TAMPA PALMS -- The meeting begins like any other. 

The local taxing district supervisors, in polo shirts and business suits, assemble at the front of the room shuffling papers and exchanging greetings. 

In the audience, a dozen devoted residents brave tempers and tedium as they pick up the night's agenda and settle into folding chairs. 

Together they recite the Pledge of Allegiance, call the meeting to order and for the next few hours desperately try to ignore the man in the back row. 

He nitpicks. He needles. He is Bob Doran -- self-described community activist, and perhaps the most expensive man in Tampa Palms. 

The gadfly, the critic, the watchdog quizzes his public officials on everything from major projects to government minutiae, blasting them for fiscal irresponsibility and suing for violations in public meeting laws. 

A retired cable operations manager, he slings statutes like a trial attorney, highlights his Sunshine Law manual at home and fires off e-mails to local supervisors and the state attorney alike. 

He even has his own civic organizations, although some question his membership numbers. 

Supervisors with the Tampa Palms Community Development District blame him for more than $14,000 in legal fees this year alone. They now keep a running tally at the meetings -- tracking tax dollars spent fighting litigation and paying attorneys to pull paperwork and check statutes. 

Those outside this affluent suburb may gripe about apathy. But for some in Tampa Palms, public participation is growing too costly for comfort. 

"It's a fact that freedom is not free," said neighbor Maggie Wilson. "And we're the people it's costing." 

Superman

"I've never been a go-along guy," said Doran. At 66, he is not about to change. 

Few would peg the white-haired man dressed modestly in T-shirts and shorts for what he has become: the most expensive man in Tampa Palms. 

Supervisors are stumped on where to draw the line. When does discontent become harassment? 

"It's frustrating," said chairman Mark Fitzpatrick, who has characterized Doran as "the embodiment of all that's wrong with American politics." 

The two men have had fiery exchanges on everything from Sunshine Law litigation to the disposal of surplus landscape equipment. 

Frustrated by lengthy debates on agenda items, board members imposed a three-minute public comment rule. They named it after him. 

Aggressive and implacable, Doran is critical of the board's failure, in his view, to follow proper procedure. 

Fitzpatrick condemns Doran's complaints and lawsuits -- filed via state attorney at no cost to him, and defended with tax dollars. 

"We have to earmark another $40,000 to $50,000 over and above the regular attorney's fees to battle what I consider to be trivial issues," Fitzpatrick said. 

Not all of the expense should be laid at his feet, Doran argues. 

"The money is not being spent because of my complaints; it's being spent because of the way they handle my complaints," he said. 

Tampa Palms' district manager could pull public records for free, he contends. High-priced attorneys employed by the taxing district are not the only ones who could research his queries. 

And if he is an instigator? 

That proves he is doing his job as an involved public citizen. 

"I generally thought I could accomplish a lot more being an activist than a public official," said Doran, who served on the community development district board from 1994 to 1996. 

Neighbors said he has taken up some laudable causes over the years. 

"Once he proposed a roundabout on Compton Drive to slow traffic," said Maggie Wilson, a Sanctuary homeowner who serves on several local boards and became a field consultant for the district in September. "He has said things over the years that I thought were useful." 

In Northdale, members of the special tax district board called Doran in three years ago to help when a fellow trustee was ousted. He never left. Even a scuffle with a sheriff's deputy that left him in a sling didn't keep him away from the meetings. He accompanies Northdale homeowners downtown to file complaints. 

"I do like him; I think there should be more people like him," said Esther Lutz, who serves on the Northdale taxing board. "It's very easy for people to shrug their shoulders and look the other way. We need people like him to be watchdogs." 

Still, she said, "to be an activist like that, he's going to make a lot of enemies. I imagine he has rubbed people the wrong way." 

Doran sees the controversies as his legacy. 

"My father was a New York City police officer," he said. "It's corny, but he believed in truth, justice and the American way. It sounds like Superman but that's how I was raised. He taught me if you feel something is not right, you've got to do everything you can to fix it. I'm doing this out of respect for him." 

Sunny days

Long before Bob Doran became acquainted with Florida's Sunshine Law, he worked in New York as a phone and cable operations manager for Manhattan Cable (later gobbled up by Time Warner). 

It was there he met his wife of 20 years, Arleen -- now an investment adviser and president of the North East Business Professional Women's club. She declined to discuss him or his activism. 

At work, Doran moved up the ladder and then onto consulting jobs, setting up a regional office for Innovative Network Solutions of Chicago. 

The work led him to New Tampa. When the company went out of business, he stayed. He moved to Tampa Palms in 1989 just as a massive development boom began. 

