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Names, dammit, we want names!!!
-- Venice Florida! dot com, 08/16/03
No more flooding for now
-- Venice Gondolier Sun, 08/16/03
EPA's grand jury is in progress
-- Venice Florida! dot com, 07/04/03

Yes, it really happened
I have received a lot of feedback from the original story. An unprecedented amount. Over 2,000 page views were recorded by the server on that one story within the first 24 hours of its publication. Folks who have communicated with me are incredulous, some stating that I either have grossly exaggerated the events or simply made it all up.

It's all true. All of it.

In fact, if you read the story carefully, there is very little of my usual inflammatory invective. The story is told all through the eyes and words of the participants. There really isn't any room for invention or exaggeration.

The Groveland area residents who are mentioned in the story all were given the opportunity to fact-check the story. As a result, several changes were incorporated into the current revised version. So far, all who have reported back have stated that the article as it stands now is accurate.

The rumors about deliberate sewage spills at Mundy Park are legendary. I had heard stories about the deliberate spilling of sewage into the park as much as a year and a half ago. Until this past week, I couldn't get anyone to go on the record about it, and I thought the stories were invented. It never occurred to me to go and talk with the area residents. It turned out that they were quite willing to talk all along, it's just that nobody ever asked them.

Since publication, I have since received some info that indicates that Groveland is not an unusual situation. There are two or three other lift stations that I am told I could investigate and come up with nearly identical stories, the Cherry Street station being the one that a few folks are trying to nudge me towards.

As to getting comments from official city sources -- yeah, that's gonna happen. Right after my dog Amos wins a Pulitzer.

I currently have several records requests that are weeks old on unrelated stories, and the city is totally ignoring the requests. City Manager George Hunt has publicly accused me of extortion twice (on TV no less, I still have the video tapes) and privately quite a few times. I half suspect that if I called up to get official reactions to this latest story, Hunt would call the cops and accuse me of making a bomb threat or something. Who knows? So I try to limit my interaction with the city government to those times when witnesses are around. These are dangerous and paranoid times.

Speaking of Hunt, I have received further information about his reactions to the story. For one thing, disciplinary actions are pending against a number of city workers, all suspected of talking with either myself, the newspapers, the EPA, general citizens, or Herb Levine of the Venice Taxpayers League. The word I am getting from several credible sources is that Hunt is on a major witch hunt (no pun intended), trying to find out who has been talking to who. He has reportedly instructed utilities supervisors in the past to find out at all costs who has been leaking info so that they can be fired ASAP. Think I'm kidding? Go back and read Quigley's comments to the Groveland residents -- his guys strayed, he was responsible for their straying and he knew his fingers might get chopped off. The top priority for the utilities department has been to regain secrecy and to keep it. That mandate is and has been considered mission critical by Hunt's office.

The problem is that the mission is failing miserably. As the clampdown became worse, more and more employees were getting angrier and angrier. The threat of leaking info is now on the other foot, as workers are beginning to cop the attitude of "Go ahead and do your worst, but if you mess with me, I'm going straight to the media."

Whatever hold that Hunt and utilities management had over the troops to keep them silent about wrongdoing is shattered.

Welcome to Jericho
On May 7 of this year, I published a story that indicated the EPA was moving in on Venice. It was the first story that indicated that the EPA was closing in on a specified set of suspects and that they were dead serious. One of the things that was reported to me and that I subsequently wrote was the following:

Again, I was accused of exaggerating and making things up. While there was no way for me to know at the time that the stories I had previously heard about deliberate and secretive spills at Groveland were true, there were enough stories floating around Venice to indicate that there were a lot of bad things that had happened and that they didn't just start up by themselves recently.

Now look at the Groveland story again. Neighbors who have lived in the area for as long as 20 years are stating that they have seen sewage being deliberately spilled from the lift station for as long as they can remember. No, it wasn't effluent or stormwater; no, it wasn't potable water; no, it wasn't Kool-Aid or any other damned thing that the city is going to try to say. There is one thing and one thing only that goes in and out of the Groveland lift station: sewage, only sewage and nothing but sewage. There is nothing else possible that city workers could have been spraying from the lift station.

This time, folks are not speaking anonymously out of fear of losing their jobs. This time, I could name names and give independently verifiable info.

Now, do you think for a moment that the EPA and the DEP haven't already well documented these stories by now? After all the interviews that the EPA has done of city workers over the past year?

Now can you understand what it is that George Hunt, Pat Wilson, John Lane and a few others are facing in this EPA investigation? Now can you understand that their backs are to a very thick and high wall and that this is why city politics has reached its current highly lunatic level? Now can you understand why Hunt would say just about anything to try to discredit the work that I've done in this web site? These folks are in the fight of their lives for their very freedom. What they have wrought upon this community, what they have knowingly allowed and in many cases openly encouraged is, quite literally, criminal.

Council candidate John Simmonds still thinks Hunt is a great manager, can't understand why there are folks out here screaming for city council to fire his miserable and sorry rear-end. I like Simmonds, he's not a bad guy. I mean as a person, he's not a bad guy. As a potential councilman, he is a party line drone, a potential disaster.

At the last city council meeting, while one neighborhood was digging itself out of a sewage pile, Mayor Dean Calamaras blindly droned on about what a great job the city  utilities department is doing and how there were no problems or major spills. A few days later, while I was working on the original story and editing Calamaras' sound bite, I received a piece of junk mail from Bon Secours Hospital. There on the cover is the Mayor, beaming with a beatific smile and holding a heart-shaped cutout. Talk about bad timing in marketing plans.

Tell ya what, Mayor: grab that paper heart cutout and take a walk through the Groveland neighborhood. Tell the folks along that street that you really care.

Who were the suits?
That question has been nagging me. Who were the two men in suits that arrived with Shane Saputo to quell an angry group of neighbors? Why were they there?

A clear picture of the entire incident won't really emerge until that question is answered.

Brave Bravos and Dabrowskis
A little background on the Bravos -- Susan and her grown daughter Jessica. Hunt would no doubt like to vilify them in an effort to discredit them. That's going to be hard to do. They are a family entrenched and well known in the community.

Susan is the daughter of a retired and highly decorated Venice Police lieutenant. Daughter Jessica just graduated from my alma mater, the University of South Florida, strangely with the same degree I earned from the school: a B.A. in Criminal Justice from the College of Behavioral Sciences at USF. Moreover, the two are full-time caregivers for Chubb Willis, who also lives at the house. Willis is a former Venice Police officer who was shot in the line of duty some 18 years ago or so. Willis was accidentally shot in the shoulder by a fellow officer during a drug bust. He has never regained full use of his shoulder and arm.

So, the Bravos are fairly bulletproof when it comes to credibility with the city. Hunt may want to take them on, but he would be extremely foolish to do so. The brushfires within the city government that are beginning to spread will blow into a full-scale city-wide conflagration that he will be unable to put out. It will be his doom.

Or, as Susan Bravo cheerily put it, we've got a shit shower out here!!!

Given this city's propensity to squash tale-tellers, the bravery of this mother and daughter cannot be understated. Right now, the two of them along with the Dabrowski family get my nomination for this city's heroes of the year.

In light of recent events and the news storm that is about to envelope city hall, there is but one choice: George Hunt must either resign or be fired. John Lane, Pat Wilson, Shane Saputo and Bill Quigley should be put on immediate administrative suspension. Any pending disciplinary matters against workers that any of the mentioned four people have participated in should be immediately dismissed with prejudice.

Problem: I'm the only one saying this so far.

Give it a week.