"Remember: Trust is the key"

Photo credit: GREG TRAVOUS & HANS HOLBEIN THE YOUNGERTwo candidates are running against Mayor JOSEPH LESTER BOLES, JR. of St. Augustine. BOLES ha.s former Council on Aging (COA) Director Cathy Brown -- a paid employee of St. Johns County Sheriff DAVid BERNARD SHOAR doing "community outreach" for Sheriff SHOAR -- reach out to her many friends and solicit Facebook "likes."
Friendship with Cathy Brown is not transferrable to yet another vote for Mayor BOLES.
In Washington, D.C., Marion Barry was once called "Mayor For LIfe." It did not work out thattaway.
We all "like" Mayor BOLES. The question is, do we re-elect BOLES as Mayor?
Mayor BOLES has served for eight years -- enough already! (Insert Spanish, Temucuan, French, Greek, Minorican, Gaelic and Yiddish equivalents here.)
We salute Mayor BOLES and thank him for his years of public service.
He deserves a grand tribute and credit for good work in many areas.
But under the 22nd Amendment, the President of the United States cannot be elected to more than two terms of four years.
If popularly elected Presidents -- like Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama -- can serve only eight years in office, why would Mayor BOLES want more?
A fifth term is asking for too much.
Mayor BOLES increasingly reminds me of James Michael Curley, Mayor of Boston (in the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Frank O'Connor, the Curley character, "Frank Skeffington," played by Spencer Tracy in the movie). Mayor BOLES is a "Last Hurrah" kind of politician -- he does not even use a computer -- he lets women do it.
Like Mayor James Michael Curley, Mayor BOLES is an old-style "Florida cracker" politician who has become irrelevant.
How revealing is the name of the restaurant founded by BOLES and Ex-Mayor WEEKS: "The Florida Cracker Cafe."
Boston Irishman Mayor Curley did not understand the power of television.
"Florida Cracker" Mayor BOLES does not adequately respect the commands of Sunshine and Open Records or the need for openness and candor.
Mayor BOLES had eighteen residents and Holland & Knight law firm all over him like a chicken on a junebug in 2010, halting his plan for five Commissioners to visit Spain because it was a Sunshine violation. Yet he recently invited fellow Commissioners to go to Spain with him to conduct business in violation of the Sunshine law.
Mayor BOLES, at the suggestion of another Commissioner, was also all-in for the notion of outsourcing the 450th to a secretive foundation (First America Foundation): the eighteen of us and Holland & Knight shot down that turkey, too.
I spoke to the Federal 450th Commemoration Commission at Flagler College at its inaugural meeting on July 11, 2011, suggesting a St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore. There was applause from the audience in the auditorium. The Federal 450th Commission has never contacted anyone for followup, going underground, in secrecy. Mayor BOLES is a member of this well-qualified and prestigious -- but do-nothing -- Federal 450th Commission.
Thus, Mayor BOLES essentially blew the opportunity to parlay his Secretary of the Interior appointment as a member of the Federal 450th Commemoration Commission to assure compliance with open meetings requirements of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) and to use the Federal 450th Commemoration Commission to support a St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore.
Mayor BOLES attended an unknown number of secret meetings and conference calls of the Federal 450th Commemoration COmmission, keeping the people of St. Augustine in he dark about its activities (as did other St. Augustine community leaders not elected by the people).
When I asked for information about hiring of an executive director for the 450th panel, the Department of the Interior National Park Service deferred to a Miami billionaire, Jay Kislak, claiming it did not have any records.
Shocking.
Rather than being a tribune of the people for access to the 450th Commission, Mayor BOLES has been in pari delictu with a FACA violation, one that has been ongoing for three years. A former New Mexico politician working as a policy advisor to the Secretary of the Interior came up with the bogus notion that the Federal 450th Commission was an "operating" committee, hence exempt from FACA. She is gone back to New Mexico. As we know, the Federal 450th Commission isn't operating a blessed thing.
Mayor BOLES was for a decade a participant in and party to a long train of abuses of the public interest here in St. Augustine.
Mayor BOLES was overly indulgent to misbegotten plans to build private projects on top of city land at the south end of Lincolnville, including a coral-growing business, an aquarium and a children's museum (the latter with which his wife was associated). All would have been built upon a contaminated solid waste landfill (35 feet of garbage) and would have violated 2011 Florida Department of Environmental Protection guidelines.
