Threatening a potential civil rights lawsuit over Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection violations persuaded our City. City officials well knew that we were right. We persuaded them, using moral suasion and diplomacy, that it was wrong to do it in five not-so-easy pieces over ten years as funds were raised (through bake sales, presumably, due to the rebarbative racism of City Manager WILLIAM BRUCE HARRISS & Co.).
The bad news is that our Ancient City STILL has too many truck-eating sinkholes, many cracked and broken streets, broken pipes, leaking sewer pipes, red water, disturbed illegal dump sites and a host of potholes and routinely flooded areas.
It has dysfunctional intersections due to developer and Flagler College influence on local boards.
It has ugly and inappropriate buildings for the same reason.
It has neighborhoods where civil rights are routinely violated.
It has places where raw sewage spills on the ground, on the water and into homes.
Let's name them.
Name a problem and you can more easily solve it.
Even as one local developer (PIERRE THOMPSON) named retention ponds after his wife and him, let's name our City's Godawful hazards to navigation.
Make suggestions here.
Let's start with WILLIAM BRUCE HARRISS, JOSEPH POMAR, JOSEPH LESTER BOLES, JR., CLAUDE LEONARD WEEKS, Jr., PIERRE THOMPSON, DAVID BERNARD SHOAR, GEORGE MORRISS McCLURE, SIDNEY FRANKLYN ANSBACHER, JOHN LUIGI MICA, RONALD DEON DESANTIS, WILLIAM L. PROCTOR, ROBERT MICHAEL GRAUBARD, MICHAEL KELLY SMITH, CHESTER STOKES, TIDEWATER GROUP, 7-ELEVEN, et al.
Let's name these embarrassingly bumpy, ugly, wet and dangerous geographic features after them, and see if we can get neighbors to adopt the names.
Then we can ask the U.S. Board of Geographic Place Names to make the names official. UNLESS we get a new mayor, a new commitment to safety, and a coherent Capital Improvement Plan to fix the mess in real time -- rather than geologic time.
What do y'all reckon?
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