Episode Details

The Argumentative Waterboy

What This Is About

A week ago I said, Mr. Barber, you're next. This is that piece.

It is about a man running for the Marion County School Board in District 5 against Sarah James. His name is Donald Barber. His campaign calls him Donny. I call him the argumentative Waterboy, because he ran a city's water system and because of his long history of plain obnoxious arguments. By the end of this you will see that the record backs the nickname.

This is not about his family, his faith, or his children. It is not about whether he can read a utility budget. He can. It is about temperament. A man who could not keep the peace inside one small-city department now wants a vote over a school district with a budget of roughly $1.23 billion. That figure is the tentative 2026-27 budget, as reported by The Florida Trib.

A Lesson from Rome

Go back with me about two thousand years. Seneca was the most celebrated philosopher in Rome and the tutor to a young emperor named Nero. Seneca spent years trying to restrain the boy's worst instincts. It did not take. Nero grew into a ruler consumed by suspicion. He had his own mother killed. He turned on his wife. And in the year 65 he ordered his old teacher to take his own life.

Seneca had written that fear does damage all on its own, and that plenty of men walk straight into the fate they spend their lives dreading. He lived just long enough to watch his student prove it.

Now jump to 1996. Andy Grove, the man who built Intel into a giant, published a book called Only the Paranoid Survive. Business schools still assign it. But read Grove carefully and notice where he pointed his paranoia. Outward. At competitors, at shifts in technology, at the forces that could wipe a company off the map in eighteen months. He did not point it at the people down the hall.

That difference is the whole story.

What Happened in Williston

Williston is a small city in Levy County. From 2018 into early 2026, Barber worked there, most recently as the administrator over water, wastewater, gas, and the city's fiber system. In 2025 the city grew tired of the fighting inside its Utilities Department and hired the law firm Douglas & Douglas to find out what was going on. Attorney Meagan Logan interviewed 35 city employees over five days. The bill, according to the Levy County Citizen, came to $25,000.

Twenty-five thousand dollars. In a small town. To learn why grown men could not work in the same building.

Her fifteen-page report, dated September 22, 2025, is posted on the city's own website. Anyone can read it. Here is what it found. The department had split into two camps, and the employees themselves had a name for it: the great divide. You were either on Team Donald or on Team Jonathen, the second camp named for Utilities Director Jonathen Bishop, Barber's boss.

The split traces to October 2024, when the city manager restructured the department. Barber's authority was cut back to water, wastewater, and gas, with explicit instructions to stay out of the other divisions. Barber considered it a demotion and believed it came because of complaints against him. According to the report, Bishop tried more than once to apologize, even though the decision was not his to make. Barber would not accept the apology. Eventually Bishop stopped trying.

Look at one of those complaints, because it tells you everything. A city employee had been driving a city vehicle at 51 miles an hour through a 25-mile-an-hour school zone. Barber was right to be angry. Nobody serious defends that. But rather than let the director handle it, Barber called the entire department to the city barn and lectured them. Multiple employees told the investigator he spoke to them "like they were 10 years old." He had the right point and lost the room anyway.

That is a pattern, and the report documents it. Many employees acknowledged that Barber would ye