Nine years ago today, I met with criminal investigators from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP). The subject: dumping a landfill in a lake -- 40,000 cubic yards of solid waste in our Old City Reservoir, a coquina pit lake that is an "open sore going straight down into the aquifer and the groundwater," as John Henry Hankinson, Jr. told me (he is the former EPA Regional Administrator and now heads up the federal government's Gulf Coast cleanup).
The Old City Reservoir story has been told in this blog and elsewhere. I reported City wrongdoing to the National Response Center. Spending $300,000 on dodgy lawyers and flawed plans, the City fought us for two years.
We won. The City was fined. The waste is in a Class I landfill by consent decree.
We are watching our City's every move, at every meeting. Our witnesses and informants are everywhere. "We SHALL overcome," as LBJ said to Congress after Selma.
City Manager WILLIAM BRUCE HARRISS and every single elected official who tolerated this massive pollution event is now gone. Gone are the witless who voted to give HARRISS a plaque and an attaboy in March 2006 and to condemn whistleblowers in the midst of a pending criminal investigation. Forgive them.
JOHN PATRICK REGAN, P.E. was the Assistant City Manager and the HARRISS's "heyboy," the environmental engineer who claims he was kept and the dark, who claimed to complete a "root cause analysis without writing anything down" and who uncomfortably advocated putting the mess back in Lincolnville, putting dirt on top and calling it a "park."
JOHN REGAN is today our City Manager, sometimes portraying himself as a reformer. Some people say he is an incompetent, not a manager, the "Minister of Propaganda," a dreamer, a dawdler a dilettante and a fraudfeasor.
Since the election of Mayor Nancy Shaver, REGAN has been afraid for his job, retirement and perks. Asked tough questions, REGAN has proven to be as hostile to protected activity now as he was nine years ago, when on February 27, 2006 he said to me that because of what I "have done, it's going to be a long process." I told REGAN I did the right thing and I never dumped solid waste, the City did.
On February 27, 2006, then Assistant City Manager JOHN PATRICK REGAN wrote a hostile 83 word e-mail to his staff, attacking me and ordering noncooperation, reported in Folio Weekly (Ann Schindler, now with First Coat News, called me an "environmental here") -- a memo REGAN attempted to blame on his secretary, ALISHON RATKOVIC, now our City Clerk.
After staff asserted February 24, 2006 that I could not show a video of Old City Reservoir dumping to our Commissioners because the video machine was broken, designated javenile catcher REGAN urgently requested to see the pollution video and said I could show it: I declined, on advice of the federal and state special agents investigating environmental crimes of our Nation's Oldest City.
As citizen Tom Reynolds said at City Commission February 23, 2015, based on personal observation, there are some City officials who "hate" me.
That's okay.
I don't seek City Hall management's approval. I don't approve of its harassment, First Amendment violations, misfeasance, malfeasance, nonfeasance, incompetence, waste, fraud, abuse, bigotry, no-bid contracts, flummery, dupery and nincompoopery.
In fact I wear their scorn as a badge of honor. Thomas Jefferson said, "I have sworn upon the altar of Almighty God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of humankind."
This is our town and our time, and it no longer belongs to criminaloid personalities who dump landfills in lakes, arrests musicians and artists, throw bricks at black people, and earned the adjective of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "Most lawless city in America."
The illegal dumping 1905-2008 chronology is here.
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