Thursday, July 17, 2014

Saving Echo House: My Letter to Rev. Ron Rawls of St. Paul A.M.E. Church Today -- IN HAEC VERBA

Dear Rev. Rawls:
I wrote you on June 24, 2014 requesting a timeline and copies of accounting records. See below, please. Do you intend to respond? Whether or not you do:
1. Please list all of the items that have ever been removed from Echo House, their current location, and kindly provide for each item the sale price and bill of sale or transfer order, to include the beautiful long antique wooden bookcases, inside and outside copper fixtures and terra cotta roof tiles.
2. Please provide any accounting records supporting your claim to "hardship" when you say your "business" has grown at "11-13% per year."
3. Please provide a copy of the invoice from Don Crichlow & Associates for the $900 architectural plans and a copy of your engagement letters with him and other professionals, to include legal counsel, if any.
4. Please provide evidence of any fundraising and "friendraising" on Echo House, if any, to include any contacts with the National Park Service, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UF, et al., or any other efforts documenting due diligence on fixing Echo House.
5. I have read the documents that you have belatedly provided to the City, only yesterday. It looks like you spent almost all of the $26,176.82 on demolition, with $2000 paid by our City, no money spent on a grant writer and only $900 on an architect (Commissioner Donald W. Crichlow). Is that correct? Were some of these services donated? Please provide cancelled checks for all items on this list that you contend were actually paid out by the church.
6. Was your "business" plan ab initio to do nothing for years and then ask to demolish this historic building? Is that why you have spent so little and breached your promise to our City of St. Augustine to preserve and protect Echo House?
7. Did anyone ever give you any legal advice in writing, or otherwise? Please identify every meeting and telephone conversation with the late GEORGE MORRIS McCLURE and provide copies of all E-mail and other correspondence and communications with him or his firm. Has any member of the University of FLorida Levin College of Law faculty, to include your wife, ever provided you with any suggestions or advice on Echo House? If so, please provide copies of all E-mail and other correspondence or communications. Please waive any evidentiary privileges or immunities.
8. Please be prepared to answer questions under oath today at HARB. I have sent these questions to HARB and hereby request that they be asked. I shall be filing an Open Records request with UF.
9. Echo House will not be destroyed. It is part of our community and has been since 1926, long before either of us was born or EVEN first visited here.
10. As LBJ said to Congress after Selma, "We SHALL overcome!"
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Ed Slavin

1 comment:

Ed Slavin said...

Dear Rev. Rawls:
Are going to answer these questions?
As LBJ said after Selma, "We SHALL overcome." If you won't repair Echo House, may we have it back, please?
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Ed Slavin
www.cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com
904-377-4998