Dazed and confused
I am at a bit of a loss in trying to tell some of the story about the last two hearings in the Sunshine Law lawsuit. For starters, the public has barely been given a skim-over of events as these events have played out in court. For another, the story, while fascinating to me, is so bogged down with technical details that it becomes quickly boring and imponderable to anyone but the most devoted of local political junkies.

Yet this story, as it is unfolding, has already drastically changed local government and the public's perception of it, and many of the changes are for the worse as city hall has dug in for a long fight against long odds of winning. If anything, attorney Andrea Mogensen's lawsuit has made it even harder to get public information out of city hall. In short, this is a HUGE story.

The devil is in the details, though, and before I can begin to tackle the vastness of the of the untold portion of the overall story arc in a way that will be comprehensible to the reader, some background material is needed to be provided. So think of this story that you are reading now as a sort of a prelude to a bigger story that is slowly taking shape in my head (and that, hopefully, I will be able to tell in a way that is both interesting and informative -- a big challenge).

A missing building?
During much of 2005 through 2007, I was working on two overall story lines in addition to the more routine stories that were being published on this web site. The first, one that is still untold to this day due to city hall's success in blocking my access to key materials, is that the city is missing a building. An entire building. One that we paid approximately $1 million for and never was built. A small building to be sure, one that was intended for use by the city's drinking water plant as part of the treatment process. One that the DEP was told had been built and that they even inspected and approved, in spite of the fact that it never existed.

The story is still so potentially damaging to the city, to the county, and to the DEP, that all entities involved slammed down the information feeds and refused to discuss it or allow me access to public records. The city, in particular, was very creative in their reasoning: citing terrorism, then-City Manager Marty Black refused to let me have access to any of the plans for the missing building or the cheap replacement strategy that the city came up with to account for the missing building. Again citing terrorism, Black even refused to allow me to tour the facility.

Officials at the DEP refused to answer questions. Instead, they referred me to a press officer who never returned any of my phone calls. Meanwhile, the county's Health Department, deputized by the DEP to inspect the water treatment building that was never there (and that gave the missing building consistently passing grades in spite of its non-existence) likewise refused to comment or provide any materials.

There was no vast conspiracy between the city, the county, and the DEP to keep this story from coming to light, of that I am certain. Rather, there appeared to be three separate conspiracies to keep this story from ever coming to light. There is a history of convoluted and semi-related, but separate, screw ups within each agency that led to this debacle. Each agency, the city, the county, and the DEP, all have their own individual reasons to protect their own, which has collectively led to the false appearance of an overall vast inter-agency conspiracy to keep the public from knowing the full extent of the story and, thus, the ramifications on the citizens of Venice who daily drink and bathe in the water provided by the city.

Your cheap golf may go hasta luego -- now there's something worth getting excited about
The other story line that was running parallel to this, and the one that eventually took over the public's imagination and outrage when it was discovered that the public's cheap access to the golf course at the airport was jeopardized, was the tale of secret negotiations and discussions that the city was engaging in with Aris Mardirossian and his organization, Amalthea Investments. Local businessman Ed Taylor was acting as Mardirossian's front man in trying to secretly bring a Marriott to the Venice Airport. Taylor had been having numerous secret discussions with Marty Black, that has been repeatedly confirmed. Presumably, Taylor was likely talking with selected members of the Airport Advisory Board and with Councilman John Simmonds.

As seen in some of the emails that have already been produced, particularly a telling set between then-Airport Advisory Board Chairman Paul Hallowell and City Councilman John Simmonds, knowledge of the Marriott proposal and discussions surrounding it were going on as early as late 2005. The implication is that the discussions were likely taking place for a year or more prior to that, although the public and the media, myself included, still does not have a clear picture of how and when, exactly, Mardirossian and Taylor entered the picture.

Nevertheless, by June or July of 2006, I was ready to blow the word "Marriott" out into the public's consciousness. I did so in that time frame at a city council meeting during a heated public input session about amenities planned for the city's newly acquired beach park land, Tramonto Vista Park.

This would be the first time that the public would become aware of the secret plans that had been formulating in city hall and among the insiders of the Airport Advisory Board. It would be the first time that the public would have any inkling that a Marriott was being planned for them. Indeed, it would be the first time that the public would hear the word "Marriott" in conjunction with city hall or the Venice Airport.

Black gives me the boot; Hammett gets a Gmail account
Blowing that word out into the public at that time and in that way happened as a result of my frustration and embarrassment after Marty Black kicked me out of one of his weekly press conferences, a meeting that Black would have known that I was about to ask questions about the Marriott negotiations. Black's stated reason to the Herald-Tribune for kicking me out was, in retrospect, hilarious if nonsensical: several months prior, I had suggested brokering ad space on the city's official web site. Makes perfect sense... wait... what?

Sometime in that same time frame, April to June of 2006, I was standing outside of the mayor's office. There's a "press bin" on a table directly outside of his door. The press bin is a set of document trays that the city clerk keeps stocked with some of the latest documents that are floating in and out of city hall. The press is allowed to paw through these documents and make requests for copies.

Note the time frame. The public still doesn't know about the Marriott yet, but I have already learned about the plans, at least in a way that I can state is a confirmed rumor. It would be another two months before I get kicked out of a press conference and subsequently bring the word "Marriott" into the public dialectic.

I was standing at the press bin, reading through a few documents. Then-Mayor Fred Hammett was sitting at his desk, talking on the phone. His office door was wide open, but I was around the corner from his field of view -- Hammett was totally unaware that I was within earshot of his portion of the conversation, and I was totally unaware that he was even in his office until I heard his voice while I was reading through the pile of press bin docs.

