It's Morning in America and St. Augustine, Florida

This morning's St. Augustine Record has a banner headline in a story by Kati Bexley: "State investigates city dumping: Probe concerns 20,000 cubic yards of material at stide near Holmes Boulevard in St. Augustine." Looks like controversial City Manager William B. HARRISS is attempting to abuse subordinate managers and Orlando environmental lawyer as the designated javelin-catchers. We're not surprised. Character counts. Attempting to use others as his "cutouts" is a tried-and-true tactic of all autocrats, like Richard Nixon. Are HARRISS' actions demeaning to the genius of a free people? HARRISS must approve anything, even the painting of a door in City Hall (the Lightner Museum Building, which has a leaky roof, with raindrops being caught in pots and pans and buckets). For HARRISS to be so demure as to let the Chief Operating Officer (John Regan), City Public Works Director (Robert Leetch) and Orlando environmental attorney (William Pence of Akerman & Senterfitt) take "credit" for HARRISS' intentional land and water pollution is, at best facetious. As a retired EPA regulator told me last month, "there's no bedsprings in clean fill." Having put bedsprings into the coquina pit lake along with 20,000 cubic yards of metal, plastic and asphalt debris, we've heard no apology from HARRISS. In the midst of a pending criminal investigation, HARRISS resembles President Richard Nixon (who once shoved press spokesperson Ron Ziegler to deflect press questions about criminality). HARRISS has unkindly shoved Mr. Regan, Mr. Leetch and Mr. Pence in front of the media, while hiding (HARRISS missed the March 13 Commission meeting, when Commissioners defended his honor against one "disgruntled citizen," as Vice Mayor Susan Burk put it, against unverified "charges," as Mayor George Gardner put it. The Record gets much of this complex story right, while unfortunately adhering to the City's "spin" in some places, without effective rebuttal (e.g., inaccurately asserting there is no chance of water pollution when former EPA Regional Administrator John Hanksinson told me that these coquina pit ponds are "an open sore going right down to the aquifer" and local residents used the once-pure waters of our Old Ciy Reservoir for fishing and swimming for decades). Newspapers produce the first rough draft of history, and this first story tells us: It's Morning in America and St. Augustine, Florida. Those who said "you can't fight City Hall" are wrong. A few misguided status quo fanciers are reading this morning what they have reaped from St. Augustine's obsessive goverment secrecy. Anyone who reads about 20,000 cubic yards of illegal pollution and still says "don't make waves" is possibly oblivious to the fact that this is a community of sailors, surfers, fishermen, freethinkers, progressives, and other people who treasure our environment, history and heritage. The truth will set us free.