In secret, during 2005- 2006, Harriss's minions took the contents of the old illegal city dump at the south end of Riberia Street -- 30,000,000 pounds of pollution -- and dumped it into the Old City Reservoir on Holmes Blvd. Extended. They took the contaminants from one lower-income, minority community in the city and dumped it into another one in the county, without permits or public notice or discussion.
Contents of the old dump included bed springs, toilets, sewage, heavy metals, vinyl chloride, arsenic and other poisons. City workers sorted through the contaminants without proper worker safety training. Enough stuff was deposited in the Old City Reservoir to fill in six Olympic-sized swimming pools to a depth of six feet (or cover a football field to a depth of 11.2 feet).
Out in the City and Collective Press broke the story of the dumping, later reported in the St. Augustine Record in articles and editorials.
Federal and state environmental criminal investigators failed to obtain any written statement from Harriss or City Commissioners, whom he told he'd been dumping "clean fill." As EPA told us in February 2006, "there's no bedsprings in clean fill."
For political reasons, based upon inaccurate factual assumptions about a supposed lack of motive, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP a/k/a "Don't Expect Protection") refused to prosecute a case involving government officials. FDEP's blatant nonenforcement is under investigation by the FDEP Inspector General and the Governor's Chief Inspector General.
FDEP delayed announcing its proposed $47,000 fine until shortly after the November 2006 elections, depriving voters of information they had a right to know before the coronation of Mayor Joseph Leroy Boles, Jr.
FDEP then wasted another year allowing St. Augustine officials and lawyers to engage in pettifoggery, claiming the dumping was "de minimis" or "de micromis" and demanding to leave the contaminants in the Old City Reservoir and then demanding to take them to back to the old city dump (instead of putting them in a proper landfill as DEP initially ordered).
Now FDEP has agreed to St. Augustine's demand that thousands of truckloads of contaminants are to be trucked back into Lincolnville. Lincolnville residents were never asked. This is an outrageous example of environmental racism -- one that may make St. Augustine a household name again, as in 1964.
If the contaminants are ever actually brought back to Lincolnville, there would be a monument to St. Augustine's racism in the form of a nineteen foot mound of contaminants erected next to the sewage plant by an artificial wetland.
That wetland -- and the phony urgency of creating it to allow Sebastian Inner Harbor project work to proceed -- apparently led our corner-cutting City Manager's regime to dump illegally without permits, without asking the city's outside environmental lawyer. City officials deliberately disobeyed repeated oral and written orders by the St. Johns River Water Management District that the City of St. Augustine not dump and answer questions about its plans.
Empowered local citizens took videos and reported the city's actions to the National Response Center in February 2006. City officials at first told me I could not show videos to the Commission on February 27, 2006, then switched signals and demanded I provide them copies in advance. Criminal investigators requested I not share the videos with the city.
As a result, the city was caught in a perjury trap, unable to tell more lies when its actions were on videotape.
City officials continued dumping March 1, 2006, two days after criminal investigators arrived.
Since that time, City commissioners and the city manager have refused to answer over 90 questions about the illegal dumping and the city's actions. Commissioner Jones accused me of "whipping" Commissioners, saying "uncle." Commissioner Gardner asked if I had "lint in [my] pocket."
Commissioners declared my home no longer in the city. They threatened arrests for asking questions. They reduced public comment time opportunities, first making people choose between the beginning and end of meetings, then ending public comment at the beginning of meetings, referring to three outspoken residents. Commissioners actually gave City Manager Harriss a plaque and an atta-boy in the midst of a pending criminal investigation in 2006, expressing their "confidence" in him, thereby discouraging city employees from reporting dumping wrongdoing.
Three city employees -- the city attorney, public works director and utilities director -- left the city after the dumping was revealed, perhaps as scapegoats for City Manager Harriss, who later accused the first two of "incompetence" for giving him bad legal advice. Bad legal advice? The two were professional engineers and that wasn't there job. A third professional engineer on staff was left unscathed. Meanwhile, neither they nor Harriss ever called the city's outside environmental counsel, William Pence of Akerman, Senterfitt, Florida's largest corporate law firm. Chief Operations Officer and Assistant City Manager John Regan says it would have cost only $75 for the city to call Pence and ask the question about dumping in the Old City Reservoir, which would have saved the city liability, fines and cleanup costs.
Efforts to interview Pence (who claims to be a Superfund expert) have been unavailing. Last year, paged before a meeting with FDEP in Jacksonville, Pence hung up the telephone without excusing himself or saying a word.
The City Commission vote on November 13 was without two of its five members. Ex-Mayor George Gardner and ex-Vice Mayor Susan Burk -- both serving in those positions at the time of the dumping -- left the meeting before the dumping was discussed. The meeting was oddly set for 8 AM, with only one other item on the agenda the closing of the Slave Market to artists and vendors. Commissioners had no expressed justification or excuse for their refusing to allow public comment on the FDEP dumping settlement, which Assistant City Manager John Regan told St. Augustine Record Opinion Editor Margo Pope would be open for public comment and was so reported in the November 11 Record editorial.
After a pro forma presentation by Regan,
Commissioners Errol Jones, Donald Crichlow and Mayor Joseph Leroy Boles voted to accept the plea bargain without dissenting voice or public comment or questions being answered.
The settlement left people scratching their heads at the city's intransigence, which will have wasted at least $1 million by the time the cleanup is completed.
Congressman John Mica (R-Winter Park) is already trolling for $1 million in federal funds for a new roof for City Hall (another mistake by the city, with City Manager William Harris' nephew missing a grant application deadline). Federal taxpayers would in effect bail out Harriss' mistakes, while the traditionally African-American community of Lincolnville gets the contaminants back, and more damage to Riberia Street from heavy trucks carrying contaminants. Lincolnville residents are organizing and planning their next steps. Meanwhile, St. Augustine ponders what has happened under City Manager Harriss' misrule since 1998. Marshall Burns was force-tackled and rendered a quadriplegic due to poor police training ($1.5 million of the settlement was paid by raising taxes). First Amendment rights have been violated. Artists and entertainers and musicians have been hustled off St. George Street and the Slave Market Square (Plaza de la Constitucion), with courts finding free speech violations.
Our city denied Bridge of Lions flag-flying permits to Gays in 2005, resulting in a landmark federal court decision requiring Rainbow flags fly on the Bridge June 7-13, 2005.
Wetland-destroying developers misrule, even forgiven a $15,000 tree-killing fine.
Immunity is given to corporate and governmental "crime in the suites," while St. Augustine gentrifies.
Will someone please show City Manager William B. Harriss to the door? As Jimmy Breslin's book, "How the Good Guys Finally Won" teaches about Watergate, persistence will defeat corruption every time. Regan said, "this was a pretty traumatic event for everyone all the way to the top" of the city hall hierarchy. What of those outside the hierarchy, like the residents who will pay for Harriss' intentional acts (inaccurately termed "mistakes").
What can you do:
Activate in 2008. St. Augustine voters will elect as many as four new Commissioners. (If Boles seeks re-election as mayor, he must resign the last half of his four-year term). That means that Mayor Boles, Vice Mayor Donald Crichlow, ex-Vice Mayor Susan Burk and ex-Mayor George Gardner could all be gone within one year.
Like Nixon's "Final Days," this is a fascinating time. It is time for St. Augustine to expect democracy and reject autocracy.
They've had their turn. Now it's our turn. Activate in 2008
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