William March
Peter Boland and Mike Harting say they want their competitive race for the District 3 St. Petersburg City Council seat to be civil and nonpartisan – but hostile and partisan overtones are creeping in despite that.
“We made a very friendly gentlemanly agreement about how we’re going to run this campaign. I hope it stays that way — I like selling his beer at the restaurant,” said Boland, a restaurateur.
“I don’t want to do anything personal – I want to run an honorable campaign that I can be proud of,” said Harting, founder of Three Daughters Brewing.
Both also said partisanship has no place in a campaign for a nonpartisan position concerned with municipal services.
For the most part, that appears to be holding up.
However, both the Harting and Boland campaigns have put out message-testing polls that rehearse negative, sometimes partisan messages about each other, and conflict has arisen over who is the true conservative.
Ed Montanari, a Republican, is vacating the seat. The district, which voted in the Primary in which they were the top two of five candidates, is one of two in the city with a Republican plurality. However, the November election will be a citywide vote.
Boland provided a copy of an online survey that Harting acknowledged came from his campaign. The survey referred to Boland’s voting for Democrats Andrew Gillum, Joe Biden, and Bill Nelson.
It also referred to Boland’s “several run-ins with the law.”
Boland said he has acknowledged and spoken openly about an arrest record for drug possession from his late teens and early 20s – he’s now 40. But said, “To say I’ve 30 scrapes with the law” – as the survey said – “is wholly dishonest. They must be talking about parking tickets.”
Harting, meanwhile, provided copies of a survey that portrays him as a right-winger, a potentially damaging accusation in a city dominated by Democrats and moderate Republicans.
One said Harting “is backed by Republican politicians and special interest groups” and “conservative figures and corporate donors … He will favor the needs of big business and political insiders over working families.”
Harting, who is registered no-party, says he’s “a centrist … I sit in the middle, and I don’t want to be perceived as extreme in any direction.”
Meanwhile, Boland has emphasized in his campaign that he has been endorsed by the Pinellas Republican Party and Young Republicans – a post on the endorsement showing him speaking at a party meeting previously at the top of his campaign Facebook page – and noted in an interview that he’s “the only candidate that’s a registered Republican – I’ve been a Republican from 17 years old.”
