The Steele Report
At the end of the Steele Report is a hand-written diary of sorts, penned by wastewater plant operator (and Federal whistleblower) Troy Evans. The entries chronicle Evans early attempts to get the city to wake up to the problems that they were facing in a then-just started EPA criminal investigation. It is, perhaps, the most damning document in the report.

The report itself deals with asking the question: Was sewage deliberately and secretly dumped on the airport (unwritten: "...as reported by Venice Florida! dot com")? It is still my firm belief that the core intent of this report was to debunk issues that I had written about earlier this year for the sole purpose of a subsequent legal attack upon myself and this web site, a fear that is justified by repeated threats of litigation against me by city officials (both the mayor and former Utils Director John Lane on two separate occasions).

Even the Venice Gondolier Sun eventually concluded that I was full of crap, this based on a faulty county health department letter (referred to as a "report" by the Gondo) that stated that health department employees couldn't find any signs of sewage or sludge on airport property some three years after the event. What the Gondo never told you: the Sarasota County Health Department was never told the correct place to look, so they just went out and took ground samples from whatever looked like likely spots at the time. Six soil samples in total were taken. The airport is a pretty huge chunk of land, so it is unlikely that the health department would have found the spot if they had taken 200 such random samples.

The Steele Report exonerates my accounts of sewage dumping at the airport, although the report indicates that Private Investigator Keith Steele could only determine that anywhere from 4 to 24 dump trucks worth of sewage and sludge were illegally dumped on airport property. This is in sharp contrast to my reports that said the practice had likely been going on for years.

Old news: Calamaras knew; new news: now it can be proven
I previously reported on this web site that Mayor Dean Calamaras and then-City Manager George Hunt had met with Troy Evans in 2002 and that Evans had spelled out the allegations of EPA violations in an attempt to wake the city up to its own behavior.

Subsequent to that meeting was an all-out municipal campaign to slime Evans for violating chain of command, one that the mayor allowed even though he had full knowledge of Evans allegations. This, then, eventually led to Evans being ordered by the city to go to a psychiatrist by then-City Manager George Hunt and then-Assistant City Manager Jane O'Connor as part of the city's Employee Assistance Program. The logic behind this decision came seemingly straight out of a bastardized marriage of ideas from Joseph Heller and George Orwell (with a heavy dash of Poe's The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether): in Hunt and O'Connor's views, Evans wanted to continue to work for the city despite the fact that he was abysmally unhappy with a lot of the decisions that the city was making. According to Hunt and O'Connor, this psychological dissonance needed to be sorted out by a trained professional.

"I strongly urge you to use the EAP [Employee Assistance Program psych counseling] sessions to examine why you wish to continue working in an environment you feel is so troublesome to your image of how it should work," Hunt wrote in his letter to Evans.

O'Connor would later sign the papers specifically ordering Evans to lie on the couch, stare at the ceiling and talk about how a terrible childhood was causing him to illogically lash out at a benign and benevolent governmental employer.

The whole affair was so incredibly creepy as to be unbelievable, and that was the problem: the city government had become so insidious that it was beyond comprehension and belief. The true story was so unbelievably lunatic that it couldn't possibly be true -- this is the United States after all, such things simply do not happen here. In this created psychotic vortex, the only thing that made sense, once you were told the tale, was to dismiss the teller of the tale as a lunatic because such lunacy could not possibly exist.

Evans eventually sued the city for violations of Federal Whistleblower laws, one of three such lawsuits brought forth by Evans, William 'Skip' Pettit and James Campbell. All three lawsuits resulted in out-of-court settlements. Evans and Pettit each received $25,000 plus attorney fees, Campbell settled for a lesser amount.

It was, and still is, my contention that Calamaras had a legal and ethical mandate to stop the harassment and to look into the allegations that Evans had made. Calamaras did not do this, instead he verbally blew Evans off and knowingly ignored the matter. Further, he allowed then-City Manager George Hunt to ride roughshod over the lives and civil rights of Evans and other city employees It is this outrageously gross "sin of omission" on Calamaras' part that is at the heart of the dispute between the mayor and myself.

People were hurt. People were screwed over and mercilessly attacked. The mayor did nothing. Actually, that's not entirely true. The mayor did do one thing proactively.

