HOLMES BEACH – Holmes Beach mayoral candidates Dan Diggins and David Zaccagnino shared their views on a multitude of city issues during The Sun’s candidate forum held at city hall on Wednesday, Sept. 23.
The winner of the race to succeed departing Mayor Judy Titsworth will be determined during the municipal election that concludes on Tuesday, Nov. 3.
The two candidates spent about 90 minutes discussing city issues and their desire to serve as Holmes Beach’s next mayor. Diggins and Zaccagnino answered questions posed by The Sun’s editor, and many of the questions were submitted by Sun readers.
The discussion topics included the city budget and city expenditures, the size of the current city staff, stormwater and drainage expenditures, paid parking, Second Avenue, the Gloria Dei Lutheran Church property, vacating a city-owned beachfront alley and more.
The forum was livestreamed on the Anna Maria Island Sun Facebook page, and the archived video can be found there or at The Sun website, amisun.com.
This week’s story will focus on the candidates’ opening statements and why they want to serve as mayor. Additional coverage of the forum will continue weekly until it has been fully covered.
OPENING STATEMENTS
The forum began with opening statements, and Zaccagnino went first and said, “I’ve been here in the city for almost 30 years. I grew up in Tampa and I went to Florida State for an undergraduate in chemistry. I was a chemist for the state of Florida at the Department of Law and Protection, Central Laboratory for five years.
“I taught at Florida State and I decided that wasn’t my calling. And then I went back to school, business degree, masters of business, and I started working for Morgan Stanley.
“25 years ago, I’m sitting there watching the television when the plane hit the first tower, it was tower one. I worked in tower two just three months before that. That changed everybody’s world,” Zaccagnino said.
“For the past 25 years, I’ve been in over a dozen nonprofits and boards on this Island. I’ve been highly involved in the school and the community center. I helped a lot of my neighbors too, especially during the last storms that we had. I stayed through those storms.
“I grew up Catholic, went to a Jesuit high school, and my calling’s always been ‘a man for others.’ And that’s what you need in this job, you can’t do it for money. You can’t do it for ego and you can’t do it for power. This is truly a service to others.
“I remember when I started as commissioner for nine years – vice mayor for a couple years. We didn’t get paid, we just got a reimbursement, and I think it was like $300 a month. And now I think the mayor’s job is like $25,000, which is insane to me because we should be doing this for you guys,” he said.
“I’m not asking you to vote for me. I’m asking you to vote for you. Because this is important. I know how to lower taxes. We had the lowest millage in the whole county before.
“I know how to run big organizations. I’ve run big businesses. I’ve bought and sold them. I’ve managed a lot of employees. The mayor’s job is CEO. The commission’s job is board of directors. The commission is supposed to set policy and the mayor’s supposed to follow it as best as possible.
“That has not been happening right now. And that’s causing the problems we’re having right now. I want to change that. I want to change directions of what this current commission has been doing. It’s against our charter,” Zaccagnino said.
During his opening statement, Diggins said, “I first came to the Island in 2010. I was on assignment over in Afghanistan, where I lived for four years, advising the military and the ambassador there from the U.S. because airplanes were flying through an active war zone at the time. I designed the airspace so we wouldn’t shoot down friendly people, and it worked pretty well. Never shot anybody in an airline down.
“My daughter came here, she was a wedding planner, and she came down here and did a destination wedding. My wife and I lived in the D.C. area at the time and she says, ‘You’ve got to see this place. It’s really amazing.’ So, I came home on leave right after Christmas for a few days and my wife and I drove down here. And we went, ‘Oh, this is a pretty nice place.’ So, we contracted with a contractor and we built a house. We moved here in 2011. I continued living in Afghanistan until 2014.
“I have executive leadership at the federal level. Like I say, I’m out of D.C. I was an aircraft accident investigator for major aircraft accidents around the world. I was in charge of the Go Team out of D.C. I’ve been to 43 countries investigating major accidents. I investigated the Space Shuttle Columbia accident. I was the lead investigator about the cause of that in 2003.
“I spent six months at Ground Zero going through all the wreckage, trying to find airplane parts and body parts. We didn’t find too many airplane parts. We never found the black boxes.
“I testified to the 9/11 Commission about the events of September 11 and I just have a very unique background, technical background, in executive leadership and crisis management. I’m pretty good at crisis management.
“I’m a very good listener, but I’m not much of a talker. I’d like to harness the collective wisdom of all our residents because I’m really shocked at the amount of talent that we have here on the Island. There’s people from all different levels of skill and knowledge, and I would like to see more resident advisory committees to help advise us what to do,” Diggins said.
WHY MAYOR?
When asked why he wants to be mayor, Diggins said, “I want to be mayor because I think I bring the skills, the knowledge, the wisdom and the temperament to this job – and I know how to do this job. I’m familiar with the city. Terry Schaefer probably knows more about the city than I do as a fellow commissioner, but I’m a close second. I know how the city operates.
“The city is not the city it was when my opponent was here. It’s almost double the tourism. We have a very large organization. It’s a very complex operation and I have the skill set to do that; and the temperament to do that, and I think the temperament is very important,” Diggins said.
Zaccagnino said, “We went through two category four hurricanes in 11 days. The city to the northwest did a remarkable job. The city to the southwest did a remarkable job. We did a horrible job. I think Dan was vice mayor at that time. I think Terry was on the board too.
“I can’t tell you how crazy it was, how many people were just in crisis situation. We were out here. We were managing the crisis. The community center was open the next day to provide food, water, supplies, power. That should have been us. We shouldn’t have been waiting around, and we shouldn’t have been waiting around two months for our trash to be picked up and our garbage everywhere.
“I would change that. I would change that immediately, and there’s ways to do that. Transparency is huge. As a mayor, I’d be transparent. There’s commissioners up here that don’t even know that word. The current mayor has not been transparent with the commissioners. That’s the way our charter is set up. The mayor’s supposed to talk to the commissioners. The commissioners are supposed to talk to the mayor so that everyone’s on the same page and so we can solve some issues in the sunshine.
“Some people are getting 20% raises. Some people are getting 5% raises. Some departments are getting more money. Some departments are getting less money.
“There’s even commissioners up here that don’t know what kind of grants we’re getting. There’s not any communication with the local representatives on the Island, or the city, the county, or the state or the federal government.
“I personally got calls from people at the federal government, our representatives and the state, that said, ‘Thank God that you’re running because we can’t talk to the current commission and mayor right now because they just don’t want to work together.’ I would change that,” Zaccagnino said.
To be continued next week…
To video of the Sept. 23 forum can be viewed here.
