SNOOKERED ON ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA SITE FOR STRIPPERS AND SEX BUSINESSES? -- THE SHAME OF OUR CITY
That's what St. Augustine Commissioners did to local residents concerned about adult entertainment Monday night. The St. Augustine Record reporter and editorial writer were snookered too.
Yes, Mayor JOSEPH LEROY, BOLES, JR., the solution ready is "simple" and you refused to discuss it for a second. the City's ordinance 2007-14 needs to be amended to: allow First Amendment protected putative "adult" entertainment in at least four retail parcels adjacent to the St. Augustine Police Headquarters, e.g., in the SEBASTIAN INLAND HARBOR PROJECT, a failing $70 million public-private partnership built on a former Superfund site. Conventioneers like strippers.
Local residents agreed they don they don't want strip joints and other adult entertainment adjacent to their homes, or on entrance corridors, and that they want any such places where they can't be seen. Solution: locate the strip joint zone in one of the several retail places in SEBASTIAN INLAND HARBOR. That will prevent St. Augustine from become HARRISSVILLE (or POTTERSVILLE), see below.
City Commission Vice Chair DONALD CRICHLOW rightly voted against the sexpot proliferation ordinance. The City's contract attorney is researching the idea of creating the adult entertainment zone behind the SAPD HQ. Any other ordinance will cheapen our town.
Locating the stripper zone south of SAPD HQ will have a deterrent effect on crime. Yet City Commissioners and the St. Augustine Record ignore this idea, which residents applauded when it was suggested it Monday night.. Why are alternatives to City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS & Co. never discussed and always censored from public debate?
Could it be that speculator lawyer GEORGE MCCLURE is against it? He always gets his way and Monday night he said he had not done any "scientific research" but was unaware of any WESTIN HOTEL with adult entertainment. The entire SEBASTIAN INLAND HARBOR project is in disarray, with the bulkhead collapsing last year and the contractor being fired and the original developer unable to keep its promises. Instead of asking tough questions, Commissioners were rubberstamps, once again. They can rectify the situation on August 27
No contract with WESTIN exists. There is only a "Letter of Intent," not shared with residents.
Who are the investors in the SEBASTIAN INLAND HARBOR PROJECT? Let's have a list of every single one of them, so that we can evaluate conflicts of interest. GEORGE MCCLURE said the "upscale" WESTIN will attract "high quality visitors," an elitist bit of snootery attacking the millions of tourists who visit St. Augustine annually. Not one Commissioner ever stands up to MCCLURE, who presented no sworn testimony but got his way anyway on Monday. Such slickery should not be tolerated by the City of St. Augustine.
As a way of solving the putative problem on which over $13,000 in legal fees has been spetn, SEBASTIAN INLAND HARBOR can be the location of the adult entertainment zone in ordinance 2007-14, satisfying St. Augustine residents's concenrs.
Yet Commissioners won't even discuss the idea on Monday. Wonder why?
As I heard Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower say at a Nashville food conference in 1978, "they're stealing the alternatives, folks." We're not supposed to discuss what the owners, controllers and herders don't want us to discuss -- we're deprived of the information we deserve in a democracy. As Lincoln Steffens would say, is this the shame of our City?
Why? What do you reckon? Are real estate speculators so influential in our Natoin's Oldes City that their precious inchoate plans for Sebastian Inland Harbor trump public regulation of public health and morals? We need objective policy evaluation to draft legislation -- not lockstep logrolling by incurious Commissioners who sell their souls to anti-democratic energumen, like St. Augustine CITY MANAGER WILLIAM B. HARRISS..
In the words of Hale & Doar lawyer Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy at the Army- McCarthy hearings in 1954, "at long last, have [they] no sense of decency?"
As County Commission Chair Ben Rich said, even carpetbaggers would be ashamed about what real estate speculators have done to our community. "They've done everything" to our St. Augustine City government "except refine it," as was said about the Pennsylvania legislature under the Standard Oil Trust (whose felonious cartel co-founder Henry Flagler built hotels here and is the namesake of Flagler College here, with a statute looking across the street to City Hall).
For his incompetence, including the illegal dumping and adult entertainment zone fiasco, City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS must resign or be fired. It's time for him to go. This is St. Augustine, Florida, our Nation's Oldest (European-founded) City, site of the first Catholic Mass in North America on September 8, 1565.
St. Augustine must not be turned into Frank Capra's "Pottersville" at the behest of the likes of St. Augustine City Manager WILLIAM. B.HARRISS.
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