The mayor lied
After I reported on the mayor's knowledge, Calamaras had a twenty or so minute televised rant at my expense at a city council meeting on January 11 of this year [the screenshot at right is from that meeting -- Calamaras is waving around a printed copy of an article from Venice Florida! dot com]. While sitting in the audience, I listened to the mayor call me just about every bad thing that he thought could stick. The mayor accused me of cyber-stalking and threatened to sue, a threat that made the local papers. He also, in a backhanded way, urged potential advertisers to boycott this web site. He came just short of actually calling for a boycott, but the implication was very clear.

Additionally, the mayor spoke in his rant of the meeting with Evans, stating that Evans had made no such allegations of illegal activity, that Evans had shown some charts and graphs and such of a technical nature that Calamaras did not understand.

The mayor's rant was easily the most excruciatingly ugly thing I have yet had to endure in my dealings with city hall. It is absolutely horrifying to sit and listen to a government leader denounce you publicly by name. Over and over again. It took all the self control I had to put on a game face and take it and to be the only one in the room to absolutely know one thing: it was all a big lie.

Let me repeat that: Calamaras' rant, aimed at me, one that was televised and went on for about twenty minutes, was all one big colossal lie.

I've saved the mayor's rant to DVD along with my response (given while I was suffering from the onset of the winter flu that was going around town back in January). I think I did fairly well, especially considering that I walked away from the podium without the slightest clue as to what I had said -- I had to watch the televised meeting the next day to find out if I had said anything cogent and I was pretty amazed that my response was one of the best and most logical attacks I've ever made on a city official. I'll gladly burn off a copy of Calamaras' rant and my response for anyone who wants to provide me with a blank DVD.

Now comes the release of the Steele Report -- it's been gathering dust for two months at city hall. There was much publicity about it when the city hired the investigator, apparently fully convinced that I was full of crap and that this report would finally put me in my place. Once the report was received, I now can readily understand why it became a bottom-drawer-back-of-the-file-cabinet item. The mayor must have been horrified, hoping like hell that I would never think to ask for it. Other members of council didn't even know it had been released.

Marty Black gets arrested
On June 15th, 2005, the city entered a plea of guilty in Federal Court in Tampa to criminal charges brought against the city by the EPA. The plea was accepted and entered into judgment. This criminal conviction was and is a direct result of information turned over to the EPA by Troy Evans and other city employees. According to the docket, Marty Black was symbolically arrested as the city's representative. Technically, we were all arrested on June 15th, as the docket reads "Arrest of City of Venice, Marty Black, City Manager" [Criminal Docket for Case #: 8:05-cr-00190-EAK-EAJ-1]. Cue the harmonica: "Nobody knows the trouble I seen, nobody knows but Jesus......."

Currently, the city is undergoing a pre-sentence investigation, a legal function normally performed by the appropriate Department of Corrections for the purpose of forecasting and reporting the likelihood of a successful probation or projected recidivism on the part of the convicted individual. This case is a bit unusual in that a whole community and municipality is being looked at and examined as the convicted offender rather than the usual individual person. Eventually, the entire town will be placed on some sort of Federal probation which means we'll more than likely have to collectively report to a probation officer. I know that sounds silly, but that's the way the system works.

It all could have been avoided. Evans wasn't the only one trying to raise the flag, but city and business leaders in this town didn't want to hear about it. Most still don't.

Hunt in a china shop
Dennis Rodriguez, the then-union local president, held a press conference in August of 2002 to protest a botched investigation into a number of physical and psychological abuses that the utils department management was heaping on the workers, abuses that now can be seen as part of a systematic pattern of lawbreaking. Initially, then utils head John Lane had decided not to issue any punishments. Union and public pressure forced then-City Manager George Hunt to bring some kind of hammer down, which he did, although begrudgingly. Hunt blundered his way through the punishments in his typical Hunt-in-a-china-shop fashion, which in turn spawned a whole new set of legal problems.

By this time, the whole thing had turned into a circus. Circuit Court Judge Becky Titus entered the mix, this in a lawsuit filed against the city by three of the four punished supervisors in an attempt to overturn their punishments.

