter, or check out his campaign webpage. But time is of the essence and the most important thing any voter can do is VOTE! The primary ends on next Tuesday, August 28th, and hopefully all will choose to “elect the RIGHT Person.”

*Disclaimer: only the candidates and their campaigns have access to this data, and the Bill Person campaign manager requested the list to verify the numbers and claims.