More Moore on Hona Luana airport lease (WITH AUDIO)
One of the stories that was buried by election coverage was the ongoing controversy over the sweetheart lease and highly profitable sub-lease of the Hona Luana Restaurant at Venice Airport; relax, Venetians, John Moore is in the house and on the case
-- John Patten, 11/09/07
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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RELATED BACKGROUND:
Airport sublease to be reviewed-- Sizable profits are being made but not by the city
-- Venice Gondolier Sun, 10/10/07
CQG founder Boone, Councilman Moore go nose to nose over sweetheart Hona Luana airport lease (VIDEO)
-- Venice Florida! dot com, 10/10/07

Buried by election coverage
By the very end of the October 23rd city council meeting, there was only one person left in the audience -- Herb Levine. With election campaign madness having taken over the city (and with a long city council meeting that had just resumed after a lengthy backstage shade meeting over the Sharky's Restaurant airport lease), city hall and council chambers were almoat as empty as a tumbleweed ghost town.

As a result, a fairly important story about a sweetheart airport lease and private profiteering at the airport's expense was inadvertently buried.

Go back to October 9: city council was left hanging as City Attorney Bob Anderson had been instructed to research a 25-year lease of airport property that was being proposed for a sub-let to Hona Luana Restaurant. Purdy Enterprises (a.k.a. Paul Hostetler of PGT fame) is paying $8,000 a year in rent for airport property on which the Hona Luana Restaurant resides. Purdy Enterprises is requesting approval to sub-let the land and building for $64,000 a year to Hona Luana. That's some very nice work indeed if you can get it.

Councilman (and retired judge) John Moore cried foul at the October 9th council meeting. City Attorney Bob Anderson was instructed to research the issue. Which brings us to the October 23rd meeting, where, at the very end of the meeting in front of an unpacked house, Moore and Anderson announced that profiteering in and of itself was not legally sufficient to break the lease.

But... and here's where things get interesting... Moore noted that there are only six years left on the original 25-year lease and Purdy is requesting approval of a ten-year sub-lease. Moreover, the original lease called for significant improvements to be made by the original renter and documention of those improvements were supposed to be turned in to the city within 90 days of the signing of the original lease some 19 years ago. According to the dialog at the October 23rd meeting, Moore, City Clerk Lori Stelzer, and Airport manager Fred Watts went on a search for those documents through airport files and the city's archives and the trio came up empty-handed.

Here's the full audio of that discussion:
John Moore and council on Hona Luana lease (14:25) MP3 audio file, 5.0 MBs
-- from the 10/23/07 city council meeting

While a bit tedious in parts, overall the discussion in the above audio file is an extremely maddening and eye-opening look at how the city's overly friendly relationships with certain constituents (and that's about as strong a wording as I can use without traveling over the line into the land of libel) has contributed heavily to the current economic woes that the airport and the city finds itself beset by today.

NOTE: I would have preferred putting up a video file of the above, but I was prevented by a variety of ills: the original TV broadcast, which I did record, was horribly garbled at the end due to some signal problems on Comcast cable TV lines. Comcast is supposed to broadcast the meeting a second time on the Saturday following the council meeting, but Comcast instead opted to broadcast a set of infomercials that hawked self-help books and exercise equipment. City hall does not keep DVDs of city council meetings, but will charge $25 and up if they have to special order one (in seeming defiance of public records laws -- that's an ongoing set of arguments between this web site and the city clerk's office over what is and isn't a public record and how much can be charged for a public record. A secondary argument is: why does Comcast get a free copy for broadcasting purposes while this web site has to pay $25 for a copy for virtually the same purpose as Comcast, i.e., public access and broadcast?).

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.