Our City Hall Wish List for 2006
Things we wish we could write:
Newspapers grow a pair, yet another utils director is given the shove and the mayor has left the building
-- John Patten, 01/04/06, REVISED 01/05/06
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

Got a comment? Make it here.

Apparently obligatory and decidedly late
Geez, now it's obligatory and almost too late. First the Gondo came out with their wish list for City Hall in 2006, then the Herald-Trib published one the next day. This has since been followed by a few comments to me about when I am going to get around to publishing mine.

Blink.

Blink.

Is this some new mandatory journalistic tradition?

Like it would really matter? Because both papers' wish lists contain many of the same things that this web site has been screaming about for a couple of years.

But then I thought about it and reread the two papers' wish lists and was hit with one thing: they were so... so... polite.

This is Venice, it's a beautiful town to look at. It's also a political war zone where being polite means you don't stand a chance of being heard.

OK. Here goes. May the shrapnel fall where it may.

1. The Herald-Trib and the Gondo would grow a pair
I'm not talking about boobies.

1a. The Venice Gondolier Sun
The Gondo had a wish in their list that absolutely boggled me upon my first reading of it:

"The city's most frequent critics focus on issues, not personalities, and back up their allegations with hard facts..."

I have no doubt that this was being directed at me and I take major exception to the comment.

The battles that this web site have been involved in have ALWAYS revolved around very specific issues and, at the core of the arguments, these have usually been issues of due process. These issues always and invariably involve personalities -- it's personalities that drive the issues and in politics the two are often inseperable. The Gondo knows this and is seemingly deliberately confusing issues and personalities with apples and oranges.

It's not like these have been minor issues, either -- this has been some heavy stuff.

We, as a city, just plead guilty to Federal charges of illegal spills and falsifying documents -- the sentencing hearing was only a few weeks ago. The City of Venice, corporately, is now a convicted felon in Federal court.

There's a grand jury looking into indicting former and possibly present city officials for complicity. So far, the legal tab just for the city as a defendant is $1 million, including fines and legal fees, and the amount may still grow if civil lawsuits follow. You and I are paying that tab, folks.

This web site was writing about it as much as two to three years ago, prophesying that it would all come to a head and that, when it did, it would likely be ugly as hell. I demanded heads back then in an effort to head off the coming destruction. I was ignored and laughed at, in spite of backing up the allegations with a hell of a lot of "hard facts" (and the articles from this site are all still here in the online archive).

Two years ago, when it was clear to those very few individuals in the media who had been following the EPA investigation story that a legal apocalypse was all but guaranteed, I asked the editor of one of the two local papers a very pointed question: What it would take for that paper to take an editorial stance that then-city manager George Hunt had to go.

"I don't know" was the response.

Hunt finally did leave and every ill that has befallen the city since (including a few that were beyond Hunt's control or grasp) has been blamed on Hunt in hindsight by citizenry, the media and even by council. Well, not Mayor Dean Calamaras. He alone has stated that he actually tried to talk Hunt out of resigning. Nobody (I mean NO-body) else will ever come forward and say that Hunt's resignation was not a positive event for the city.

So, with all respect, I don't want to hear it about coming forward with "hard facts." This site has come up with an overabundance of "hard facts" over the years, many of them items that should have been discovered and published first by full-time journalists in mainstream newspapers rather than making their debut appearances on an independent web site.

Speaking of "hard facts," how many public documents have the Gondo published to their web site to back up their stories?

None. Not one.

Now take a look at the inventory of PDF files that have accumulated and are stored on this site. And that doesn't count documents that have been reproduced as web pages or as JPEG images.

The Gondo's "hard facts" comment may have been a nice way to say something (anything) nice about city hall in the misplaced search for balance in a critical article by unduly dismissing harsh criticism, but, in fact, the "hard facts" comment is not a factual comment itself.

Oh, and one other thing. As convenient as it is to forget, this web site has actually taken up for government officials when some pretty baseless accusations were thrown out by other media sources. When former top cop Joe Slapp, Mayor Dean Calamaras and Hunt all got together on a media attack on Police Chief Jim Hanks, it was this web site that rushed to Hanks' defense. Shortly after Marty Black became city manager, a nifty anonymous slime job was engineered by city insiders against Black. Both the Gondo and the Herald-Trib bought in and it was Venice Florida! dot com that, again, came to Black's defense -- with "hard facts" that both papers ignored in their rush to judgment.