Mayor BOLES habitually makes decisions that favor the rich and hurt history, from permitting ROBERT MICHAEL GRAUBARD to destroy a 3000-4000 year old Native American Indian village at Red House Bluff (north of St. Augustine High School) for a strip mall and housing to allowing Flagler College a Planned Unit Development, eviscerating our Historic area to his misplaced support for bringing the 2000 truckloads of contaminated solid waste back to Lincolnvile in 2007-2008.
Some of these bogus projects benefit BOLES's business partners and clients (like ex-Mayor CLAUDE LEONARD WEEKS, Jr., with whom BOLES shares a 25-year old lease for City-owned property at 81 King Street (subleased to FLORIDA CRACKER CAFE and SAVANNAH SWEETS).
Mayor BOLES relies on winks, nods and backslaps, spreading largesse to new and old pals (including the noisome $14,000 waiver of archaeological exploration fee for DAVID CORNEAL for the 102 Bridge Street property acquired, doled out after millionaire CORNEAL claimed not to know there were archaeological fees (having paid one for his million dollar mansion). DAVID CORNEAL threatened not to close on the property.
This was yet another BOLES Sunshine violation at an irregular morning meeting, outside the ordinary course of business. This is a BOLES specialty since becoming Mayor under tutelage of then City Manager WILLIAM BRUCE HARRISS in 2006.
Mayor BOLES is advertising his elder law practice on the radio, WFOY and WFOY-FM. His law firm ads are called "tips for life." In of them, he recounts how a man once told him he had $120,000 in savings, of which $85,000 had paid for his wife's nursing home, leaving only $35,000." Boles regales listeners by saying, "you should have called me $85,000 ago, but I can save you that $35,000. Trust is the key." Yes, indeed.
"Trust is the key."
We remember BOLES' and Commissioners' illegal Sunshine violations (two) that selected his pal RONALD WAYNE BROWN to become City Attorney in 2008, after the never-publicly explained firing of James Patrick Wilson as City Attorney, outside the ordinary course of business.
We remember BOLES' curtly interrupting and threatening public hearing speakers about Environmental Justice issues involving the Old City Reservoir and Lincolnville.
We remember BOLES' illegal refusal to let the public speak when voting to haul 2000 truckloads of contaminated solid waste back to Lincolnville in 2007.
(We won reversal of his vote, and the waste is now in a Class I landfill, where stubborn serial lawbreaking polluter City Manager WILLIAM BRUCE HARRISS refused to put it without an agency order).
We remember BOLES being among HARRISS' most outspoken supporters on Commission -- totally in the tank with his buddy.
We remember BOLES supporting a plaque for HARRISS in the midst of a pending EPA and FDEP criminal investigation, chilling workplace free speech rights.
We remember the silence from BOLES and other Commissioners when WILLIAM BRUCE HARRISS threatened me with arrest for disorderly conduct on APril 11, 2005 for speaking out in favor of civil rights in West Augustine. (The equitable maxim is: "Silence gives consent.).
We remember the stunning corrupt silence from BOLES and four other Commissioners when a bottle of liquor was offered by a flipper for the former Chamber of Commerce chair to stay and speak in an annexation public hearing on April 11, 2005. (We filed an affidavit from the eye- and ear-witness, which had no effect on Commissioners).
We remember the smarminess and smugness with which Mayor BOLES denied anyone not associated with the taxicab interest the right to speak at a public hearing on raising cab fares. Taxi riders were silenced.
We remember his working for years to extirpate musicians and artists from St. George Street, where (like ancient Carthage) they "created a desert and called it peace."
We remember no apologies for any of this.
We forgave him. We forgive him. But we agree with his own law firm radio commercial tagline: "Trust is the key."
It's time for Mayor JOSEPH LEROY BOLES, Jr. to go back to doing what he does best -- his law practice and businesses.
BOLES has earned a rest. BOLES looks tired. As Mayor BOLES recently told his family, he's had "a good run."
BOLES is the longest-serving Mayor of St. Augustine, I reckon.
He's served eight years -- eight years is as long as any President (except FDR) ever served (and FDR served longer only reluctantly, in time of a global war against fascism)..
Mayor BOLES has grown.
Mayor BOLES is a good guy, but one who overstayed his welcome.
Enough already.