A bit of background on Becky Titus might be in order. Titus is an odd bird in judicial circles, one with a bit of interesting history. Back in the late 1980's or early 1990s, her marriage to Elliot Metcalfe, who was then the head of Sarasota's Public Defender's Office, and her decision to force DUI offenders to place identifying bumper stickers on their cars earned her a segment on CBS' 60 Minutes program in an episode appropriately entitled Adam's Rib (for you younger readers, this is a reference to a romantic legal comedy that's been remade several times since 1929, the most famous version starred Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn in 1949). Much of the CBS news feature focused on the newlyweds' stated love for each other and the vicious headline-grabbing legal battle they were waging against each other over the bumper stickers. The opening sequence in the news piece showed the devastatingly beautiful young judge walking along a gulf beach wearing a sexy and curvalicious one-piece bathing suit with her long brunette hair waving in the wind. The episode left the viewer with the impression that Titus was a young woman with a brilliant legal mind, strong and progressive constitutionalist views and a body and face that was to die for -- the ultimate combination of brains and beauty.

All of that aside, Titus is one of the more highly respected judges on the bench. Possessing a fast wit and a keen legal mind, she has a cut-the-fluff attitude in disposing of cases with a keen eye towards correct interpretation of case law. She is nobody's fool. Which makes her decision in the Venice supervisors' abuse case all the more disturbing.

In the case at hand, Titus ruled that the city hadn't followed due process in the abuse investigations against the supervisors and thus the whole process was void. This overturned the city's determinations of guilt and the subsequent punishments. Titus never addressed whether or not the abuses happened or whether the supervisors committed the abuses, she never got that far. To Titus, the disciplinary system in Venice city government was so seriously flawed that any determination of guilt or innocence on the part of the supervisors was immaterial.

Titus' decision, while devastating to city workers and their union, was, I think, legally correct, especially given the colossal clusterflap that the city had engaged in by trying to first cover up for and then investigate its own. Sadly, however, the effect of Titus' decision was to put the union and management right back to where they had started prior to the union's objections -- unless the city was willing to restart the investigative process from scratch, the supervisors would be free again to run the department the way they wanted to and the workers would be free to run away in terror. The city chose to drop it and move on.

We won't get fooled again
In both the Evans affair and in the wake of Titus' ruling, the city had the opportunity to wake up and sniff the cappuccino. Instead, the snooze button was pushed. The end result of the continued snoring was a mandatory appearance last month before a Federal judge in a massive case brought against the city by the EPA.

Last Tuesday, again, I was before council raising issues of new idiotic and illegal acts by our utilities department. This time, I was informing them that the city, through hired contractors, had hooked a mudhog pump up to a sewage spill at Patches Restaurant on July 1 and that, as a result, sewage was pumped into a storm drain that emptied into Hatchett Creek for an estimated five and a half hours. I thought I was speaking to automatons. I received glazed robotic stares and a smarmy thank you from hizzonor. So here we go again.....

"Venice residents and anyone who cares about the health of the creeks and bays that flow into the Gulf should thank EPA investigator Dan Green and other federal officials for pursuing this case. Also deserving of praise is local resident John Patten. Over the last three years, he repeatedly urged city officials to look into illegal dumping by the Utilities Department. If those officials had listened to Patten, they might have saved the city a lot of trouble and a lot of money."
-- editorial, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 04/09/05

Yeah, well, nothing much has changed it seems. Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss, and we're all getting fooled again.

A mayoral colonoscopy may be in order
In 2002, the mayor asked "If the EPA is coming, where are they?"

I humbly offer this response:

Mr. Mayor, the EPA is presently so far up your tuchus that they know what you had for lunch yesterday. That's where the EPA is.

Furthermore, Mr. Mayor, I and all of the rest of the residents of the city of Venice would like to thank you for the wonderful fines and attorney fees that we residents get to pay on your behalf, all because of your stupidity and lack of ethics. $1 million in total if the newspaper accounts are correct. I personally feel that you should step up to the plate and pay this bill as it was your behavior in a large part (along with a few others) that landed us in Federal Court. Or rather, your lack of behavior.

"Poop on our streets makes baby Jesus cry" editorial cartoon pic courtesy of Church Sign Generator

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.