Diana Hamilton: Sarasota's Three-minute Mayor

SARASOTA, FL—Self-proclaimed three-minute mayor and local political activist Diana Hamilton says she began regularly attending meetings of the Sarasota City Commission in 1988, 10 years after she arrived to Sarasota from Knoxville, Tennessee. She brought with her a lifetime of political insight.

At the time Hamilton arrived to Sarasota from Knoxville in 1978, she says, “it was literally a ghost town in the summer. Everything closed at 5 p.m.” She continues, “There was a sense that there was nobody here. There were only four bars, and I ran one of them.” According to Hamilton, that was a time in which artists, writers, and musicians stuck together.

Fresh-faced with a cup of hot tea with lemon, Hamilton spoke very directly. Although, her southern charm could clearly be heard in the stories only a southern girl like Diana Hamilton could tell. An extremely well-read activist, Hamilton uses her story telling, which is dominated by city politics, in her column, “What Beats?” It is published bi-weekly in SRQ Magazine’s Saturday Perspectives edition of their daily email.

Search YouTube using the words: “Diana Hamilton Sarasota.” The video, which was created for one of her two unsuccessful political races for the position of city commissioner for the City of Sarasota shows her passion for her adopted hometown. Hamilton first introduces herself as an artist. She also owns her own local landscape design business called City Girl Gardens.

With her watchdog ways, Hamilton keeps up with city politics and helps the city commission and the community stay on its toes. Her claims are aimed at bringing common sense where it is sometimes lost as well as speak for the voiceless.

In 2009, Jacob Ogles, a writer for SRQ Magazine, pointed out a tactic used by Hamilton at city commission meetings to get the last word in. Today, she still uses that same strategy. Hamilton will wait until the last possible second to turn in the necessary card, which is filled out and used by the commissioners to call speakers to the podium. There is a three-minute speaking limit. Hamilton says she finally noticed that it was the mayor who got to listen to everyone else speak.

“I called myself that [three-minute mayor] because the mayor speaks last,” Hamilton explains.

After the mayor and commissioners listen to everyone’s ideas and points of view they tie it all together. Hamilton has learned that it is the mayor who is up front and center, holding the power to gather all the information and lead the decision-makers, as they speak among themselves.

She admits to not speaking on issues as much as she used to. But, she says, “If I hear people making crazy claims or confusing the issues, I’ll go down and try to reframe the issue to remind commissioners that that’s not what we really came here to talk about—this is what you [the commissioners] came to vote on—that’s what a mayor does!”

Hamilton worked on a recent city charter revision effort aimed at changing Sarasota’s municipal government to include an elected mayor. The amendment failed to pass. Hamilton says that the city commission is broken, as there is no central figure who can work with Sarasotans in a way that brings them together. For that reason, she believes there is a lack of collaboration, subsequently leading to continuous arguing and a mob mentality.

Believing that the average resident of Sarasota is being misled by a group of residents she refers to as the mob--locals, Hamilton says, act as a machine to control the commissioners’ decisions as well as the outcome of city voting. In fact, she says, “so much of what goes on in our city is predicated on intellectual dishonesty and falsehood.”

In an effort to describe how broken Hamilton believes the city commission is, she compares it with the Sarasota County Commission. She talks about the respect current county commissioners show for one another then she breaks into an attitude of disgust for the Sarasota City Commissioners’ behavior.

“They speak into the camera [as opposed to one another or the public], say what they have to say, don’t work together,” and, Hamilton says, “If you’re Willie Shaw you just throw out a nasty barb to the person sitting next to you, or you make uncommonly unkind remarks to people [from the public] who come down to speak.” Hamilton also believes Sarasota has not had a descent city commission since she arrived in 1978.

An elected mayor is what Hamilton and others are working toward. If the City of Sarasota changes its charter to allow an elected mayor, Diana Hamilton’s name will be on the ballot.

It was John F. Kennedy who first attracted Hamilton to politics. “At 10 years old, I got him,” she says. “I got his charisma, and I wanted to be for him,” Hamilton explains. “So, I’ve been doing politics since I was 10.”

“I’ve sung on stage and on street corners, acted in plays and acted out,” Hamilton explains. “But, more than anything, I wish I could snap my fingers and be sweet boss mayor of this city, heal its wounds, save its soul, and then go home to the mountains and write it all down.”