Fracking, a dispute about a campaign sign and an attempted political comeback have heated up the battle for a North Florida Senate seat in a key swing district.
The outcome of the race between state Rep. Keith Perry, R-Gainesville, and former state Sen. Rod Smith, D-Alachua, could help Democrats in their effort to chip away at the Republican Party's majority in the Senate. Meanwhile, Republicans hope to hold onto the seat as part of their legislative dominance across much of North Florida.
After a redistricting court battle, Senate District 8 has been redrawn to include Alachua and Putnam counties along with northern Marion County. As an indication of the swing nature of the seat, President Barack Obama carried the district by just under 1.4 percentage points in his 2012 re-election campaign.
The race has attracted big money, with Perry raising more than $611,000 and Smith raking in more than $563,000 for their campaign accounts --- not to mention money getting dumped into the race through political committees.
Smith, 66, is a longtime political figure in the Gainesville area and has also been prominent in state Democratic politics. He served as state attorney before getting elected to the Senate in 2000 and serving six years. Smith later became chairman of the Florida Democratic Party and was former state Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink's running mate in the 2010 governor's race.
Perry, 57, is a contractor who's served the past six years in the House, with his district including part of Alachua County and rural Dixie and Gilchrist counties.
Neither candidate faced a primary opponent this year, and as they have battled in the Nov. 8 general election, Smith has tried to zero in on Perry's support for legislation dealing with fracking, a controversial technique for extracting oil and natural gas from the ground.
Supporters of the legislation said it would have allowed the state to regulate fracking, but environmentalists opposed the measure, saying it would have done more to open up the state up to fracking than to regulate the practice.
"This bill was drawn up by, for and of the petroleum industry," said Smith, adding that the industry gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the state Republican Party. "Everybody knows what that was about. That was to give them the intro to bring fracking into this state."
The bill was approved this year by the House but died in the Senate. Florida Conservation Voters dubbed Perry as one of its "Dirty Dozen in the States" for backing the legislation.
But echoing arguments that many Republican lawmakers made during the legislative session, Perry said fracking is already legal under state law, calling it "disingenuous" to suggest that the bill would have allowed it. And he said the focus on fracking has detracted from other concerns facing the district and the state, from housing costs to infrastructure to education.
"I think it's a non-issue," Perry said. "I think there are so many other issues that are real, that are pressing, that are important. ... That's not something that should take up 90 percent of the discussion and debate."
Perry's campaign has also hit back in ads pointing out that Smith frequently drew "F" ratings from environmental groups during his time in the Legislature, something Smith doesn't dispute --- though he said that was at least in part because of his position on the Rodman Reservoir, a long-running environmental issue in North Florida.
As much as any specific issue, though, there seems to be an elemental battle between the two candidates, something that goes to their makeup. Smith is a remnant of what might be called the old school of politics, and particularly the Senate, where partisans would do battle but ultimately find a way to settle their differences amicably. He's displeased with the uptick in partisanship in Tallahassee --- and even closer to home, as he's discovered in gearing up to run for the seat.
"I find families that I have worked with for years in the past who said, 'Rod, you were a great state attorney' or 'Rod, you were a great state senator, but I'm much more Republican now,' " Smith said. "The flip side is the Democrats have become more entrenched. I have to say, I think that's been the focus of an awful lot of money being invested in convincing people that one or the other side should be vilified or demonized. That's not at all true."
It's the prism through which Smith tends to view the race, at least in overarching terms.
"I think he's more ideological than I am," Smith said of Perry. "I think I'm more pragmatic."
At the same time, Smith's way of governing and experience have exposed him to charges that he is an insider at a time when voters want to shake up the system. Smith countered that he hasn't held elected office in a decade.
"In a year when people 'want an outsider,' I think what they really are saying (is), they want somebody who's not going to march to the party line, who's not going to be owned by any one interest," Smith said. "And if they would check my voting record, it is probably the most independent that there ever was up there."
Perry doesn't argue against his profile as a small-government conservative --- one who follows the belief that many government programs start out with noble but perhaps misguided intentions.
"Government is an inefficient delivery of services," Perry said. "That's just the nature of it."
But Perry has also taken on at least one issue not usually associated with Republicans: promoting the role of music in the classroom. He sponsored legislation in the 2016 session that would have created a three-year pilot program providing incentives to school districts to set up music education programs in early elementary school. It is a pushback, he said, against attempts to pigeonhole children too early in their academic careers.
"We've seen this movement over years of taking what I believe are intrinsically creative children and driving the creativity out of them," Perry said.
The race took a strange turn last month when Perry got involved in an altercation with another man, Robert Leppla, over a campaign sign. The conflict escalated, with Perry ultimately striking Leppla in an incident caught by a nearby security camera.
State Attorney R. J. Larizza, who works in a different circuit, was brought in because of a conflict of interest for Gainesville-area State Attorney Bill Cervone. Larizza declined to move forward with the case because, according to a memo from his office, "the allegations do not meet the standard for a criminal prosecution."
Perry said the dispute with Leppla escalated because Leppla spoke vulgarly about Perry's wife and spit on the lawmaker. But he said Cervone and members of the Gainesville Police Department worked to keep the issue alive as long as possible to help Smith, who is backed by Cervone and has represented police officers.
"They did that for a specific reason, and that is to drag it out and keep it in the front of the papers and make this an issue," Perry said.
Smith said he has declined to make political hay out of the incident.
"I never paid any attention to that," he said.
