DAVID DOUGLAS BIRCHIM, dodgy, other-directed City of St. Augustine, Flori-DUH
City Planning and Building Director
As Capt. Lee Geanuleas, U.S.N. (Ret.) writes on St. Augustine Residents County, is it the policy of bumptious, bungling City of St. Augustine Planning and Building Director DAVID BIRCHIM to accept every assertion by every developer, even when mathematically false and verifiably so?
BIRCHIM graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1997 with a degree in Urban Planning, going to work for the City of St. Augustine, where he learned to be a louche lackey lickspittle for the rich and powerful under "managers" without a moral compass, including disgraced City Manager WILLIAM BARRY HARRISS (who dumped a landfill in a lake and got caught) and mendacious MARK ALAN KNIGHT, fired City Planning and Building Director whose firing involves an illegal gag order and hush money, insisted upon by City Manager JOHN PATRICK REGAN, P.E. BIRCHIM once told me, "you keep chipping away" at secrecy and unaccountability (in the context of trying to get BIRCHIM to post on the City's website all of its backup materials for PZB and HARB hearings).
JOHN REGAN and DAVID BIRCHIM are execrable managers, and this post proves it again, irrefragably:
Returning to the San Marco hotel parking PUD. To the litany of bad information that was allowed by city staff to infect the PZB's deliberations and the City Commission's appeal decision, please add this.
The picture below shows the hotel and its proposed surface parking lots. The Barnacle Bill's lot is in red and the "satellite lot" is in yellow.
The graphic shows what the applicant claimed for the size of the proposed parking lots compared to what St Johns County property tax records show. When you subtract those parts of the lots that cannot be used for parking (sidewalks, etc.) you see that the developer OVERSTATED THE AREA AVAILABLE FOR PARKING by approximately 15%.
Does that mean he'll volunteer to pay 15% more property tax on those lots? Probably not...
This information was presented to the City Commission on Monday evening, but none of the three who voted to send the rezoning request to a second reading (Neville, Sikes-Kline and Horvath) asked Planning & Building Director David Birchim to explain the difference and if it might have an impact on the number of cars that those two lots could accommodate.
This was just one of MANY instances in which inaccurate data was allowed to corrupt the process. It would appear the policy in Birchim's Planning & Building Office is to accept everything a developer tells you without question.
We can do much better...
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