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The Jax Files is an interactive, quick-hitting blog devoted to any and all things Pasco, whether whole-heartedly, tangentially or merely psychologically.

Tom Jackson:

Tom Jackson is in a 12-step program for recovering sports writers; as part of his rehabilitation, he writes a column centered on the people, politics, passions and peculiarities of Pasco County. Email

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The Jax Files: With Tom Jackson in Pasco

Pasco County News | Breaking News

(Disappearing) signs of the times

Posted Aug 9, 2010 by Tom Jackson

Updated Aug 9, 2010 at 11:55 AM

First-time political candidate Sallie Skipper (she’s seeking the Pasco school board post held by Cathi Martin, whose problematic tenure we will not belabor here) writes lamenting the extraordinary vanishing of her campaign signs. Writes Skipper:

This is the first time that I have run for public office, and I am shocked by how many—and just how quickly—my signs have disappeared. Not only are signs expensive, but they are purchased with some donated money that is not my own. Some of my contributors are retirees on fixed incomes and people who don’t have much disposable income. Who does anymore?

So, having laid the foundation for this communication…

My friend had just returned from vacation, and he asked how campaign things are going.

I described for him what happened yesterday: I was driving home from a School Board meeting in Land O Lakes. I noticed that all my signs were gone. Signs of other candidates were still there—in clusters—but mine were gone. I put out a few more (keep a stash in the back of my Tahoe), but had this eerie feeling like a character in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Eraser. It was like I had been erased. I was no longer a candidate.

The Jax Files has no independent means to verify that what Skipper is telling us is accurate—except to note that we have not seen that Pasco County is awash in Skipper-for-school-board placard. However, given local history, we have no reason to doubt her.

Skipper would not be the first office-seeker to suffer the apparent theft and/or vandalism of signs, nor will she be the last. Nonetheless, that the practice is common does not change the fact that it is among the lowest and most vile of campaign treacheries. To that end, every candidate in every race should make it part of his/her stump speech that the candidate deplores such practices. Moreover, his/her campaign will aggressively enforce its condemnation by identifying to local authorities anyone suspected of participating in swiping or mutilating opponents’ signs.

Not that Skipper’s story comes to an utterly irredeemable end.

Today, being on the campaign home stretch, and down to a few thousand dollars in the fund, my treasurer and I considered how best to spend what remains.

We quickly decided not to order more signs because it would be more efficient to just throw money out the car window. We’d save all that time of ordering signs, putting them together, loading them up in the Tahoe, pulling off the road, stopping the car and jumping out to put them in the ground for someone else to just take away. We concluded that what money is left in the account will be better spent on advertising in the newspaper. [Emphasis added.]

Humorously: Wondering if your paper had a hand in the sign removal?

Seriously, the treasurer and I decided to do just that—newspaper advertising—with the remaining campaign funds.

A sad commentary for our system. A good one, I suppose, for the Fourth Estate.

For the record, if getting campaign signs off roadsides would drive candidates to advertise more abundantly in my newspaper and on this Web site—and I thought it reasonable that such a law could withstand constitutional scrutiny—I would launch a series of columns advocating a countywide moratorium on the practice. For a more beautiful Pasco County, don’t you know. But I don’t, it wouldn’t, and I shan’t.

Let’s just play fair out there, OK? And, now that it has been brought to our attention, if in our tours of Pasco in the next couple of weeks we notice plenty of campaign signs for certain candidates and next to none for others, we are going to note the imbalance here. We won’t be accusing. We’ll just be wondering aloud.