On June 3, 2025 , organized money flexed its muscle and persuaded St. Johns County Commission to extend controversial County Administrator "JOY" ANDREWS' contract by an additional three (3) years, effective June 3, 2025, extending her current contract into 2030. The vote was 3-2.
As of September 17, 2025, some fourmonths and eleven days later (some 133 days later), there is still no proper performance appraisal by all County Commissioners of our County Administrator or County Attorney.
Wonder why? St. Johns County is an oligarchy, not a meritocracy. That's why.
Read my June 4, 2025 blog post, below:
County Administrator "JOY" ANDREWS has still never had a proper performance appraisal. Only one in the file, filled out by her gal-pal, Commissioner SARAH ARNOLD, then-Chair. No other Commissioner was asked to evaluate her performance. Wonder why?
Records on Administrator ANDREWS, including her hiring a relative, have not been provided.
In a repeat of her dramatic performance last month, JOY ANDREWS prattled on about being a "single mom," and played for sympathy. "JOY" sticker buttons were part of a histrionic display of support for the County Administrator, which special interests supported and helped organize.
Unregistered lobbyists (not required to register as lobbyists in this lawless County) helped ANDREWS get three votes -- CHRISTIAN WHITEHURST, SARAH ARNOLD and CLAY MURPHY.
Unjust stewards, these two of these Commissioners once voted to move non-agenda public comment to the end of meetings at the behest of developers, making concerned citizens wait around all day. We see right through these superficial satraps.
Two reform St. Johns County Commissioners, Chair Krista Keating Joseph and Commissioner Ann Taylor, stood their ground and voted no, in the face of some truly dishonorable utterances, trite tropes and smarmy tributes and silly ukases from the likes of Commissioner CHRISTIAN WHITEHUST, JOY ANDREWS and a few others, who were demanding that people and "social media" stop criticizing Ms. ANDREWS. Their improper arguments treated legitimate debate in a democracy with disdain and disrespect. They were open and notoriously seeking to silence dissent.
Call them cat's paws for angry corporate oligarchs. Their arguments were angry and their logic case flawed. My grandmother would say "they're typical of their type."
Consider the perverse perorations when you watch the video. Commissioners WHITEHURST and ARNOLD and Establishment figures like business attorney RICHARD RUMRELL angrily attacked "social media." SARAH ARNOLD is married to business lawyer CASEY WILLIAM ARNOLD, who is a DeSANTIS appointee who sits on the Seventh Circuit Judicial Nominating Commission, which recommends judicial candidates to the Governor.
Shrilly calling on concerned citizens to "stop" criticizing our government, while wearing sticker buttons with the word "JOY" on them was not a good look. It smacked of Europe in the 1930s. It was an overt and feckless, reckless intimidation tactic, attempting to quell Commissioners and citizens from doing their jobs. I've been reporting on governments since 1978. No amount of scorn, obloquy and mockery will deter me -- that's how God made me, my parents raised me, and my mentors taught me.
Authoritarians can't stand criticism. We, the People don't take you seriously. To the thin-skinned, I wear your scorn as a badge of honor.
One joyless wealthy wearer of one of the "JOY" sticker buttons actually proclaimed that he had consulted "God" and he arrogantly attacked "social media." What a lugubrious goober. Business lawyer RICHARD RUMRELL is the father of St. Augustine Beach Mayor DYLAN RUMRELL.
They were joined by some good people who said that Ms. ANDREWS was the best-ever County Administrator, and the only one who talked with civil rights groups.
Those were good people and true statements. I've lived here since 1999 and found prior County Administrators to be arrogant autocrats. In twelve (12) years as County Administrator, developer puppet MICHAEL DAVID WANCHICK never once returned one of my telephone calls. I called for his firing, but missed the day (November 19, 2019) when Commissioners unanimously fired the sexist, misogynist WANSHICK, expoed by the Roper report, but allowed to remain in office until he lied to Commissioners about other matters.
On June 3, 2025, the demand by self-descriveed "business owners" to hurry up and to extend ANDREWS' contract "bears watchin'," as they say in East Tennessee.
The good people supporting Ms. ANDREWS were joined by misguided former Commission Chair Isaac Henry Dean, developer cat's paws, and the usual assortment of Chamber of Commerce and developer interests, including former St. Johns County Commission candidate JERRY THOMAS CAMERON and millionaire St. Augustine Distillery owner PHIL McDANIEL
Special interests appear to have organized a crowd.
While St. Johns County Commissioners are often told by lawyers to ignore "the clamor of the crowd" when the "crowd" opposes overdevelopment, there was overbearing bitterness about ANDREWS being criticized at all.
I called their bluff, quoting Judge Murray Gurfein, whose first case after becoming a federal judge was in the Pentagon Papers case. A brand-new Nixon appointee, U.S. District Court Judge Murray Gurfein (later an appellate judge) famously wrote in The Pentagon Papers case, where the government sought prior restraint, "The security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know." United States v. N.Y. Times Co., 328 F. Supp. 324, 331 (S.D.N.Y. 1971), affirmed, New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971).
Or as the St. Augustine Record editorialized November 19, 2006 about City officials' anger and hostility toward me after we caught the City dumping a landfill in a lake, some of our St Johns County Commissioners need "thicker skins."
“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein." See West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943).In the midst of World War II, our Supreme Court reversed an erroneous decision that let Jehovah's Witnesses children be punished for refusing to salute the flag
The decision was written by Justice Robert Houghwot Jackson, who was later our prosecutor at Nuremberg. One more time: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
Overdevelopment is killing our trees, killing our wildlife, breeding mosquitoes, overcrowding our roads, overcrowding our schools and destroying what we know and love about this magical place, which we call "God's country." We moved here on November 5, 1999, more than 25 years ago.
Foreign investors purchase influence and clearcut entire forests, leaving flooding in some 33 communities.
The axis of overdevelopment does not give a tinker's dam about people like us. Or nature. But organized money abuses the trust of the people by manipulative unethical political campaigns. Yesterday, it manifested itself in a campaign to extend the County Administrator's contract outside the ordinary course of business. They did it because they can.
As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said 90 years ago, "“We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
This is our time, and our country and our county: we can do better, we must do better and we all do better
o St. Johns County voters elected Ben Rich, Sr. and Joseph Kenneth Bryan as County Commissioners, to stand up to corruption and developer overreach.
o St. Augustine voters elected Mayor Nancy Shaver to stand up for the people against the powerful.
o St. John County voters elected three of five Commissioners for the rest of us, untainted by campaign contributors that fund clearcutting horrors.
"We will be heard," in the words of the abolitionists.
We need a lobbyist disclosure law, a County Ethics Commission, and investigations of the power of organized money here.
St. Johns County needs a strong tree protection law, like our City of St. Augustine.
1 comment:
Damn Junyao Yoyo seen in a new dress every time we see her. Must be nice to be able to afford that. Some people really got the "talking for money" down to a T. Wonder what other sorts of grifts in that portfolio of skeezing and wheezing and flim flapping.
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