He won a seat on the five-member Community Development District board in 1994. But after a turbulent term he resigned in May 1996 in protest. The district had paid back taxes on land that it did not own at the time. Doran called on the board to limit the district manager's financial authority because of the oversight. They disagreed. 

His resignation was a symbolic gesture, he said. But when he ran for re-election soon after, his opponents were so determined to bar him from returning, they raised more than $8,000 in cash and in-kind donations to replace him. 

No matter. 

He served on the board of the New Tampa Community Council, the area's answer to a Chamber of Commerce. And in 1995 he helped form the New Tampa Citizens Coalition. Its members successfully fought proposed boundary changes for Tampa Palms Elementary and an all-portable school for New Tampa. 

Criticized for his inability to work with others, he also founded several grass-roots groups. 

In 1997 he began the New Tampa Community Alliance, a defunct umbrella organization of homeowners associations and civic groups. That same year he led CATCH, or Citizen Activists for Troubled Community Homeowners. 

Doran cites truth in government as his motivation, but critics accuse him of overkill. After all, they say, Doran is not fighting City Hall, but a development district board. Technically government officials who balance budgets and tackle community concerns, they are more akin to a local homeowners group with limited political savvy. 

"I really like the CDD approach, but there are some major flaws in it," said Bob Van Sickler, a former president and current voting member of the Tampa Palms Owners Association. 

"Here we have residents with no political background in what they're doing ... and they can't talk to each other; they can only talk to each other in a public forum" subject to Florida Sunshine Law. 

They will stumble. 

Two years ago Doran successfully sued the Tampa Palms CDD for violating the state's open meetings law on multiple occasions. Officials on the five-person board met privately to discuss pending litigation. Legally, they can do so only to discuss active litigation. 

The district paid more than $40,000 in attorney's fees, the bulk of which went to Doran's lawyer. 

"I think he paralyzed the CDD; they're scared to death of him," Van Sickler said. 

Doran is not the only homeowner who has criticized the CDD management. In her campaign for a seat this year, Patty Maney said the board failed to do its homework and dismissed resident concerns, resulting in poor fiscal responsibility and no long-term planning. 

The difference? Doran takes his grievances to court. He says he has no choice. 

"Very rarely do the supervisors explain their actions," he said. "When I ask a question, nine out of 10 times they don't answer me. When they don't, I go another route -- a lot of the complaints I file with the attorney general are unanswered questions." 

They do something wrong at every meeting, contends Doran, who said he has filed at least eight complaints to various agencies in recent years. 

The State Attorney's Office is among them. 

In 2002, assistant state attorney Patricia Cullen Turpin handled more than three complaints against the Tampa Palms taxing district and one in Northdale. 

They are "complaints within complaints," she said, adding that all but one have been alleged Sunshine violations. 

This year she fielded 30 to 50 e-mails from Doran in roughly six months. 

In the end, her office's latest investigation into the CDD proved fruitless. She found no violation when a group of homeowners formed an advisory committee to identify budget cuts and prevent a tax hike to fund landscape improvements. 

"Doran is trying to use the power of the State Attorney to intimidate his neighbors," she wrote in July memo to State Attorney Mark Ober. 

Doran called the investigation "a farce." 

Like a Good Neighbor

Every community in America has its own breed of activist. But few can boast a Doran. 

He might mean well, but his methods grate, Maney said. 

"Sometimes his ideas are real good," she said. But "his manner of trying to solve problems is just not my manner of trying to get problems resolved." 

Neighbors who regularly attend CDD meetings and participate on local boards have inch-thick folders full of his correspondence. 

Sometimes it is meaningful. 

Sometimes it is just mean. 

"All my barriers go up when his name is mentioned," Van Sickler said. "He takes the pleasure out of doing anything for the community because you have to do battle with him." 

Doran, in turn, paints his opponents as snobs. 

When neighbors implored him to focus his energy on helping them launch a landscaping revitalization effort in Tampa Palms, he declined. 

"I've already done this community an awesome amount of GOOD ... as for doing GOOD for myself, I don't think that way, I leave that MO to people like you, pretentious elitist intellectuals who think they have all the answers," he wrote in a December 2001 e-mail to neighbor Maggie Wilson. 

With him, what you see is what you get. 

"I don't take this personal," he said of his campaigns. "I can separate my community activist life from my personal life." 

As for taking things too far, "I'm just one big pain in the butt ... that's why they (say), 'He won't let go,' and I won't," said Doran. "I'll just keep hammering away until people wake up."