The Manatee County Commission chair shares frank insights on WSLR’s ‘The Detail’.
Johannes Werner
Original Air Date: Feb. 28, 2025
Host: George Kruse is a political survivor. First elected to the Manatee County Commission five years ago as a member of a MAGA and pro-development team, he increasingly distanced himself from that team. Then, last year, he was primaried by a sitting commissioner. But he emerged victorious and stronger. Now, he chairs a Manatee County Commission dominated by rebels close to their constituents, and Kruse sets the tone. Cathy Antunes, host of The Detail show on WSLR, asked George Kruse some big-picture questions on Thursday. We selected some of his best answers for you.
Johannes Werner: Asked by Antunes about his performance during the first term, Kruse was frank.
George Kruse: Sure. Look—I’m going to preface this by saying that I’m not here for revisionist history by any stretch. There’s a lot of things I did that did cause a lot of problems. I’m not going to sweep that under the rug. There were votes I made because I was part of a quote-unquote “team,” and whether it’s in Tallahassee or it’s in D.C. or it’s local, you get in and you’re basically told, “You’re part of this team. Don’t crack the wall around this team. Stay firm. It could be a 4-3 vote forever. If you get our stuff done, we’ll help you get your stuff done.” That’s what you’re told! Same thing up in Tallahassee. It’s like, you’re part of a caucus, you stay there. If you don’t, that’s how you end up in the basement, or your parking spot’s three blocks away from the Capitol. You’re told that. There were things like terminating the county administrator, which—
Cathy Antunes: Cheri Coryea, yeah.
GK: —which was a massively destructive vote, at the end of the day, for Manatee County. Some of the development votes—I’m the first to admit those were terrible, terrible votes, but you get in with no political experience, and they’re like, “Hey, stick with the team,” and I stuck with the team. That said, from day one, I also had my own views of things. I pushed for 100 percent impact fees from day one in spite of getting yelled at about it. I thought that was important; I still think it’s important; and, God willing, now Manatee County is moving forward with that.
JW: Kruse sees his win as driven by voters disgusted by partisan politics.
GK: 2020, people weren’t paying as much attention, so the campaigns were party-based campaigns. Who is the furthest right? Who is the most Trump? There was nothing about policy whatsoever. That’s part of the problem with local politics—it’s part of the problem with all politics, honestly. We’ve gotten away from policy and just determined who is the most aligned with whatever party it is.
CA: What people identify with.
GK: Sure. And here it happens to be Republican. There are other places where it’s Democrat. It’s whatever the constituency is. In 2024, in Manatee County—and you saw it a bit down here with Commissioner Knight’s race—there was a big effort towards educating people. By “educating people,” it was just letting people know, “Here’s what your local government is doing, isn’t doing, and here’s what the candidates on one side are thinking about.” And I said a lot of things, and sometimes I said things that people would disagree with me about, and I was willing to lose those votes because I was running on a policy-based platform, because I felt it was important to educate people, win or lose. I think we’ve started opening a lot of eyes. We had a lot of help with that. We had Take Back Manatee. We had Bradenton Times. We had people that were pushing that message out. It came down to not so much advocating for ourselves but advocating for an intelligent, educated electorate. Their heads were so inflated that, with their money and with their attacks and with their blueprint, they could do whatever they want in Manatee County. For a couple of cycles, they proved that to be true. They just got way over their skis in terms of a belief that they were all-powerful in Manatee County, and they overplayed their hand. They just didn’t understand that the public was paying more attention than they were in the past. I think it shocked them. Could they have lost one race here and there? Sure. Did they expect to lose every single race except for one state house race? They lost every single race in Manatee County in part just because, if you got lumped into that group, you just lost. People just got sick and tired of it, and I think that was Manatee county saying, “Enough is enough. We’re now informed,” and I’m hoping that transcends over to ‘26 and ‘28 and it starts affecting our votes at the state level and federal level—that we now have one of the more informed communities in the state of Florida.
More than anything, that wetlands decision was the catalyst that started this all. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was so inexplicable that that vote happened, and it was a 6-1 vote. The outcry from the public—the Suncoast Waterkeepers started having educational meetings at clubs and educating—and it was one of the first big issues that was truly bipartisan, where you started seeing magnets on cars, and you had people from the Patriots and Lakewood Ranch Republican Club sitting next to people from the League of Women Voters and the Democrat Club. That was really the impetus for everything that happened in 2024.
CA: A unifying issue.
GK: Correct. It got everyone together and to start realizing there are policies that transcend policy, and one of them is how our community’s going to grow, how it’s going to be governed. We had a lot of crossover. People have switched political parties for the primary in August 2024. We had a lot of people from all parties showing up at events. I had support from every party during that race because what I focus on—whether it be multimodal transit; whether it be affordable housing; whether it be fiscally sound budgeting to keep our taxes down, our costs low; or animal welfare—those are not party issues. They try to turn everything into a party issue, and that’s what’s broken everywhere in politics. It’s the money that flowed in that allowed people to—that’s why you don’t see anything happen in Washington D.C. Nobody’s up at D.C. because of gerrymandering. Nobody up in D.C. is worried about losing a general election.
JW: He described as one of his goals safeguarding agriculture in Manatee County and creating a wildlife corridor that could serve as a buffer to development.
GK: I’m a huge proponent of mixed-use, in-fill locations. The problem is twofold with this development, to your point. The further you keep building out and the more it sprawls out, the more expensive it is for me to be able to get the infrastructure to them. That’s where the impact fees, in theory, are supposed to come from, but, first off, that means I’m only using their impact fees for their own benefit, because I’m building the infrastructure that they need for their project, which is short-sighted because I have a lot of infrastructure that’s been waiting its turn, in some cases, since the 2010’s, because I’ve got roads that are two lanes that are fully developed right now. They’re waiting for somebody else’s impact fees. It’s a Ponzi scheme. Someone else has to pay in down the road so they can get their roads.
JW: Again, this was Manatee County Commission Chair George Kruse, interviewed by Cathy Antunes. To listen to the full interview, go to https://archive.wslr.org/ and look for The Detail edition of Thursday, Feb. 27. Only on WSLR!
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