Friday, March 11, 2011

LET’S PRESERVE AND PROTECT FLORIDA’S STATE PARKS (STARTING WITH THOSE NEAR ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA, OUR NATION’S OLDEST CITY) WITH NEW NATIONAL PARKS

Tallahassee politicians, including our own State Representative JOHN THRASHER, think they’re smarter than God, Theodore Roosevelt and the founders of our State and Nation.

They want to prey on Florida taxpayers by using bond money to subsidize private corporations to build golf courses in our state parks.

The legislation is written around particular (unnamed) corporations that have developed golf courses in other state parks.

They’ve built golf courses in state parks in Georgia. Georgia is well-known for lax environmental regulations, its lack of planning and the undue influence upon governments of the KKK (as documented by our local civil rights hero, Stetson Kennedy).

They’ve built state parks in Tennessee. Tennessee is well known for lax environmental regulations. The historic environmental depredations in Copperhill, Tennessee can be seen from space. Tennessee is also noted for Union Carbide’s and the Department of Energy’s world-class Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant pollution (largest mercury pollution even in the history of planet Earth). Tennessee is also noted for intimidating dissenters (remember the Scopes “monkey trial”) and for the founding of the KKK by Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Now, having trashed Georgia and Tennessee state parks, the “developers” want to “develop” golf courses in state parks in Florida.

No way.

Senator JOHN THRASHER’S special interest legislation writes into law de facto sole source procurement.

It requires that companies getting these concessions have developed golf courses in other states’ parks and be hooked up with Florida resident JACK NICKLAUS, for whom the whole mess would be named --- in fact, the entire bill is a legislative mash note to JACK NICKLAUS. That’s a disgrace. Arnold Palmer also lives in Florida and he and his company oppose the idea. See below.

I am hip to de facto sole source procurement, about which my mother was my teacher as a teenager (and pre-teenager).

My mother was a purchasing secretary/agent, first for Diamond Alkali and F.W. Woolworth & Co. in Philadelphia, and then for Camden County College (CCC) in Blackwood, N.J.

I learned in my mother’s office at a tender age exactly how how narrow writing of specifications around particular products or organizations leads to wasting money. It’s our money. My mom was so disgusted with the practice of de facto sole source procurement by petty bureaucrats that she requested and got demotion – from an “A” to a “B” secretary under the collective bargaining agreement that she hammered out between CCC and her local (which she co-founded), International Union of Electrical Workers Local 440. My mom became the only secretary in the history of CCC to request a demotion. My mom then happily became a faculty secretary to the business department chairman, earning a few less dollars, but with a clear consciousness.

My mother’s lessons to me about corruption in government purchasing have had some big-time consequences for big-shot crooks from Tennessee to Florida. They include:

A. My research and investigation, funded by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, and reports to the General Accounting Office (now Government Accountability Office) and FBI. Result: this exposed the Tennessee Valley Authority’s sweetheart contracts and lack of coal quality control over with East Tennessee coal operators (cronies of Senator Howard Henry Baker, Jr.) These sleazy purchasing practices cost ratepayers some $300 million from 1953-1981.

B. My research and investigation about purchasing practices by Anderson County, Tennessee, resulting in passing a referendum for election of the School Superintendent (and the resignation of School Superintendent PAUL EUGENE BOSTIC, SR.).

C. My research, investigation and community organizing here in St. Johns County, Florida, resulting in halting the $1.8 million purchase of a no-bid helicopter by the Anastasia Mosquito Control Commission of St. Johns County (AMCD). My mother advised me in 2006 that she would never buy a helicopter without competitive bidding. This obvious, ineluctable truth was seemingly lost on the likes of BARBARA BOSANKO, wife of controversial former St. Johns County Attorney DANIEL BOSANKO, and AMCD’s longtime attorney GEOFFREY B. DOBSON, who claimed it was ”sole source.” It wasn’t, and thanks to the leadership of AMCD Commissioners Jeanne Moeller and John Sundeman, AMCD cancelled the helicopter purchase and obtained a full refund (after shedding three lawyers who wouldn’t answer the questions they asked about contract law). BARBARA BOSANKO quit the AMCD board and moved with her husband, DANIEL BOSANKO, to Georgia, where they continue to read this blog.

So State Senator JOHN THRASHER actually wants to write the name of JACK NICKLAUS into Florida law, and require that our state parks be carved up by corporations that JACK NICKLAUS contracts with (with further standards specifying they must have carved up other states’ parks into golf courses). It reminds me of a turtle on a fencepost.

Why?





President Bill Clinton said, “If you’re driving down the road and you see a turtle on a fence post, you know that somebody put it there.”

We don’t need de facto sole source procurement written into Florida law by politicians “who know not that they know not that they know not,” in the words of my mentor and former client, Senior Special Agent Robert E. Tyndall (Retired).

