The Mayor of Miami has rightly vetoed a lucrative lobbying contract with AKERMAN SENTERFITT. See below.
St. Augustine residents will never forget the $300,000 AKERMAN SENTERFITT billed our City of St. Augustine for work defending -- and proposing -- environmental crimes.
First AKERMAN SENTERFITT kept controversial City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS from going to jail for putting 40,000 cubic yards of solid waste in our Old City Reservoir. HARRISS blamed underlings, but it was he who ordered the environmental crimes, which were never properly prosecuted by federal or state prosecutors.
Then AKERMAN SENTERFITT euchred and gulled the City and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection into adopting a consent order that would have sent 2000 truckloads of the contaminated solid waste down Riberia Street, top it with dirt, and call it a park. We called it Environmental Racism. That's what it was -- brought to you by the biggest corporate law firm in Florida, Republican lords of all they survey, which now represents BP on its Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Environmental Justice advocates rightly challenged the consent order that AKERMAN SENTERFITT spent so much time persuading our City and State to agree on.
We won.
In fact, AKERMAN SENTERFITT could not persuade a single person who watched its presentation at the St. Paul A.M.E. Church in January 2008. When Judith Seraphin asked that anyone who supported the proposal to stand, not one of the 300 people in the audience stood -- not even the City, FDEP and AKERMAN SENTERFITT lawyers.
Way to go, MIAMI -- this heartless corporate law firm does not deserve government lobbying contracts. Save your money!
AKERMAN SENTERFITT deserves to be investigated.
Of course, Florida's Little False Claims Act applies only to state contracts, not local government contracts, and when I publicly pointed out this to State Representative William L. Proctor in January 2008, PROCTOR mocked me for asking him to "endorse motherhood."
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