So there.

1b. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune
The Venice Taxpayers League once growled at city hall about the sweetheart deal with the Venice Golf Association, a deal that was so sweet that the FAA investigated it after formally accusing the city of "diversion of [airport] revenue." The VTL wanted the golf association's books opened to public view, an idea that is supported by now-former Attorney General Bob Butterworth in an opinion he wrote about a nearly identical situation.

The Herald-Trib took a look at the VTL's arguments and agreed.

The paper published an editorial on June 22, 2004, to the effect that city council had some explaining to do regarding council's strange protection of the VGA's interests (archived copy):

"Discussion during the 'shade' meetings sometimes veered off into public relations and land-use strategies. In fact, more time was spent discussing how to keep the press in the dark than determining the identity of the Venice Golf Association's principal stockholders or finding ways to scrutinize the association's finances. Today, the council should explain why it leases public land to a private association that fails to disclose its principals and profits..."

In response to the demand for such an explanation, Councilman Fred Hammett compared the VGA (a privately owned and traded corporation) to IBM (a publicly traded corporation) by saying that we do some business with Big Blue and we don't demand ownership information from them, why should the VGA be any different?

OK.

Moving right along.

On July 14, 2004, the paper finally published an editorial that all-out agreed with the VTL that the golf association's books should be opened for public perusal (no archived copy found online). This was followed by a third and similar editorial on September 22, 2004. I contacted the Herald-Trib sometime in between the last two editorials and asked for them to follow through on their words by making the request for documents through their legal department.

The Herald-Trib leapt into action by quickly and decisively dropping the issue. The paper then ran for the woods. They have not brought the issue up since.

That's called no balls.

To this day I think it is a missed opportunity and a bad call on the part of the Herald-Trib. I urge them to go back, re-read their own editorials and follow through on them. There's still a story there and it is, in all likelihood, a whopper.

In the coming year, I predict more editorial calls for action by both the Herald-Trib and the Gondo. Some will be worded quite harshly, though I doubt either will ever rise to the level of rhetoric that appears on this web site.

I also predict that the two papers will behave like castrated tenors, as ball-less as ever. They'll both publish bold editorials demanding change or some decisive action. One or two pieces may even demand sweeping changes. Then they'll walk away and not look back, never once demanding a follow through or even (gasp) the resignation of any public official no matter how much that official has failed to honor his or her oath of office.

I'm going to call for the resignation of another city official a little later on in this article. I will be alone at the front of the pack, even though it should be clear to anyone with common sense that it is time to make such a call. Trust me, the print media will not gather up their courage to join in but they will hide in the trees and watch with glee as the howls of response are bayed from the dais of council chambers. Privately they will agree with me on most points. Publicly they will be far more... polite.

2.) Fire Utilities Director Chris Sharek
Chris Sharek has great hair. It's John Kennedy hair. Really incredible hair.

And that's about the only nice thing I can bring myself to say about him.

As a department director, he has been an unmitigated disaster and, like his predecessor, John Lane, we will be paying for his mistakes and foolishness for quite some time. In fact, Sharek's nickname within utilities is "Junior." Sharek will be learning here, probably for the first time, that the nickname is not a reference to his youthfulness but to his similarities to John Lane. The nickname is, in full, "John Lane, Jr."

At last count, there were some 22 union grievances that are ready to go to arbitration and, according to union officials I've talked to, the bulk of them are due to the boneheaded outright meanness of Chris Sharek. Here's just one example: a union official disciplined outright and admittedly for undesirable union activities, specifically for writing a letter of complaint to OMI while acting in the capacity of a union steward, NOT as a city employee. More on OMI a little later.

Union officials and AFSCME members are currently complaining of the lowest morale in memory, including the time during former city manager George Hunt's reign. Prime reason number one is Chris Sharek. Remember, this is a guy who brought you mandatory backflow devices, not because state law requires them (which it does), but because terrorists might blow up your toilet while you are in a constitutional mood by sending hand grenades up your pipes -- a story so ridiculously hilarious that it was picked up nationally when Sharek's terrorism quote was referenced on Fark.com.

This is a guy who then backed out of state mandated backflow compliance on a city-wide scale immediately after being accused by Councilman John Simmonds of not knowing what he [Sharek] was talking about. Even funnier was that Sharek stated to Simmonds in an open council meeting that Simmonds was right, Sharek didn't know what he was talking about, had absolutely no clue how to comply with state guidelines.

