WILLIAM B. HARRISS, St. Augustine City Manager, Republican Lord of All He Surveys, Recidivist Developer-Coddler, Water Polluter, Civil Rights Violator -- Happy 5th Anniversary! (Photo credit: J.D. Pleasant)
April 11 marks the Fifth Anniversary of my first encounter with WILLIAM B. HARRISS. WILLIAM B. HARRISS is the sorriest, slimiest, most supercilious excuse for a City Manager ever to make a chair squeak in the entire State of Florida.
It seems only yesterday that I first encountered WILLIAM B. HARRISS, who (thinking no one else was listening) after the April 11, 2005 City Commission meeting nastily threatened me with arrest for “disorderly conduct” in retaliation for First Amendment protected activity regarding the City of St. Augustine’s violation of the Fifteenth Amendment in annexing more than 60 times all-white areas, but never annexing West Augustine (whose residents are charged 25% more than City residents for water).
I documented HARRISS’ threat, only to be told by Comissioner SUSAN BURK write Commissioners that it didn’t happen.
It did happen, and I already had an affidavit from Sue Neely about that threat and the bribe offer by the applicant for testimony on a voluntary annexation by a former Chamber of Commerce President, of a “bottle of liquor” in exchange for his testimony.
How many other local residents did GEORGE McCLURE, WILLIAM B. HARRISS & Co. bully and intimidate in the course of their crooked shenanigans? How many people did HARRISS bully successfully into silence about corruption and sequelae before he tried it and failed with me?
That encounter with WILLIAM B. HARRISS was the first time I ever attended a City meeting. My eyes were opened. Our city and county are cesspools of corruption and civil rights violations.
The very next month, in May 2005, at HARRISS’ behest, Commissioners violated the First Amendment, denying the right to St. Augustine GLBTQ people to fly Rainbow flags on our Bridge of Lions (see below). Only two weeks to the day later, United States District Judge Henry Lee Adams, Jr. declared that the City of St. Augustine violated the First Amendment, ordering the Rainbow flags to fly.
Bigots still rue the day, whining on local KKK-style hate websites. We wear the bigots' scorn as a badge of honor, and note their hate websites exist to excoriate everyone who criticizes WILLIAM B. HARRISS (and that they are run by MICHAEL GOLD, beneficiary of no-bid uniform contracts and bagman for SHERIFF DAVID SHOAR f/k/a "DAVID HOAR," whom HARRISS hired as Police Chief and supported for SHERIFF).
In February 2006, I caught WILLIAM B. HARRISS placing 40,000 cubic yards of solid waste in our Old City Reservoir. I turned him in to state and federal law enforcement agents, which have not yet arrested anyone.
At City Commission meetings during 2006-2008, WILLIAM B. HARRISS would laugh and giggle girlishly every time I brought the issue up in City meetings, knowing he had the Commissioners conned and the State of Florida fooled.
In 2008, citizens had the last laugh. Public protests led by Judith Seraphin forced the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to remove the solid waste from the Old City Reservoir and put it in a Class I landfill – our City and its tatterdemalion $500/hour lawyer, WILLIAM PENCE, wanted to bring the contaminated solid waste back to Lincolnville.
In January 2009, we filed an Environmental Justice complaint against the City of St. Augustine and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which my friend David Thundershield Queen said really stood for “Don’t Expect Protection.”
Last year we reported on a State Attorney General’s opinion that says local ordinances can’t create laws defining what are crimes – our Florida Constitution says only the Legislature and Governor can write criminal laws. By that measure, the City of St. Augustine is a recidivist lawbreaker, one whose ordinance 1-8 is repeatedly used by City Commissioners to make misdemeanors out of ordinance violations. By that measure, it appears that HARRISS and his lugubrious goobers may have committed hundreds, if not thousands, of illegal arrests, including arrests of artists and entertainers on St. George Street for 24 years.
Controversial City Manager WILLIAM HARRISS is still in his job five years later, but neighborhoods and activists are empowered, and the days are now long gone when the likes of GEORGE MCCLURE, DONALD CRICHLOW, GEOFFREY DOBSON and WILLIAM B. HARRISS could kill wetlands, destroy trees and murder wildlife without being publicly questioned.
You never know when the FBI will put handcuffs on WILLIAM B. HARRISS and take him away. You never know when HARRISS will quit as City Manager and move to a country without an extradition treaty. You never know when Commissioners will fire HARRISS.
In the immortal words of General Kutuzov in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, “patience and time.”
As United States Supreme Court Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis wrote 82 years ago, government official lawbreaking promotes anarchy:
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding....Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means-to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal-would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this court should resolutely set its face."
Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 479, 485 (1928)(Brandeis, J., dissenting).
So, happy anniversary, Mr. HARRISS.
Thank you for the chase.
You and your hey-boys have made me feel young again – as young as I was when the FBI arrested Anderson County Sheriff Dennis O. Trotter – as young as I was when we got the largest mercury pollution event in world history declassified.
You see, the people, united, can never be defeated. In the particular, the people have already defeated HARRISS and his authoritarian, hierarchical nincompoops -- ignoramuses who thought it cute to put solid waste into an open sore that goes straight down into our aquifer and groundwater, and then to bring it back to the African-American community where it was illegally dumped in the first place.
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