Friday, October 29, 2010

SUPPORT AMENDMENT 4 (HOMETOWN DEMOCRACY)

One sunny morning, a newly born baby rhinoceros and his mother were walking through the bush in search of the morning meal, when they happened upon a makeup mirror that had been left at a campsite by a careless eco-tourist. The baby rhino looked down curiously at the mirror and blinked his moist eyes.

"Is that me, mama?" he squeaked.

"Yep" replied his mother, wincing as one of several ox peckers tore a blood engorged tick from her leathery hide. The ox pecker needed breakfast, too.

The baby looked up innocently at his mother, gazed over her cracking cover obtained from the mornings mud wallow and asked, "Why am I so ugly?"

The mother looked at her baby lovingly and exhaled a sigh from deep within her soul. She, too, looked in the mirror, surprised at the depth of the scars inflicted by predators when she was but a youngster. There she stood, seemingly in a trance, at a loss for words.

To you and I, the answer seems simple and obvious, but the importance of this story is not in the answer but the question. The baby rhino asked the question because he was inexperienced, na

Let me give you some facts. As a former St. Johns County Commissioner, I know these things to be true.

1. The developers, their attorneys and those who stand to make money from mega-development will stop at nothing to control your elected commissioners regarding land use matters. I sat for two years on a commission totally controlled by these special interests. The last vestige of that system is Commissioner Cyndi Stevenson, the pick of the Issues Group (Executive Director, Sid Perry, wife of the former sheriff) over other interviewed candidates such as Jack Boyd, who was rejected by the developer membership when he refused to sell you out.

2. Without reform to the system of changes in land use designation, it will be a matter of time before your commission once again falls under the control of the development special interests.

3. If we continue down the present road, you will become a mirror image of counties like Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Duval (the murder capital of Florida). The historical facts clearly show what the influence peddling of the development industry leaves in its corrupting wake.

4. If you do nothing to change the course of history, you, too, will suffer under future crushing tax burdens to prop up failing schools, build water desalinization plants, expand grid-locked highways into bigger grid-locked highways, close beaches, and expand jails, courts and government bureaucratic services.

You now have a frame of reference. You are no longer uninformed, na

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Ben Rich is a former chairman of the St. Johns County Commission. He served on the County Commission from District 3 from 2004 to 2008.

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