LINCOLNVILLE STREETS FLOOD WHILE THE CITY OF ST. AUGUSTINE WASTES MONEY ON $25 MILLION WHITE ELEPHANT PARKING GARAGE AND OTHER FLUBDUBS

Many times each year, St. Augustine streets in low-income and minority become impassible due to flooding.

These are prime examples of what we call "Environmental Racism." Not only do Lincolnville and West Augustine literally get dumped on -- it's worthy of a Scandals Tour -- but our Nation's Oldest City's racist City Manager has been unwilling and unable in 10.5 years on the job to do anything about the drainage problems here.

Not only that, but he's also failed and refused to get federal grants that would fix the crumbling seawall (below).

We have in St. Augustine "a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference," in the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (quoting Dante). Where else in the world would a City Manager still be in power (and smirking) after two major environmental violations -- dumping 40,000 cubic yards of solid waste in the Old City Reservoir (in West Augustine) and dumping sewage effluent in a saltwater marsh for years, failing to inform the people while commiting Sunshine violations to conceal it all?

City Commissioners refuse to discuss the City Manager's crimes against nature.

Who should we ask about this Environmental Racism? Who empowers this gang of thugs.

CONGRESSMAN JOHN MICA, who got the City a $1.2 million grant for a giant parking garage we don't need.

FLAGLER COLLEGE CHANCELLOR WILLIAM L. PROCTOR, our State Representative for the 20th District. Thanks to PROCTOR, St. Augustine's in danger of resembling the dystopia in the movie, "It's a Wonderful Life," where one mean old man named Potter dominates a town through ruthless financial chicanery -- the angel shows the hero what the town would look like without him.



Thanks to PROCTOR, St. Augustine gets very little from FLAGLER COLLEGE (only $127,000to pay for two police officers, when other colleges and universities are much more generous -- Yale University pays New Haven, CT. 50% of what it would pay in property taxes.

Thanks to PROCTOR's bad influence -- a right-wing school with no tenure for faculty members -- our City is deprived of what could be a first-rate educational institution with adult education programs at night.

Thanks to PROCTOR's and MICA's developer-driven refusal to support the St. Augustine National Historical Park, National Seashore and National Scenic Coastal Highway (proposed in 2006), our small businesses and employees are suffering from an economic downturn.

Thanks to PROCTOR and MICA, St. Augustine increasingly resembles the dystopia of Potterville in "It's a Wonderful Life."

FLAGLER COLLEGE started a food court in its new Ringhaver Building, resulting in coffee shops and other small businesses closing their doors.

Thanks to City Commissioners' ill-advised adult entertainment ordinance, we might look even more like POTTERVILLE soon due to the economic downturn.

And the obscene, hyseterical and ranting posts by those government officials, family members, toadies, and henchmen posting as Anonymice at Plazabum, we're scaring tourists away with hateful attacks on homeless people (commencing two days before Christmas, 2006).

It's a beautful town in a beautiful place.

By electing reform-minded citizens like Jimmy Owens and Judith Seraphin to City Commission -- and Faye Armitage to Congress and Doug Courtney to the State Legislature -- we be able to protect our precious environmental and cultural heritage, create good jobs at good wages and recover from the misfeasance, malfeasance and nonfeasance of the WILLIAM. B. HARRISS regime.

What do you reckon?