Ed Slavin's 34 Questions for St. Johns County Attorney Job Applicants

In selecting a new County Attorney for St. Johns County, we need to ask questions, demand answers and expect democracy. Enough waste, fraud, abuse, misfeasance, malfeasance, nonfeasance, no-bid contracts, coverups, flummery, dupery and nincompoopery. 

We don't need any more louche lapdogs for secretive, foreign-funded, rich and powerful land-raping developers in the job of St. Johns County Attorney.

As the late Whitesburg, Ky, Mountain Eagle publisher Tom Gish said, "we must ask a million questions."

Here are a mere 34 questions that I sent to four finalist applicants seeking appointment of St. Johns County Attorney, two of whom, Messrs. Tom McFarland and David Migut will now be interviewed by the full five-member St. Johns County Board of County Commissioners.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ed Slavin <easlavin@aol.com>

Sent: Wed, Aug 25, 2021 7:14 am

Subject: Questions For St. Johns County Attorney Job Interviewees

Dear Ms. Robinson and Messrs. McFarland, Migut and 

Sanders: 

A. Thank you for applying for the position of St. Johns County Attorney!

B. Our County needs fresh eyes, independence, and a fresh start in that office. Toward that end, would you please be so kind as to answer some questions and provide some documents?

C. After sharing the first draft of my questions with the Chair of the County Attorney Hiring Committee, Hon. Henry Dean, Vice Chair of St. Johns County Board of County Commissioners, Commissioner Dean suggested that I write each of you who are to be interviewed this week.  

D. Please respond: 

1. Curriculum vitae: Please supply a detailed c.v.  
   
2. Legal writing:   Please provide at least three samples of your published or unpublished legal writing on public policy issues. 
3. List of cases:  Please provide a list of all cases on which you have worked.
4. Redistricting: What is your experience with the 15th Amendment, Voting Rights Act, and redistricting that would inform your advice to BoCC in redistricting this year?  Please review the history of redistricting in St. Johns County, and its civil rights history (Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called this "the most lawless" place in America?
   
5. Management experience: Please describe your management experience and your proposed approach to the County Attorney position.
6. Your suggestions, please:  Have you reveiewed the County Attorney office budget, FTE, the work of in-house and outside counsel, its approach to contracts, ordinances  and litigation?  If not, please do so. If so, please share your impressions and suggest a path forward.
7. Civil litigation: Please describe and explain your civil litigation experience and your five (5) most significant cases.
   
8. Complex litigation: Please explain and describe your experience with complex litigation, to include MDL, Superfund, antitrust, toxic torts and employment discrimination .
9. Civil rights:  Please describe and explain in detail your experience with civil rights laws, including legislation, judicial or administrative litigation.  If hired, would you kindly promise to  support body cameras for police?
10. Public speaking ability:  Do you think well on your feet? Please describe and explain your strengths and weaknesses at public speaking in a non-rehearsed setting, e.g., responding to Commissioner and citizen. questions at meetings.
11. Negotiations:  Please give three examples of your negotiating skills and explain your strengths and weaknesses.  Please provide supporting documents.
    
12. Procurement: What would be your approach to contracts against public policy -- would you withhold your signature and discuss your concerns publicly with the BoCC, rather than "going along to get along?"
13. Recruitment:  Will you promise, if hired, to encourage SJC to recruit employees through HBCUs, working for a diverse workforce?
    
