Former St. Augustine Mayor CLAUDE LEONARD WEEKS, JR. is facing two investigations.
How independent?
How competent?
First, TIMOTHY BURCHFIELD, Assistant City Manager, has been assigned to write a chronology and interview witnesses.
Why?
He's a bully in a china shop, and will question city employees and otters. He is not a criminal investigator.
St. Augustine and other local governments need inspectors general and ombudsmen. Now.
Too much of the "buddy system" prevails in local government.
We need watchdogs, not lapdogs.
Second, OSHA is supposedly investigating. But with what level of effort and interest?
Speaking of lapdogs, what is OSHA doing? Did OSHA go to the crime scene on September 25?
The Jacksonville OSHA duty officer (AL) initially reacted to my call September 25 by stating "we don't investigate building collapses if no one is hurt or killed." What? That dog won't hunt.
I explained to the OSHA duty officer (AL) that this was illegal and contrary to federal law and the genius of a free people.
The OSHA duty officer (AL) responded, "Sir, yes sir" and transferred me to his supervisor, Bud.
OSHA Jacksonville supervisor (BUD) was even more obstreperous, talking over me, minimizing the risk of a building collapse on employees, saying "I don't care if it's historic" and similar taunts, pointedly asking, "Who are you" and "Who are you with.
When I started to tell BUD about corruption and Len Weeks and the Folio Weekly cover story, BUD again interrupted me to tell me again that he "I don't care," inaccurately referring to Folio Weekly as a "commercial advertisement" (it is a newspaper). When I told him what I expected, BUD grew huffy, repeatedly interrupting, at first refusing to e-mail me correspondence. BUD even asked me "What's OSHRC?" (It is the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission in Washington, D.C., where an independent administrative law judge and commission members are ready, willing and able to hear any appeal that an employer may file from an OSHA citation).8
After telling me how little he cared about worker rights and enforcing the law when a building collapses without injuries, BUD then affected martyrdom when I told him I expected him to do his job without fear or favor and referred to OSHA's attitude as "Laziness."
When I called him again the afternoon of September 26, Bud angrily refused to tell me the name of the investigator or supply his or her e-mail, saying only that I would be contacted. Bud officiously accused me of "name-calling," ordered me never to call him again, and hung up the phone.
No Bud, "laziness" is not name-calling: it accurately describes OSHA's attitude. We expected hope and change with President Obama, and the now OSHA Administrator, but OSHA remains fraught with laziness, desuetude, misfeasance, malfeasance and nonfeasance.
There's another word for OSHA's attitude on worker rights: desuetude (non enforcement). For more, please see my March 4, 2010 testimony to the "OSHA Listens" session held by the Assistant Secretary of Labor, HERE.
I have reported the Jacksonville OSHA office to the Inspector General of the United States Department of Labor for investigation of its breach of the Standards of Official Conduct.
The next time someone calls the Jacksonville office of OSHA to report an imminent life safety hazard, they must be treated with dignity, respect and consideration. No more nastiness, bullying or icy indifference. OSHA works for us -- not construction contractors.
OSHA must investigate the building collapse caused by ex-Mayor CLAUDE LEONARD WEEKS, Jr. Now.
2 comments:
SHUT IT DOWN!
PUBLIC SAFETY!
I believe this entire project should be shut down on an emergency basis. It has been poorly planned from its inception and reflects the risk taking sociopathic arrogance of a captured gangster government and its complete disdain for the public welfare. Your experience with the EPA Ed, where they are non responsive to your valid complaints, is not unfamiliar to me and is one of the reasons why so many people are rapidly losing faith in the 'system'. I would love to see all of those believers in the 'system', who constantly ask me to vote, help you out and call the EPA. Someone could be seriously hurt here if this mismanaged debacle is not reigned in.
Some thoughts;
1. This entire project is too large in scope. With better planning it would have, and should have, been done in much smaller more palatable chunks.
2. Allowing the public access to businesses in these delicate historic structures during construction has severely confined and impeded the construction process itself while at the same time: putting the public at unnecessary risk to construction hazards; reducing their quality of life (no one likes to walk through dirt, dust, and grime); and giving them a very negative impression of Saint Augustine to boot. Business owners are also faced with the dirt, dust, and grime, as it is tracked through their shops and damages their inventory. Allowing the public access to businesses has also created an atmosphere of urgency as business owners put pressure on workers and project managers to hurry up and get the job done. This is the pressure that makes for high risk taking and ill considered decisions on the fly. It is this pressure that is responsible for the collapse of the irreplaceable historic Don Pedro house.
In tandem with doing this project in smaller more easily managed sections businesses should have been closed and sealed against construction hazards and owners (building and business) compensated for losses on a historical accounting basis. Expensive? No, not when compared to all of the harm done and especially when one considers the terrible loss of one of our core historic structures, the Don Pedro house. I have always enjoyed walking by that building as it had a special feel and charm to it that I know can never be replicated. What a terrible loss. Even worse is the damage done to the many other businesses in the area, and the structures they are located in that may now also be on the verge of collapse. This is why I believe that the entire project should be shut down, inspected carefully and reconsidered by the community from top to bottom.
3. The equipment being used in this project is the real bull in the china shop here and it speaks to the lack of foresight, poor planning and improper respect for the project at hand. Using a Cat 320E, a twenty seven ton monster, in this area of delicate historic structures, with many constructed of coquina and built in times of no and very early building codes, on minimalist foundations, on low compressive strength soil, is mind bogglingly stupid. It is tantamount to opening a delicate ancient Egyptian mummy with a chain saw. The vibrational forces alone, at just idle, of this 54,000 lb. monster, can create seismic forces that are capable of shaking old and delicate precariously balanced structures off of their already weak pier foundations. Arguably yes, conditions would have to be just right for this to happen, but the point is that many of these conditions do exist in this area. Consider also that in motion and thumping the ground the 320 E is a virtual earthquake. Imagine one in your driveway. There is a reason that people that live by train tracks do not display fine dinnerware on flimsy display fixtures on open shelves.
The take away here is that we are dealing with historical structures that require careful consideration of the size and the environmental impact of the tools used to service and maintain them. Much of this work should have been done slowly and carefully by hand and much of it with much smaller equipment at a far slower and more responsible rate. You don't use a gasoline powered 4200 PSI pressure washer to clean the fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. You do it by hand, slowly and carefully in small increments.
4. A ticking time bomb. It is imperative to properly and PROFESSIONALLY inspect ALL of the structures in the vicinity of this project. We can not afford another building collapse now or in the future. God forbid, but what if the Pope were to come to Saint Augustine Next year for the 450th celebration and his Pope-mobile were to travel up Hypolita Street and a building were to collapse on the Pope-mobile and kill the Pope? How would we all feel? How would those dolts at the EPA feel?
At some point this community is going to have to come to its senses and deal with its sordid past. Joe Boles and Len Weeks are criminals that belong in prison.
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