We are currently not in compliance and there appears to be no attempt on the horizon to begin the process of coming back into compliance. Potential punitive measures by state regulatory agencies hover over our heads like a piano on a rope in a Roadrunner cartoon.

There are a number of other incidents I could cite (or, more correctly, have cited in past articles), including Sharek's defense of deliberately exposing his employees to asbestos illegally and a Sharek-ordered municipal investigation into how a public document wound up on this web site. More recently, Sharek was quoted as saying that City Manager Marty Black wanted AFSCME's local chapter president Ralph Hamann fired, a comment that Black denied making. This last mentioned incident has all the markings of union busting on Sharek's part and AFSCME is reportedly not taking the comment lightly.

Sharek should have been fired a few times over by now. The fact that he is still on the city's payroll defies any sense of logic.

The official city line is that Sharek has to be retained because of a piece of paper that Sharek owns, his engineering degree. Other than that, he's unnecessary. Well if that's the case, show this doofus to the door: we have an engineering department and -- shades of excitement -- that very same piece of paper can be found in there.

3. Fire OMI
Another bone of contention with the union is OMI, the private company hired by the city to manage and run the city's utilities department, especially the sewer system. Even by Sharek's own admission, OMI does a really incredibly crappy job of managing crap. Also according to Sharek, the company has been somewhat less than stellar in its relationships with city employees. In a letter dated August 2, 2005, Sharek himself cited a number of deficiencies, including the fact that the management company wasn't managing anything as they had not brought down enough managers. The letter had all the markings of a veiled threat of a legal battle with OMI over contractual performance.

Right now, we're paying close to $1 million a year for four full-time OMI employees.

Four guys, $1 million.

Those figures come from the union. The city states it's three guys full-time at just over three-quarters of a million.

On top of that, I started hearing rumors a few months back to the effect that OMI was using the Eastside Wastewater Treatment plant as some kind of staging area for other projects that the company has going on elsewhere in the state. If true, that would mean that we are paying OMI for work that we are receiving no benefit from. I asked Sharek over a month ago if what I was hearing was true. He stated he didn't know(?) but that he would look into it. To this date I have yet to get a call back from him.

4. Hire a finance Director
Mayor Dean Calamaras has bemoaned the fact that he can't seem to find any qualified people to apply for the job, a fact that the Venice Gondolier-Sun took him to task for when they went through the rejected applications last year -- according to the Gondo, there were plenty of qualified applicants.

The only guy we did manage to get into the shoes mysteriously beat feet and got out of Dodge almost in the middle of the night. To this day I still can't figure out what scared him so much that he uprooted his entire family and moved back to New York within a few days of unexpectedly quitting. He isn't talking either: an inquiry from me shortly after his resignation resulted in a paranoid accusation of stalking and a threat of prosecution for some unknown crime that I supposedly committed.

The word around town is (and I believe the rumor may have some legs): Calamaras doesn't want a competent financial director. In a town where cost overruns in the millions are so commonplace that contractors complain publicly when they are not getting their fair share of the fiscal runoff (as a painting contractor did in the financial fiasco known as the Venice Community Center reconstruction), who would want a competent accountant? There's no telling what dirt he'll unearth.

We almost got a perfect match earlier this year. William Poling, finance director for New Smyrna Beach, passed the Calamaras litmus test for the job. Then news filtered out to the Herald-Trib that Poling had once filed for personal bankruptcy. A few murmurs here and there, but it looked like Poling would still get the job here in Venice.

But then... Behold, the power of Google! I started sniffing around on the web and came up with two news stories from New Smyrna Beach about Poling's then-recent clashes with New Smyrna Beach's city commission. On October 6, I published this set of blurbed headlines to the front of the site (the News-Journal links are now dead as the paper has since pulled the stories from their free section):

Mayor Calamaras' choice for finance director under fire here and at home
Hizzoner turns in another banged up performance as his finance director candidate, William Poling, is taking some serious heat in New Smyrna Beach
In a pair of stories filed by the Daytona News-Journal, NSB's city commission is clashing with Poling over their bafflement of impact fees and unusual circumstances in the city's utilities budget; meanwhile, the Herald-Tribune is reporting that Calamaras somehow glossed over the fact that Poling filed for bankruptcy in 1995
-- News-Journal stories filed on 10/01/05, Herald-Trib story filed on 10/06/05

Unhappy rumblings towards Calamaras' choice were heard around town. It wasn't the bankruptcy, either, that could be forgiven, but the links to the Daytona News-Journal stories raised some major alarms. What killed Poling's chances here was the idea that Hizzoner had taken his cue from Max Bialystock in deliberately passing over better candidates by offering the job to an already troubled official.

