I reject anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry in SJC politics, and so should we all

Update: I called out NICOLE CRANBERG CROSBY for her bigotry at the August 6, 2024 St. Johns Commission meeting, in non-agenda public comment, shortly before the meeting ended.  NICOLE CRANBERG CROSBY stomped by me at my table at the back of the room, starting that I had just destroyed St. Johns County.  To borrow a line from the late William F. Buckley Jr., "now that's an icebreaker." But having walked up within a few feet of me to start an argument, she stated, "Stay away from me!"  How gauche, louehe and lacking in self-insight.  No apology.  Glad that SJSO officers were there to observe her behavior.  Longtime DOYLE DANE BERNBACH International Senior Vice President and Creative Director, is often overly "creative" with the facts and law.  Pray for her.  She knows not that she knows not.  DDB has strong policies against anti-LGBTQ_+ bigotry.  Perhaps Machiavellian NICOLE CROSBY forgot?  Using Gay Pride as a cudgel against a longtime Florida public servant who worked for five Governors and helped save the Everglades?  That is so wrong.  It is Gay-bashing. Ugly, stark and raw.  We reject her works and pomps.

On Sunday, August 4, 2024 at 06:34:26 PM EDT, Ed Slavin <easlavin@aol.com> wrote:

Dear friends:

1. Note the manipulative eleventh hour anti-Gay dig against Commissioner Dean in an otherwise informative message.  

2. Quo vobis videtor?  (What do you reckon?)

3. Pray for bigots, bullies and Gay-bashers to try tolerance.  Reject their works and pomps.  

4. Tell your friends and neighbors.  

5. This is so wrong. 

6  We are better than this cheap shot about a proposed Gay Pride proclamation, St. Johns County.  

7. Our Nation was founded by proud "liberals," and our Founding Fathers said so.

8. Enough Madison Avenue flummery, dupery and nincompoopery.

9. Say no to homophobia. 

Thank you.

With kindest regards, I am,

Sincerely yours,

Ed Slavin

Box 3084

St. Augustine, Florida 32085-3084. 

