Picking the next reality TV star... oops, Palm Beach County administrator | Opinion

UPDATE: An earlier version of this column said that Palm Beach County Clerk of Courts Joe Abruzzo’s defamation lawsuit was ‘thrown out of court.’ In fact, a South Carolina appellate court ruled that the parties were required to arbitrate the dispute and the case has been stayed pending the outcome of the arbitration.”

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In case you haven’t been paying attention, we’re about to break some ground in the search for a new Palm Beach County administrator.

The current holder of the county’s most important public post, Verdenia Baker, is retiring in May after 38 years of solid service to the county.

And it seems like the local political fixers here have already penciled in Joe Abruzzo, the well-traveled lawmaker-turned-county clerk, to slide into Baker’s job without a wider, more deliberate search. 

Abruzzo, 44, did 10 years in the state legislature before landing a job more than four years ago as the Palm Beach County Clerk and Comptroller, an elected office that put him in charge of nearly 650 employees and a $70.5 million budget. 

Lock down Abruzzo now!

But that’s small potatoes compared to the 7,100 employees and $9 billion budget the county administrator oversees. And Baker makes more than double Abruzzo’s current $206,000 salary as the county clerk. 

So, it’s no wonder that some are saying that there should be no rush to hand the job to an undereducated, peripatetic political player like Abruzzo, when there may be a country full of better choices out there who wouldn’t be looking to hopscotch to another job in a few years.

I disagree. We need to lock down Abruzzo now! 

The people who are knocking Abruzzo are forgetting one important qualification he holds for the job, one that will be hard to duplicate.

Don't you remember Abruzzo from the TV show 'Southern Charm'?

Abruzzo has experience as a hottie love interest on Southern Charm, a TV reality show centered on the lives of wine-swilling socialite women from Charleston, South Carolina. 

Who could forget during the 2019 season when Kathryn told Naomie that she got picked up by a guy from Boca Raton at a Miami Dolphins game?

“Apparently, I have a type,” Kathryn said. “He’s a senator. He’s a Democrat, though.”

Being a Democratic state senator in Florida is the closest thing to being unemployed. But for the show’s purposes, it made Abruzzo quite a catch.

As part of the show, Abruzzo signed an agreement that allowed other characters to disparage him and say all sorts of things about him, even if untrue.

“Other parties may communicate private, factual, or fictional information” that could be “humiliating or embarrassing or that is defamatory, disparaging or unfavorable” to him, read the document he signed. 

And that’s what happened.

But he sued anyway for defamation after the show disclosed details of his real-life, one-year marriage, child-custody fight, and purported nude online photos of him that he said weren’t real. 

His lawsuit has been stayed and the parties have been ordered to arbitrate the dispute. As for Kathryn, she took the advice of her TV-show friend, Danni, to dump Joe.

“She didn't agree with the way he talked to me or things he did,” Kathryn explained on the Daily Dish podcast. “That's when I started to think, ‘Hmm, if my friends are turning on me, I do not need this man in my life. Girls are more important than any kind of dude.’"

That may be true, but we really need this kind of dude running our county government. 

If not an elected leader, then maybe 'The Real Housewives of Wellington'

And I fear that if we don’t snap him up, we might lose him to Temptation Island, Love is Blind, or The Real Housewives of Wellington.

Sure, we could go on an extended search and hope that a discarded contestant from The Bachelorette with six-pack abs, a perpetual three-day stubble, and log-splitting skills will show up with some innovative growth-management ideas.

But I say, snap up the reality TV-show character you have in hand rather than hope for one that’s theoretically out there. 

Somehow, we got lucky with Baker, getting 38 competent years from a career public servant who probably wouldn’t have lasted beyond the first tribal council of Survivor.

We can’t count on that kind of luck again. So, I say we disregard what Kathryn said about Joe, and sign him up anyway. 

And we promise: No questions about nude photos.

Frank Cerabino is a news columnist with The Palm Beach Post, which is part of the USA Today Network-Florida. He can be reached at fcerabino@gannett.com.