Thursday, May 09, 2019

My EPA Environmental Justice Complaint Against City of St. Augustine is Apparently Assigned to EPA HQ Dept. of Flummery, Dupery and Nincompoopery



Got an odd call from an unfriendly man from EPA HQ in Washington, D.C. May 9, 2019 5:24 pm concerning my May 7, 2019 Title VI complaint against the City of St. Augustine over its KEEPING HISTORY AHOVE WATER Conference this week:


  • He wanted my mailing address.
  • While I sent my complaint to the Atlanta Regional Office Environmental Justice coordinator, he said it was assigned to Washington, D.C. 
  • He made crude reference to my filing "another complaint." (I'd filed previous complaints, including one against Governor RICHARD LYNN SCOTT's racist veto of $200,000 for West Augustine sewers, unadorned by any staff briefing or any reason whatever, while not vetoing $2.4 million for a project benefitting a few privileged rich white owners of Summer Haven vacation homes in the same county.)
  • He said EPA would not investigate whether Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the City of St. Augustine "the most lawless city in America," one of "fifteen paragraphs" in the complaint, he said.

I responded that this was part of the "res gestate, irrefragable and res judicata without possibility of appeal." 

He mocked my word choice.

I think he was flummoxed. 

He would not not give me a case number.

In sharp and marked contrast, two attorney-investigators with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights interviewed me May 8, 2019 about my related April 24, 2019 complaint against Flagler Conference concerning the same conference.  

But the unfriendly caller from EPA HQ said that it could take "weeks" to make a "jurisdictional" finding, and he shared no case number.

When I called back to get his name, his telephone extension rang and rang and rang.  

But we've got his number.

In a dysfunctional EPA and EPA Environmental Justice office in an EPA territory now headed by a racist former James Innofe staffer ANDREW WHEELER, a former coal lobbyist, it seems that calling citizens to discourage civil rights complaints is part of the job of pompous prejudiced privileged Republican white guys wearing yellow ties.

In the immortal words of Senator J. Danforth Quayle, "I wear their scorn as a badge of honor."

Or as JFK said, "There are three things in life that are real.  God, human folly and laughter.  Since the first two are incomprehensible, we do what we can with the third."  

In JFK's spirit, we're laughing at the "human folly" of EPA today. 


We're laughing at the schoolmarms at Flagler College and at kiss-up, kick-down characters St. Augustine City Manager JOHN PATRICK REGAN, P.E. over their secretive "KEEPING HISTORY ABOVE WATER CONFERENCE."  

As Albert Gore, Sr. said on Election Night 1970, "The truth shall rise again."

Keep asking questions.

There are more good people than mean bureaucrats.

There are more good federal employees than snooty snide cynical satraps and anti-literate energumens. 


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