We don’t need to build ANY golf courses in state parks, with or without state bonds.

Florida is already blessed with nearly 1300 golf courses. Some are floundering.

Florida does not need Big Government creating more public golf courses to compete with private golf courses. (Fourteen St. Johns County employees maintain golf courses).

Meanwhile, Florida does not have enough parks.

Money-hungry developers, often foreign-funded, from countries with high growth rates, send their money here to hire shady developers and lawyers to do snarky, sharky, sneaky things with our land.

As former St. Johns County Commission Chairman Ben Rich put it best, these Florida developers are “worse than any carpetbagger.”

Under the ancien regime, they were like what Henry Demarest Lloyd said about Standard Oil (and HENRY MORRISON FLAGLER and JOHN DAVIDSON ROCKEFELLER and the Pennsylvania legislature) – they did everything to the St. Johns County Commission “except refine it!”

The same goes for our state legislature and governor.

Those formidable forces --- seeking to commit even more “crimes against nature,” as Robert Kennedy, Jr. would call them -- want to attack Florida state parks as we know them. They want to carve their initials in Mother Nature’s back. They propose to use State Senator JOHN THRASHER as a bullet in their gun.

Don’t let them.

See below.

Tallahassee politicians several weeks ago proposed closing fifty-three (53) state parks permanently, including Fort Mose and Washington Oaks Gardens State Park. That plan fizzled

Now they’re wanting to build golf courses, hotels and liquor-bars in our state parks.

That’s a really bad idea.

The ancient Roman historian Tacitus said of the sack of Carthage, “they created a desert and they called it peace.”

Don’t shut down our green spaces .

Don’t destroy our green spaces – public parks – for private parks, as State Senator JOHN THRASHER plans.

We need green space for environmental preservation, wildlife and people.

Civilization requires nature to sustain itself.

Our frail planet needs more parks.

Nature-haters have often installed golf courses in other states’ parks. That’s what they’ve done in other states.

I hate to say “I told you so.” But, I did. Sadly, I predicted to local Democrats in 2009 that this would happen in Florida if a right-wing Republican was elected Governor.

I am sorry I was right.

In 2009, I warned anyone who listened that special interest lobbyists would seek to build golf courses in our state parks. I warned that we needed to protect our local state parks by working smarter and harder to adopt a St. Augustine National Historical Park, National Seashore and Scenic Coastal Parkway.

We need an emerald necklace of parks in Florida, not more golf courses.

Let’s work to turn selected Florida state parks over to the National Park Service, pursuant to federal legislation to create more national parks, seashores and scenic coastal parkways in Florida.

Let’s start with the St. Augustine National Historical Park, Seashore and Scenic Coastal Parkway. www.staugustgreen.com

As Aaron Sorkin wrote for Michael Douglas’s character (President Andrew Shepherd) in his movie screenplay, The American President (1998): “Everybody knows America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say, ‘You want free
speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating, at the top of his lungs, that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free… Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free…. I’ve been operating under the assumption that the reason that Bob [Rumson] devotes so much of his time and energy to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn’t get it. Bob’s problem is that he can’t sell it. Nobody has ever won an election by talking about what I was just talking about.”

If they could get away with it, Tallahassee politicians would sell our state parks.

Rather than divide our state with bad ideas, let’s unite our people with good ideas – we need an emerald necklace of parks – funded by BP remediation money – starting with the St. Augustine National Historical Park, National Seashore and Scenic Coastal Parkway. www.staugustgreen.com

I recently attended a University of Florida program on Public Interest Environmental Law, at which former Governor Buddy McKay was the keynote speaker. Governor McKay talked about corruption, including how he was invited to a Sunshine violation (called a “happening”) in which many North Florida public officials who should never be meeting with one another met and partied with callgirls from Georgia (and the local State’s Attorney who would have to prosecute any Sunshine violations). Governor McKay praised environmental activists like the late Marjorie Carr, whose indefatigable courage helped to stop the Cross-Florida Barge Canal.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.”

Why?

As Anthropologist Margaret Mead said: “Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

The bad ‘ole days of the “Porkchop Gang” and pervasive corruption in Florida must end. Working together, we can stop the destruction of our state parks. We can persuade Congress to create new national parks, including one right here in St. Augustine and St. Johns County.

As Albert Camus said, “if you do not help us do this, then who else in the world will help us do this?”

My first boss, the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, told the Democratic National Convention in 1980:

… may it be said of us, both in dark passages and in bright days, in the words of Tennyson that my brothers quoted and loved, and that have special meaning for me now:

"I am a part of all that I have met
To [Tho] much is taken, much abides
That which we are, we are --
One equal temper of heroic hearts
Strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."


… For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

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