Property Appraiser in the Hot Seat
There have been a few stories in the Gainesville Sun lately about Alachua County’s Property Appraiser, Ed Crapo. (Here’s one of them.) Crapo has a side job doing consulting, and he has done county business with some of the same people who have paid him fees. The attention he has gotten from the press lately has caused him to go to a state ethics committee to see if he’s done anything wrong. He says he had previously gotten advice from an attorney, and that the attorney saw nothing wrong with what he was doing.
The jury is still very much out on whether or not Crapo did something illegal, although whether or not it was ethical may be a different question. I mean, it would never dawn on me to ask an attorney if something was morally right. Morality is simply not a focus of the law.
Ed Crapo is up for re-election. He is seldom opposed, and has held the post since 1980. This election is usually a real yawning festival because no one really knows or cares what the Property Appraiser is up to, unless you get an appraisal that has an adverse financial effect on you.
I don’t know what will come of this ethics inquiry, and I have no ax to grind for Mr. Crapo, but it is in the public interest that some qualified person stand up and run against him. A candidate with a case to make is exactly what Mr. Crapo and the voters need. It’s the only way we can be sure we are getting the best representation. It’s the system we have for holding leaders accountable. It’s not personal. It’s not nasty. It’s simply our form of government, and it is the people who bring the personal and the nasty if they so choose.
