LOSING CANDIDATE IN ORLANDO ENDS RECALL DRIVE...FOR NOW

Sometimes --- not always, only occasionally --- losing candidates apparantly can't handle losing, so they try something else. But one effort in Orlando has ended, at least for the time being, according to today's Orlando Sentinel:

Sam Ings, who ran third in the mayoral race there last year, had been collecting signatures to recall Mayor Buddy Dyer. Ings claims that Dyer paid a campaign consultant to gather absentee ballots during last year's election and should therefore be removed.

While Dyer was indicted for a single count of violating election law earlier this year, the local state attorney dropped the charge six weeks later saying that an investigation had determined that the mayor had not intended to break the law. The law has since been rewritten by legislators.

Ings, a retired police captain, is being looked at on a possible violation of election law himself. To be exact, failing to register his recall committee and sending out a political mailer using an official voters list which he is not entitled to have.

But if Ings does decide to renew his recall drive, he may have another official in his sights. He is waiting for the result of another investigation, this one regarding wheather City Commissioner Ernest Page violated any laws in a voice-mail message about a housing project in west Orlando.

The Sentinel reported two weeks ago that a Tampa minority advocate who wants to convert hundreds of rundown Orlando apartments into below-market condos accused Page of threatening to kill the project unless his nonprofit development company, Southwest United Communities, was cut in on the deal.

"OK, right now the city is not going to be involved unless Southwest United Communities is involved. In other words, the project is dead unless you talk to me quick. . . . Brother, you should've known, politically, that that [expletive] was not gonna work," Page said in an Oct. 3 voice mail to minority advocate Al Pina.