I heard the words "Marriott" and "golf course" being spoken by Hammett and suddenly I was damned curious as to what he was talking about in his phone conversation, but I couldn't make out complete sentences as the gals in the front office were talking and their conversation drowned out much of Hammett's conversation. After a bit, I moved a few steps closer to Hammett's office in an effort to get a better listen, all the while pretending to seriously study a set of documents from the press bin.

What I heard, and I'll never forget it, is the following: "No, don't send it to that address, the press reads it and then it will end up in print. Send it to rfh704@gmail.com, that's my private email address." Hammett then ended the conversation and hung up.

I knew that Hammett had a Comcast email address (rfh704@comcast.net) that he used for some official business, but this was the first that I knew about Hammett using Google's free email service as a stealth email account for city business.

The 2007 city council gets a case of the jibblies
OK, you with me so far? Because if you're not, go back and reread the above paragraphs until they make sense. If you don't know all of that, the rest of what I am about to include will totally confuse you.

Jump forward almost a year to April of 2007. The public was well aware of the Marriott and other less likely airport development plans that had been the subject of backroom discussions and negotiations for a couple of years. In response to the public clamor, and in an attempt to shape the public's views into a suitably profitable outcome for a few secretive insiders, public "charrettes" were ongoing. These charrettes consisted of public workshops for city officials and airport consultants to gather information about what the public wanted for the future of the Venice Airport -- just so long as the public wanted a Marriott. In effect, the public had about as much input at the outcome of the charrettes as a herd of cattle has at the outcome of a visit to a slaughterhouse.

City officials were nervous. The public had actually come awake and was paying attention. This Marriott thing might not go down as smoothly as hoped. Indeed, the retention of council seats by developer-sponsored candidates was now being jeopardized. Councilmen Jim Woods and Bill Willson, along with Mayor Fred Hammett, would all have their names on the ballots in the coming November elections and they were behaving with appropriate nervousness publicly.

There is no indication that Willson was in on the Marriott information loop prior to my public outing in mid-2006 of the proposed deal. Nevertheless, Willson expressed his horror in May of 2007 at the prospect of the controversy affecting public opinion and at affecting his chances at being re-elected (video - pops in new window): "If I had to pick an item, what item could I get during an election year to get everybody mad at me that I possibly could? That item [the airport development controversy] would probably be right up there on top."

Despite Willson's well stated protestations, that item would end up costing him his seat on council, as he, Jim Woods and Fred Hammett were all ousted in the November 2007 election.

I still wanna know where that f#&#&#g missing building is, and I wouldn't mind getting a public records request actually honored
Invisible to public view: While all of this was going on, I was still trying to claw my way into getting some substantiating documentation on the missing chemical treatment building at the drinking water plant and the screwed up, half-assed rig job that was being used instead in the chemical treatment of city water. I put out some public feelers and statements (video from April of 2007 - pops in new window), but the general public could have cared less. An informed electorate has its priorities and a story about potential graft, corruption and malfeasance on a massive scale is unimportant when cheap access to golf greens is at risk. A threat of an intrusion into the recreational habits of retirees was of paramount and critical importance... sadly, stupidly, and selfishly, it overshadowed all else.

OK, are you still with me? This is important, as it is within that context that in April of 2007, a particular email exchange took place between myself, City Clerk Lori Stelzer, and Councilman John Simmonds. The gist of it is that I made a public records request to review all emails by all members of council for city business, specifically emails that had been sent or received by all council members through their privately maintained accounts -- in other words, all city business emails that were NOT sent through the city's email server.

I received a stall job from Stelzer and a bizarre and unsolicited declaratory proclamation of innocence from Councilman John Simmonds, who insisted that he did zero city business on his home computer. Simmonds wasn't even on my radar at the time, so his mondo-bizarro rant made absolutely no sense.

Boy oh boy, doesn't it make perfect sense now, eh? Touched a nerve and tweaked a guilty conscience, and I never even knew it. If I only knew then what I know now...

As far as anything that came close to honoring the records request, what I did receive was five... count 'em, five... printed emails from Councilman John Moore. That and nothing more.

Mogensen is letting Hammett take a walk
Thanks to public records requests and subpoenas from Andrea Mogensen, we now know that there were a hell of a lot more emails in April of 2007 that would have qualified for my public records request than five emails. There were thousands, many of them from Simmonds -- now I know why Simmonds blew a sprocket at the request, yet still he persisted in using his private email account to do city business, even after denying that he engaged in such behavior.

Yet in April of 2007, without even a moderate legal budget to pursue further, I was stuck and Stelzer, Simmonds, Hammett, and the rest of city hall knew it. They were home safe. City hall had beaten me. I was not to ever know about the full extent of secret dealings that led to the proposal of a Marriott on airport land. I would never be allowed to get my hands on documents that would show that former city officials had knowingly spent approximately $1 million on a ghost building. I would never know where, exactly, that money actually went.

Hammett has been added to the Sunshine Law lawsuit by attorney Andrea Mogensen, but only for his limited involvement in Tra Ponti, Mike Miller's proposed hotel/condominium project planned for the north end of the island portion of Venice, a few miles away from the airport. In spite of my begging, Mogensen has not added Hammett's Gmail account to her list of subpoenaed public records.

For his part, Hammett has stated publicly that he has deleted all city business email on his computers, presumably because he was ignorant that he was required to keep them. That still doesn't explain why I wasn't provided with them back in April of 2007, but Mogensen appears to be quite content with letting Hammett get away with it.

Coming up in the next few days: the publication of the email exchange referenced in the above article. Be prepared to be very, very surprised.

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.