Audacity

From the St. Petersburg Times:

When the criticism got too loud, Sen. Evelyn Lynn, R-Ormond Beach, decided to quit taking the $2,300-a-week salary for the one-year contract running the Florida Center for Reading Research — a program she got funded at Florida State University — while running the Senate's education budget committee.

"When people thought it was inappropriate, I decided I'll maintain my reputation. So I volunteered the rest of the contract and then quit," Lynn said. "Everybody's different. It means a great deal to me to maintain my reputation that I've had for 14 years."

At UCF, Senator Lynn’s reputation sucks. To those that know how she operates, she is seen as a manipulative bitch. The way she pressured UCF to hire her daughter, Karen Jans, was utterly unethical.

Here’s the story. Jans quit UCF because she couldn’t stand her boss, David Harrison. After a period of failure in the free market, she went back to Harrison to ask for employment. Because he couldn’t stand her any more than she him, he rejected her for employment at UCF (During this interview process, Harrison cruelly pretended that Karen was likely to be hired.)

It was at this juncture that the Senator started putting the legislative screws to UCF. This was easy because she is chair of the Senate’s Committee for Higher Education Appropriations. Because UCF values funding more than ethics, they hired Jans back for about 30k a year more than she made when she was previously employed by UCF. They also paid her out of Harrison’s budget but gave Harrison no authority over her.

Senator Lynn used the power given to her by the voters to get her daughter a sinecure funded by students and taxpayers. Her reputation is only good among the ignorant.