Cazual Conversation

More deputies comes to mind, or less grief from an increasingly difficult-to-please audience in the Internet age where the most heroic of acts can be denigrated anonymously.

“Bay deputy saves child’s life with CPR” the headline might read. An anonymous comment left online, I’m willing to bet, would chime, “I’m surprised the deputy had any breath left to do that if he was more than 10 yards from his patrol car. They’re all fat and should be fired.”

Such is the life of elected officials in these parts, who can do no right.

Yet it very well could be what he is doing by the end of the fiscal year, which happens to be right around election time, when controversy is not what people running for office seek.

Nothing good, you see, is in it for McKeithen to assume that responsibility. Nothing good has ever come out of running a jail.

Even if McKeithen were to see it that way, it may be that he has a duty, a certain moral obligation, to take over the jail if that is what the county asks.

So how might that work? First, some history.

When CCA took over the Bay County Jail some 20-plus years ago, it was a progressive move by a progressive county commission that brought us the incinerator. The incinerator was very progressive, and is not so much a failure as it is a victim of the contracts associated with its early years. Burning, rather than burying, garbage has saved this county money and landfill space.

The jail was under intense Department of Corrections scrutinty, with lawsuits on the horizon if things didn’t improve. Things were not improving. CCA fixed that.

Knowing it had the first privatized jail in the country - one that puncuate its sales pitch to other counties and states - CCA turned it into a clean, top-notch facility.

As the company grew, the luster wore off the jail, conditions were allowed to slowly deteriorate, the company seemed less eager to please and complaints began to grow.

While CCA is calling an end to the relationship, it is somewhat like the husband who leaves on his own after the wife has repeatedly told him she’s one step from kicking him out.

So here we are.

McKeithen took a troubled Gulf County Sheriff’s Office and turned it around when Al Harrison was indicted. He won the loyalty of his employees. He tried some different things at the Gulf County Jail. He learned that the media is not always a monster to be handled at arms length.

So when he was into one particularly interesting experiment that drew media scrutiny, he invited the media out.

McKeithen had turned some inmates to gardening to grow their own food, and inmates behaved better. He had them sleeping in tents during overcrowding, and he spent the night with him to show it wasn’t all that bad. The inmates, as much as they could, seemed to appreciate that and the furor never gathered steam.

When McKeithen came to Bay County via Governor’s appointment, it was said he couldn’t do with a large department what he did with a smaller one. He proved them wrong, won the loyalty of the majority of his people, and brought some calm to a tense department.

The Gulf County Jail may be small, but the good things that happened there were more a matter of principal and technique, not numbers. There are things that work on any level, things that are more about the intent and the message than the size of the audience.

We needed CCA when it arrived. That need is not so evident now.

If McKeithen is called in, and agrees to do it, the hope is that the Sheriff’s Office and the county will approach it as a team, not as adversaries as it sometimes appeared prior to CCA’s arrival in the ’80s.

Because, really, it would not be the sheriff’s jail, it is ours.

We have to hope that a sheriff who has showed genuine concern for people in the past can manage to stay off the path of past sheriffs, can steer away from slipshod conditions that plague other counties, team up with our commissioners and make something good happen out of a situation that does not lend itself to goodness.

It won’t be cheap, and it shouldn’t be. If we’re going to take the jail out of private hands, the key should not be turning a profit, or breaking even. It should be doing whatever needs to be done to make sure everyone is safe - those inside and outside the cells.

There’s nothing in this for McKeithen, but there may be something in it for us.

At first review, I liked the idea that director Jason Newsom banned employees from bringing fatty foods like doughtnuts in for others to share. It’s the Health Department, after all.

I mean, it wasn’t like Newsom issued everyone hand sanitizer and tissues for their desks in case he needed it during the course of the day. Or that he lets his office tap run for 15 minutes before pouring a glass of water to “clean out the pipes.”

That would be odd, I thought, as I read those very complaints in an anonymous letter to the state Surgeon General, Viamonte Ros, from an employee seeking relief.

So I called Newsom and asked him about the hand sanitizers and tissues.

“Those are bennies,” he said, “and I issued them to every employee as a benefit. I also gave every employee a box of tissues so they can sneeze into it at their desk and use the hand sanitizer to kill the germs so cold viruses and germs don’t go all over the office.”

Newsom explained that hospital employees — that would be those working to save the dying and working around open wounds and surgeries and such — use the sanitizers throughout the day.

So how often does he use the employee-issued sanitizers in the non-surgical environment at the Health Department?
“Every time I come out of the bathroom I get a squirt,” he said. “I get a squirt before I go to eat, and pretty much anytime I’m walking around the Health Department and have to shake hands. And times when I put my fingers on doorknobs I take a squirt.

“It’s just kind of a habit I’ve developed.”

And the running water?
“I love to drink water,” he said. “The only time the water is run is when I get the glass, so in order to get that metallic taste out of that water I let it run for 15 or 20 minutes to get the metal taste out of the pipes.”
Well, I don’t do that, and I don’t know anyone else who does.

“If you had to get that out of my sink you would,” he said. “It’s at the very end of the water distribution system of the building and at the very far end of the utility line. The water’s healthy, it just tastes really bad.”

How did Dr. Peter Sylvester survive, one wonders?

There’s nothing wrong with clean hands and fresh water, and the anonymous letter writer wasn’t being critical of either. The writer was noting a pattern that could cause the doughtnut issue to carry more weight.

“This is not an issue of staff made angry because the Director took away our doughnuts,” the letter stated. “We would just like to have a Director willing to do his job! One that is as concerned with public health and our community as he is about what I eat.

“He has found a job that pays well over $100,000 a year for concentrating on his pet peeves and hobbies.”

Asked if he could see how some might put all of that together and be a little put off by his management style, Newsom seemed genuinely confused.

“I thought these were wonderful employee benefit kinds of things,” he said.

Things started well, the letter said, with Newsom gaining employee discounts at local gyms and moving smoking areas away from the front of the building.

Messages on the electronic sign outside seem to have degenerated, and appear focused mainly on diet. “French Fry=Thunder Thigh,” for example, greets people with “thunder thighs” who must show up for various reasons, like getting a copy of a birth certificate.

So while Newsom’s edict initially sounded good — after all, employees were free to bring doughtnuts and such for themselves, just not for everyone — it may be indicative of one person imposing his will on others in a manner than goes far beyond encouraging healthy choices.

And that’s a concern.

In e-mails and notes to staff, Newsom preaches, essentially, that people can make their own choices unless HE decides those decisions adversely affect others.

The anonymous letter, for example, said Newsom is lobbying to have insurance benefits changed to reward the “healthy” and put the cost on the “overweight.”

Newsom wrote to staff that “if you currently pay $180/month” for the department’s insurance, but you do not smoke and are within 10 percent of your ideal body weight, “then your premium will be reduced to $0.” Fatties who do not smoke would pay $216 a month. Fatties who smoke would pay $360 a month.

That should be an interesting lobbying effort in Tallahassee.

Newsom can lobby for that all he wants, but until a higher power makes that decree, it’s not his position to force it on all. There is a difference between promoting and dictating, especially as it goes to personal choice.

Newsom can achieve his goals more subtly, because one of two things is going on here:

Newsom remains oblivious to the climate he is creating with his style, or he doesn’t care.