14. Differing professional views: What is your approach to resolving differing professional opinions?
15. Independent Legal Advice:  Please give three examples of your legal advice to organizations exemplifying Elihu Root's mandate that a good lawyer will always tell them when "You're damned fools and you should stop!"
16. Suing Powerful Interests: Please describe and explain, with doc aments, your experience in suing dysfunctional large organizations?   
17. Home Rule: What are your thoughts about litigation and legislation to preserve, protect and defend SJC residents' home rule rights from Tallahassee trickery?  Governor DeSantis's first veto in 2019 was of the ban on straw bans, such as enacted in coastal communities.   Now the Governor abuses home rule powers on mask-wearing, causing our State's COVID-19 infection rates to be first in the Nation.  Are you prepared to help Commissioners find a path forward to preserve and protect Home Rule?
18. Mask Ordinance:  What steps would you take to provide thorough legal research on mask ordinances (something sorely lacking under current County Attorney)?
19. Legal Audit:  Will you request BoCC enlist academic and public interest experts to conduct a legal audit examining  St. Johns County's rubber-stamping developer projects; suppression of dissent; hiring of a conflicted developer lobbyist to represent the County; illegal hiring practices; refusal to adopt ethics, lobbying disclosure and other reforms;  toleration of Sheriff's Department embezzlement; and County Attorney Office representation of the District 23 Medical Examiner in a disciplinary case arising out of the botched Michelle O'Connell homicide investigation, subject of investigation by The New York Times and PBS Frontline et al.? 
20. Forensic Audit: Do you support a forensic audit of the St. Johns County Sheriff's office and other local offices in light of $702,666 in embezzlement over six years under the nose of the prior Sheriff, David Shoar?
21. Open Records: Will you please review the files on the County Attorney's efforts to avoid Open Records requests, including delays, overcharging estimated fees, including putting County server(s) on a truck without a bill of lading in purported effort to have computer contractor search for water use records pertinent to Jeremy Banks homicide investigation. 
22. Ex Parte Contacts: Please list all oral or written contacts, including indirect contacts, that you have had concerning your application for the County Attorney position.
23. How did you first learn of job opening? 
24. Environmental and land use planning law:  What is your experience with environmental and land use planning.  Please give details on any legislation or judicial or administrative litigation.
25. Environmental policy:  Would you recommend St. Johns County consider environmental law reforms?  What sort of ordinances should we consider to protect "God's country" from money-laundering speculators buying up land to subdivide into cookie-cutter tract homes, destroying forests, wetlands and wildlife habitat?   How about a local equivalent of the National Environmental Policy Act, requiring Environmental Impact Statements for all govern meant actions, including development orders?
26. Developers:  What is your opinion about the proper scope of required disclosures for those seeking zoning favors?  What are your suggestions for lobbyist registration, County ethics board and Fair Housing ordinance?
27. Community service: Please list any organizations which you have served as a volunteer or board member, giving the pertinent dates and lessons learned.
28. Unconscionable Contracts of Adhesion:  You signed an employment application con training an inaccurate, misleading gratuitous HR statement in your application stating that this is an "at will" job, never mentioning that discrimination laws are an exception to employment at will. Would non-lawyer applicants think that this clause was legally binding?  Is it an unconscionable "contract of adhesion?" Will you review the routine forms used by HR and give your impressions as to how you would advise modifying them?
29. Procurement contracts:  What is your experience with drafting of complex procurement contracts?  Please review the County's contracting procedures and specification drafting, and kindly describe and explain how it might or should be improved?
30. Conflicts of interest and appearances of impropriety: Please give five examples of your raising or resolving concerns. 
31. Chilling effects on citizen free speech rights: Please review the Commission's chilling preface to non-agenda public comment and state your opinion as to possible violations of the First, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments by inflicting a Philistine's veto with vague, ambiguous and unconstitutional language forbidding asking questions and "demanding an immediate response," and forbidding applause.
32. Non-agenda public comment time: Do you agree that non-agenda public comment belongs at the beginning of BoCC meetings, so people know when to show up?  (County Commission Chair unilaterally moved it to the end of the meeting, discouraging citizen concerns about persistent flooding in poorly-engineered developments, and other important public policy questions that reflect on Commission's nature, structure and performance)
33. Civil lawsuits, bar complaints and law enforcement encounters:  Please list any civil or criminal case in which you were a plaintiff or defendant, list any Bar complaints and how resolved, and describe any law enforcement encounters, whether or not resulting in arrest.
34. Social media, blogs and websites: Please list each of your social media account addresses, handles or screen names, and kindly share the urls for any and all blogs or websites associated with you.

Thank you.

With kindest regards, I am,

Sincerely yours,

Ed Slavin

904-377-4998

www.cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com

www.edslavin.com