Like William Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth washing the blood off her hands, ERROL JONES a/k/a ERRONEOUS JONES is obsessed with his overt acts, repeatedly talking about the damage that he has done to our beautiful City of St. Augustine under the reign of ruin of JONES, who has become controversial City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS' attack parrot on issues ranging from illegal dumping to government waste.
What was supposed to be a profile of ERROL JONES a/k/a ERRONEOUS JONES turned into an angry man's idee fixee obsession with the lady who single-handedly organized St. Augustine residents into opposing the City of St. Augustine's illegal dumping in two (2) different African-American and low-income neighbhorhoods, Lincolnville and West Augustine.
Take out JONES' hatred of reformer JUDITH SERAPHIN and there's almost no profile article left. These are quotes from the article below, followed by rebuttal:
Errol Jones seeks to complete projects, help historical infrastructure
Errol Jones wants to keep his seat in the City Commission and says his opponent is not "working for the best interest of the city."
Balderdash. JONES is obviously mistaking the interests of BIG BAD BOSS WILLIAM B. HARRISS with the interests of the people.
Jones is running for Seat 1, a four-year term, against Judith Seraphin, a resident of the historical St. Augustine neighborhood Lincolnville who says the public can't trust city government.
Jones feels he's "done a good job" for the city and feels Seraphin spends too much time criticizing instead of finding productive ways to do good for residents.
Harrumph. Is JONES' Mrs. Seraphin's overseer? Is he running a stop watch? The only thing that ERROL JONES knows how to run is his mouth.
"We need to bring our community together as one toward a common cause," he said. "Government is not a ghost out there doing something evil to (the public). I welcome (Seraphin) to spend a day with government and see who these people really are."
As Freud would say, what does he mean by that? So does ERRONEOUS JONES want Judith Seraphin to "spend a day with" BIG BAD BOSS WILLIAM B. HARRISS, sitting in his lap? Or riding around like ERRONEOUS JONES has been wont to do, pretending he is a policeman, harassing people on St. George Street and according to Folio Weekly, opening closed drawers in a ghost tour hostess' table at the Slave Market?
Jones has been a commissioner for six years and says his record proves he tries to do what is right for residents. He said there have been many times when he has voted against the other commissioners on issues because he thought there was a better way.
"It shows that I'm independent and I'm not in anybody's pocket," he said. "I listen to people and I've been man enough to step up and say, 'OK, let's do it differently.'"
Again, the Commissioner "doth protest too much," claiming he wasn't "in anyone's pocket. Where ROBERT MICHAEL GRAUBARD and CHESTER STOKES and GEORGE MCCLURE are concerned, JONES aligns himself with them 100% of the time. He reminds me of the remark of Commodore Vanderbilt when he said "Let the public be damned." So many times ERRONEOUS JONES has talked down to neighorhood residents, whether it was Leonardi Street about heavy trucks zooming down a 25 foot wide street to AMEERIGAS, or Lincolnville, West Augustine, Davis Shores or NOrth City about developments there.
Jones grew up in St. Augustine, and worked in the public and private sector for 40 years, including in New York and Hawaii. In June, he retired as dean of students at St. Augustine High School.
So JONES calls Judith Seraphin a "carpetbagger" for moving here and then becoming involved in politics, when it appears JONES moved back here with the express purpose of becoming involved in politics.
He hopes to be re-elected so he can get several projects completed that started during his tenure, including the Bridge of Lions rehabilitation project and the San Sebastian Harbor condominium and hotel development.
There's a crock worthy of satire. JONES is not a construction worker or an engineer, so there's nothing for him to do on the Bridge of Lions rehabilitation project, which is being done by Skanska and subcontractors for the Florida Department of Transportation. Sebastian Harbor is a private development that is moribund, as predicted, with no work taking place there for a year. Perhaps JONES wants to stay on the job so he can smirk at another ribbon-cutting and drink champagne and eat canapes with developers wearing pinkie rings.
He has also been an advocate for more of the city budget to be dedicated to St. Augustine's historical and aging infrastructure. He believes the city should craft a 10-year plan of how to tackle this problem during such tight times in the economy.
Plan? What plan? JONES doesn't even have a plan to stop illegal dumping by our City Manager, WILLIAM B. HARRISS. Our City doesn't plan anything except how to ripoff taxpayers and destroy tourism by kicking buskers off St. George Street and the Plaza de la Constitucion at the behest of WILLIAM B. HARRIS, creating lacunae left open for the homeless to come and beg.
Jones' and Seraphin's disagreements stem from an incident in 2005.
