Wednesday, March 05, 2014

Incompetence and Corruption in St. Johns County

Two ATMs are illegally charging St. Augustine Farmer's Market customers and St. Augustine Amphitheater patrons $3. The ATMs were illegally installed in 2006, without a lease, without a Request for Proposal and without any legal authority.
Here in the home of the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, those two cheesy ATMs are not ADA-compliant. Other ATMs allow deaf or blind users to use them -- not these two plastic bandits, owned by a bank no one has heard of before.
The Bank of America and the St. Johns County Administrator, MICHAEL WANCHICK, were working to replace the two cheesy, illegal ATMs with Bank of America ATMs that would be free of charge, as part of the County's using BoA for its half-billion annual budget deposits.
St. Johns County has not kept its promises to me on the ATMs. County ATTORNEY PATRICK McCORMACK admitted as muh earlier this week.
Our overpaid county government officials are maladroit.
St. Johns County Administrator MICHAEL P. WANCHICK reckons he is Republican lord of all he surveys, meeting last month with a developer to discuss trading what he termed the "not irreplaceable" St. Augustine Beach Pier Park for land purchased by the developer. The Pier Park is likely the second location of St. Augustine, when in 1566 Indians burned the first settlement to the ground.
MICHAEL WANCHICK needs to watch what he does -- he could be talking to an undercover FBI Agent (as our former County Commission Chairman Thomas G. Manuel learned the hard way).
Our St. Johns County government is still all too riddled with waste, fraud, abuse, misfeasance, malfeasnce, nonfeasance, patronage, nepotism, ineffectiveness, flummey, dupery and nincompoopery.
The refusal of any County official to speak out about the Michelle O'Connell case illustrates what tour guides here have long said: "If you want to commit a murder, do it here," referring to the infamous 1566 murder of a Gay man on orders of Florida's first Governor, Pedro Menendez de Aviles.
The two illegal ATMs at the St. Augustine Amphitheater are a synecoche -- a part that stands for the whole.
They are an embarassment, and bad for our branding.
The two illegal ATMS unlawfully inflict ilegal charges on concert patrons -- who are not allowed to leave and return to the Amphitheater when attending a concerts -- large signs say, "No Re-Entry." No legal authority is given.
Welcome to corrupt St. Johns County, concert-goers.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

yes, the building department works for the contractors. There are thousands of shoddy houses that were allowed to be built. Inspectors were overruled, back stabbed, punished.

Anonymous said...

This hardly sounds like the type of issue that one would so vehemently tackle - but glad to see there is progress - Saint Augustine is my favorite city in all of Florida - I would hate to see it change too much - I wouldn't visit it anymore if it did

Anon said...

The building dept is corrupt and nepotistic.catering to the old names in town and discouraging new buisness growth.