CITY OF ST. AUGUSTINE HAS NO SAFETY CULTURE TO PROTECT WORKERS

Our Nation's Oldest City of St. Augustine, Florida has utterly no safety culture to protect workers.

Remember the pipe to nowhere, the shredded sewage effluent pipe that dumped treated sewage effluent into our precious saltwater marsh for years without letup, because no one from the City bothered to fix it or check up on it properly?

Well City of St. Augustine Chief Operating Officer JOHN REGAN had some photos he brought to a dog-and-pony show last week. (No one showed up -- the meeting should have been held in Lincolnville, the affected community, but stiff-necked, yellow-tie-wearing mossbacks in City Hall refused to hold the meeting at St. Paul's A.M.E. Church, where December 13, 2007 and January 10, 2008 civic meetings helped halt the City's nefarious plans to bring 40,000 cubic yards of contaminated solid waste back to Lincolnville.

The third of the photos REGAN brought showed two city workers handling the sewage effluent pipes. They had rubber boots on, but bare hands. No gloves. Not even the most basic PPE for employees of our Nation's Oldest City of St. Augustine.

REGAN told me last night they have gloves for employees who request them.

Gloves must be mandatory for employees handling corroded pipe, with a risk of tetanus and E. coli and hepatitis and other diseases.

Our Nation's Oldest (and oddest) City government doesn't know any more about worker and environmental protection than a hog.

In 2006, when we caught our Nation's Oldest City illegally dumping and reported them to the National Response Center, one of the findings of the March 15, 2006 Notice of Violation by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection was failure to protect employees, failing to provide any HAZWOPER or other training to workers who sifted through 40,000 cubic yards of contaminated solid waste before it was deposited in our Old City Reservoir. Did those workers lack gloves too?

In recent times, contractor workers on top of the City's Visitor Information Center were observed without any fall protection, with workers firing nail guns into the roof while other workers were directly below.

Archaeology volunteers and city employees alike stand in trenches without shoring.
That's a good way to die -- it happens all the time when unenlightened employers violate OSHA.

In this case, there is no OSHA.

Under Florida Governor JOHN EDWARD BUSH (a/k/a JEB BUSH, our Florida Legislature abolished all safety and health protection for state, county, municipal and special taxing district employees in 2000.

As OSHA will tell you, Florida's mean-spirited action means a city employee could literally be asked to hang from a roof by a string and s/he would have no rights -- not even OSH Act Section 11(c) rights to raise safety concerns.

Lobbyist-lickspittle-legislators in Tallahassee have not bothered to fix the problem in the eight years since they created it. Our legislature was so overresponsive and literal-minded in response to Chamber of Commerce demands to abolish the state program that they left government employees unprotected. Not even the deaths of government employees at schools and sewage plants and other supposedly "safe" places have melted the hard-hearted halfwits in Tallahassee to change the law.

Not only is our City government a tyranny bossed and bullied by a miscreant (City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS), but it has no decent respect for its workers, even asking them to handle sewage pipes without gloves. (Of course, City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS has never had a performance appraisal. He was hired 10.5 years ago. Only then-Commissioner John Reardon proposed one, and he could not get a second to his motion.)

The answer is for citizens and for fire, police and other public employee unions to demand action --- give HARRISS a performance appraisal, adopt a safety, health and environmental protetion ordinance worthy of the name, and (for heaven's sake) hand out safety gloves to employees and insist that they wear them when handling sewage pipes and other potentially hazardous and infectious objects.

Any supervisor who puts employees in harm's way should be subject to positive discipline.