Incident? Disagreements? That's damning with faint praise. It was a massive violation of environmental law, involving 2000 truckloads of solid waste moved from one Environmental Justice community to another -- 40,000 cubic yards of contaminated solid waste moved secretly to the Old City Reservoir, specifically disobeying written and verbal orders from the St. Johns River Water Management District not to dump. JONES was repeatedly nasty, brutish, bullying and pig-ignorant when we raised these issues in front of the City Commission, serving as BIG BAD BOSS WILLIAM B. HARRISS' designated attack parrot, the cognitive miser who interrupted, heckled and mocked every single citizen who tired to get our City to take action. I once presented City Commissioners with a visual aid, pouring colored water through coquina to show the porosity of the material (rated 47 out of a 100 by geologists -- JONES' inane retort wss "that's not coquina." In fact, the reactive, reactionary, ridicule from JONES reached its nadir when ERRONEOUS JONES voted for a resolution praising WILLIAM B. HARRISS in the midst of a pending criminal investigation, which borders dangerously on obstruction of justice.
Judith and Tony Seraphin took center stage during a conflict with the city over illegally dumped landfill material. In 2005, the city took dirt from an old landfill site on Riberia Street, near the Seraphins' home, and dumped it into a water-filled borrow pit on Holmes Boulevard. The state Department of Environmental Protection fined the city and told staff to remove the waste.
The State's orders were to move the waste to a Class 1 landfill, but CITY MANAGER WILLIAM B. HARRISS and his henchmen gave instructions to the City's mouthpiece, AKERMAN SENTERFITT lawyer WILLIAM PENCE, not to agree to move the waste to a Class I landfill under any circumstances. The State of Florida caved under political pressure.
The city planned to return the material to the Riberia site, but the Seraphins said no.
The entire city said no, in a display of righteous wrath that brought some 300 people to St. Paul's A.M.E. Church for a community meeting on January 10, 2008, led by Judith Seraphin. Not one person stood up and said they favored the City's stupid plan to destroy property values by bringing contaminated solid waste back to Lincolnville. It was JONES who made the motion to bring the contaminated solid waste back to LINCOLNVILLE, in a meeting on November 13, 2007 where the public was forbidden to speak and threatend with ejection.
They filed a petition with Environmental Protection against the city's plan. The city has since changed its plan and is now taking the material to a landfill in Nassau County.
Unlike the City's spin machine, which uses the term "water-filled borrow pit," the Administrative Law Judge referred to the dumping site as the Old City Reservoir. Former EPA Region 4 Regional Administrator John Henry Hankinson, Jr. told us in 2006 that the coquina pit is an "open sore going straight down into the aquifer and the groundwater." While the City apparatchiks claimed it was "clean fill," lying to then-Mayor George Gardner, EPA's 40-year veteran John Marler says "there are no bedsprings in clean fill." Or arsenic or heavy metals.
Jones said he is tired of the Seraphins holding on to the incident.
So JONES is tired? Maybe it's from spending too many wasted hours in bars like Slugger's and Scarlett O'Hara's, while neglecting his legal, moral and ethical duties to residents and visitors. "Holding on?" "Incident?" JONES insulted concerned citizens, voted to commend the lawbreaker, and never apologized for the CIty's sins, crimes and torts. So is Mr. JONES saying he is a a martyr because the Seraphins (and every thinking person in the City) criticize the City's repeated bad judgment on environmental matters? Cry me a river.
"We've not been perfect in all our decision making. ... (The dumping) was not done with malice," he said. "We've corrected that. We've righted that ship. We learned from it. Let's move on with things."
JONES is a liar. Chief Operating Officer JOHN REGAN tried to sell this line of hooey at the January 10, 2008 meeting, claiming there had been a "root cause analysis" as to why the dumping occur ed. When we asked for a copy, he said there was nothing in writing. That's not "root cause analysis" by any professional engineer's definition. That's the thermal equivalent of what scientists call "drylabbing" and what NASA engineers call "warm fuzzies" -- vague, incoherent, inarticulate, glib assurances that everything is "OK." That specious illogic has killed seven astronauts.
Jones said he has served his constituency well and he wants "to continue to work for them and represent them."
JONES doesn't represent anyone but the rich people like ROBERT MICHAEL GRAUBAD who want to kick working people out of St. Augustine.
"It's not an easy job," he said. "Unfortunately, we can't satisfy people all the time. ... (But) I think we do a pretty good job."
JONES' self-delusions have no bounds. "Pretty good job?" Our seawall's crumbling, our tourism's declining, our city is full of waste, fraud, abuse, misfeasance, malfeasance and nonfeasance, culminating in two large FDEP environmental fines in less than one year. "Pretty good job" compared to what other city? Calcultta?
If JONES weren't so insecure and smart-alecky, he would have treated citizens with dignity, respect and consideration. He's never even apologized for the illegal dumping or thanked anyone for raising the concern about illegal dumping, let alone thanked the Seraphins. He and City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS are no different than any criminal defendant -- sorry they got caught.
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