Developer FARID ASHDJI: UF Interview

Developer FARID ASHDJI: UF Interview. Read it here (translated from Arabic).

FARID ASHDJI is most noted for threatening the City Commission of the City of St. Augustine with a crack motel if he didn't get his way on building a too-tall hotel on U.S. 1.  He's also demanded that the City of St.  Augustine Beach allow him to breach his binding legal commitment to pay $566,000 for infrastructure associated with his new hotel.  (After we applied a spinal implant, St. Augustine Beach Commissioners turned ASHDJI down.)
ASHDJI seems like a hard-working immigrant from a business-class family, emigrating from "Palestine" with his family when he was 19, escaping war and intolerance: he nearly earned an engineering degree at UCF when he decided to pursue a business degree.
The problem with ASHDJI and other wealthy businessmen is that they have never learned the lesson that Senator Gary Warren Hart (D-Colorado) taught in the 1974 campaign: "You won't get the government off your backs until you get your hands out of its pockets."
Constantly seeking to rewrite our laws in their own graven image, developers like FARID ASHDJI and DAVID BARTON CORNEAL must remember that, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts."  Or their own zoning.