Officially, Poling's name was withdrawn by Calamaras due to his undisclosed bankruptcy. Officially.

It's my belief, one apparently shared by a number of citizens, that Calamaras can't seem to find a finance director either incompetent enough or crooked enough to step into the office and not raise a ruckus about past discrepancies. So we'll probably never get a finance director.

Unless....

5. The resignation of Mayor Dean Calamaras
Messiah on a matzoh, where do I begin?

We're in hock for close to $1 million in fines and legal fees due to lack of oversight by our beloved version of Boss Tweed, this due to to a criminal investigation of the city by the EPA that ultimately led to a guilty plea in Federal court. The city was finally sentenced just a few weeks ago.

I have called out Calamaras on this issue a number of times, especially due to his attendance at a crucial meeting back in 2002 when he was told by EPA whistleblower Troy Evans that the city was doing some very bad things.

Calamaras could have and should have called for an internal investigation as to whether or not Evans was telling the truth. Instead, he stood on the sidelines and gave support to those who would end up persecuting Evans for taking a brave stance -- for instance, Evans was ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation, ostensibly because he must have been crazy to continue to want to work in a workplace that was so obviously screwed up (see the "Mandatory psych counseling" portion of this article if you don't believe it). Evans and two other city employees later sued the city for violation of the Whistleblower Act. The lawsuits were eventually settled out of court. For his part, Evans was given $25,000 and his legal fees in exchange for his silence on what else he knew about the case.

To say that I have not been nice to Calamaras about this whole fiasco would be an understatement.

Calamaras, in return, has been beating his breast ever since at my accusation that he looked the other way. Calamaras' defense has been that he didn't understand what Evans was talking about.

Which actually, when you think about it, is even worse than my accusation of complicity. Calamaras is stating that he couldn't have been complicitous as he's an idiot.

What's really sad: It's actually a believable defense on some levels.

For whatever reasons, Calamaras supported George Hunt and former utils directors John Lane and Patricia Wilson right to the very end of their careers with the city. That support ended up costing the city -- you guessed it -- $1 million. Not only that, but as I write this (and as I mentioned before), the Feds are currently in closed Grand Jury, presumably seeking indictments against a number of former and possibly present city officials.

"I'm not a politician, so I don't read scripture," Calamaras stated at the reopening celebration of a church recently (my personal choice for quote of the year). Nice, Dean, very nice.

Can you read an exit sign?

6. Now that Calamaras is gone, hire a frickin' Finance Director
Why do I feel like comedian Lewis Black sometimes?

BECAUSE IT'S ALL JUST COMMON SENSE AND IT SEEMS LIKE NOT A SINGLE PERSON AROUND HAS ANY!!!!

7.Make peace with the unions
The FOP and AFSCME have been getting a screw job and a snow job from city hall for the past year and a half to two years. In the process, we, as a city, have wasted our most precious commodity: our loyal employees. There aren't any anymore. Most have quit and the rest have become decidedly and understandably disloyal. The only really loyal employees left are those within close working proximity of City Manager Marty Black's office (and if you've followed city politics for a few years, doesn't that have a strange and scary deja vu feel to it?).

There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which were some seriously questionable negotiation tactics on the part of city hall in dealing with union contracts. Little things, like the city getting caught by the FOP using fake statistics and financial numbers.

Black (Marty, not Lewis) is insisting that the unions, and by implication every unionized employee, is wrong. With 22 grievances headed for arbitration and a near universal hatred of city hall that rivals (and may even surpass) the resentment created by George Hunt, ya know what Marty? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that you think you're right and everyone else is wrong. What does matter is making peace and so far your efforts at any such peace have failed miserably.

If the unions are so wrong, bring on the arbitration hearings and stop the stalling. If the union loses these arbitrations, that'll shut the whiners up in a heartbeat.

The problem is -- what if the union is right?

Make peace, Mr. Black. Fulfill the promise that we as a city saw in you when we rallied to your support in the wake of Hunt's resignation. On a personal note, convince me that I wasn't a fool for strongly supporting you during that tumultuous time.

If you can't find any olive branches, maybe Publix can special order some.

John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.