Healing Continues

The healing continues, as yesterday's St. Augustine City Commission meeting with the County Commission showed.

Commissioners are considering how best to provide sewer service to West Augustine. It will cost some $20 million. Both the City and County will incur "losses" in complying with the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires equal protection. he City staff suggests the County might take over utilities, since t has a higher bonding capacity and the ability to obtain HUD Commmunity Development Block (CDBG) grants to help people afford sewer connection costs.

History of racism: No sewer service was provided anywhere in West Augustine until 1998 (the year our City Manager, John Patrick Regan, P.E., became Utilities Director). Racsts in our City sharply questioned r. Regan then -- and have muted criticism now -- at the "costs." The costs of not having sewer service include death, disease and depressed property values. Failure of the ancien regime to provide equal services a was a flagrant violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Racism in our City is why most of West Augustine has no sewer service. To remedy that scourge of racistm, yesterday our St. Augustine City Commissioners voted to spend some $265,000 on the first next step -- sewer service for the intersection of Volusia and West King. The vote was unanimous.

But a few minutes earlier, Commissioner Donald W. Crichlow essentialy said he wanted to ask people if they wanted higher utility bills to pay for expanding sewer service to African-American homes. That's an unenlightened question, one inviting civil rights litigation for violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

As City Manager John Regan rightly responded to Commissioner Crichlow, West Augustine sewer service has been discussed at dozens of City meetings, and no one has ever objected to paying in our bills to bring sanitary sewers to the African-American community so long neglected by St. Augustine during the time of Jim Crow segregation, de facto and de jure.

With sewer service at that intersection, the likelihood increases of Florida Memorial University (formerly Floridal Normal School) returning to St. Augustine with a branch campus here on land it still owns. FMU moved to its campus in Miami Lakes in 1968, after being hounded by segregationists here. After the anti-segregation protests here in 1964, FMU was made to feel unwelcome, financially, physically and psychologically, in the worst tradition of the KKK's "Unwelcome Wagon."

West Augustine, once thriving with small businesses fueled by spending from the college, professors, students and staff, withered.

Meanwhile, our racist State of Florida Department of Transportation refused to locate an I-95 interchange to serve West King Street, further withering West Augustine. These were intentional acts of the racist power structure.

We look forward to Florida Memorial University coming back. We look forward to West Augustine coming back.

As Lyndon Johnson said, "We SHALL overcome."

Let the healing continue....