www.edslavin.com

http://www.cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com

http://www.staugustgreen.com

(904) 377-4998

----- Forwarded Message -----

From: SJCounty Neighbors <sjcountyneighbors@182551206.mailchimpapp.com>

To: "easlavin@aol.com" <easlavin@aol.com>

Sent: Sunday, August 4, 2024 at 04:31:55 PM EDT

Subject: 7 developers & builders control our County and Election

View this email in your browser Dear Neighbor, Let's skip the niceties and cut right to the chase. We. Are. Owned. And we will continue to be owned, depending on the outcome of the August 20th primary election just around the corner.  A deep dive into the PAC dollars pouring into the intense advertising blitz to keep three St. Johns County commissioners in office, by attacking their opponents in commercials and mailers  with blatant lies, reveals that SEVEN major St. Johns County developers, builders and site developers are investing heavily to maintain control of St. Johns County's government - and your tax dollars - for another FOUR years.  The seven have already spent a staggering $1.2 million to convince you to vote against your best interests and elect the commissioners they control. Was it in your best interest when they tried to raise your sales tax by 15% (2) in 2022 despite our record property tax revenues that year?   Has it been in your best interest over the last four years when they’ve voted to charge you the maximum allowable property taxes in years 2022-2025 versus the lower rollback millage rate? Guess whose best interests it was? The seven companies below.  If the incumbents are elected, you can expect continued efforts to raise our taxes and approve more developments than our roads and other infrastructure can handle. (In a recent debate between Henry Dean and Ann Taylor, only Taylor said she would not consider a 1-cent sales tax referendum. Dean said "not now."  That says it all!) Below is the list of the SEVEN companies and the $1.2 million donated so far to win your vote. They went to such great lengths to hide their donations from the public that they used 77 entities and 8 dark money PACs.  They will be expecting a full return on their investments from Dean, Alaimo and Whitehurst who only go through the motions of working for us.  They do NOT work for us. And that is the single most important message of this email. Each of these seven companies donated money into dark money PACs and incumbents' PACs, and we followed the trail of money all the way to the attack ads on Ann Taylor, Ann-Marie Evans and Clay Murphy - . Why do sitting commissioners need such large sums of money to defeat political newcomers who only have about $150,000 combined? Because the incumbents' excessive overdevelopment of our county is undeniable and all around us – overcrowded schools whose #1 ranking dropped to #2; overcapacity roads increasing by 65% over 4 years  (3); vast, clear-cut swaths of land spreading like a cancer; nearly 30,000 homes and housing units approved over the past 7.5 years. And to raise money to subsidize the developers’ roads, parks and other infrastructure needs, Dean and Whitehurst tried to raise our sales tax by 15%, which failed in a landslide. (904 Now calls it "The developer tax" at the 6:15 mark here.) Our current commissioners are also costing a property owner with a taxable home value of $500,000 an additional $1900 over four years in property taxes by voting against the rollback on the millage rate each year.  That meant a 4.4% higher tax bill for us in 2022, 12.6% higher in 2023, 10.5% higher in 2024 and now 7.1% higher in 2025.  The Dean Machine is working overtime to crush his opponent, Ann Taylor, depicting her in attack ads as a radical liberal who supports open borders, the release of criminals, and sex changes for children. It is beyond absurd.  The actual truth (3:39:05)  is that Ann Taylor is a staunch conservative, and she presented to the Commissioners on Gov TV 12/23/23,  a request to St Johns County to STOP FUNDING an organization that promotes “drag queen story hour to encourage children to explore gender fluidity.” She helped STOP our tax dollars from funding this nonsense.  Conservative Ann Taylor is clearly the polar opposite of how the attack advertising portrays her, and her 3-minute public comment linked above will prove it. How can Dean silently stand by while such outrageous falsehoods are told by his developer funders?  (See her responses to the attacks here.) Equally egregious is their claim that both Ann and Ann-Marie propose a $7 million “tree tax.” Lying Christian Whitehurst coined the term “tree tax” when he voted against all 14 tree protections that Commissioner Krista Joseph proposed (BOCC, 10/17/23) and he would not even consider reducing clearcutting (currently 95% for PUDs) by 5%.  Not one of the proposed tree protections is a tax, and a number of the proposals would not increase costs such as not clearing land until ready to build. Whitehurst nixed that too.  Whitehurst should not be an elected official based on his "tree tax" deception, and for misusing the term "tax" to mislead his constituents.  Don’t believe the lies they’re telling to keep the developers in control of our county.  Now, Dean and Whitehurst's advertising brazenly lies that they “kept taxes low” (after trying to raise them) and that they “slowed the growth" despite approving an average of 3500 homes per year.  Dean and Whitehurst have left one of the wealthiest counties in Florida so broke, that we can’t afford to pick up our own litter. (4) Ironically, Dean really is a liberal, having advocated (unsuccessfully) for a Pride Month resolution. (5); he also tried but failed to pass a mask mandate (6) during Covid, and Dean and his wife have donated 11 times to Democrats (7) including Andrew Gillum and Corrine Brown. Yet he continues to call himself a conservative Republican. Tax-and-spend Henry Dean told a reporter in 2022 that the 5600-home SilverLeaf Expansion he approved would cost taxpayers $50 million in road needs.    Dean also calls himself the “conservation commissioner,” even though he approved the development of over 31 square miles of our county. (8) His first five years in office, he approved 120 out of 121 developments of undeveloped land, (9) and then he flat-out lied that "about 100" of those votes are for “very minor variances” like “moving a driveway over six inches.” (10) You can see for yourself that there are no small variances on the entire list.  During the 8 years prior, Henry Dean was a lobbyist to “Big Sugar” (11) – the industry that has cost taxpayers over 10 billion dollars to clean up its destruction of the Everglades.  Dean was among the lobbyists to ease Everglades clean-up legislation and to allow sugar growers to continue polluting farm land that drains into the Florida Everglades for another 30 years. (Florida Trend 4/30/14) In his campaign ads, Henry Dean takes credit for land acquisitions authorized by others, decades ago. His Land Acquisition Management Program (LAMP) has resulted in one small, unusable parcel in three years.      Whitehurst’s big campaign promise four years ago was ballparks for kids, yet not a single one was built. All we have are election-eve plans and promises and impending debt of approximately $97 million. It'll be two more years before the first park will be built; six years is a long time for children to wait for a place to play ball.  In July, every commissioner except Krista Joseph once again voted against a rollback on our millage rate; so that’s four years in a row that we’ve been paying more in property taxes every year because they refuse to hold our taxes steady while our home values increase.    It's not small white lies, but big Whitehurst lies that are being used to deceive voters about Ann-Marie Evans. She faces a PAC of lies including that she’ll “raise property taxes,” backed up with a phony facebook citation that leads to nowhere.  She’s also accused of donating to a radical leftist group, when in fact she paid dues to her professional trade association for attorneys – without which it would have been difficult to run her law firm. Ann-Marie moved here from a rural part of Washington State (not Seattle as the ads falsely claim), to live in a conservative state aligned with her values. Of course, the attack ads lie that she “brought her liberal values with her.” The attack ads irresponsibly call her an “ambulance chaser,” maligning the field of law that brings justice to people who are injured. (Whitehurst: middle class upbringing, achieves a high school diploma. Ann-Marie: raised in poor family, becomes an attorney, only to be called an “ambulance chaser” by Whitehurst’s thugs.) See Ann-Marie's responses to the attack ads here.  With plenty of conservative creds, Republican Ann-Marie Evans was a participating attorney in the Wisconsin 2020 recount. She’s also mom to a United States Marine and to a Sheriff’s Deputy, and is married to a retired Police Sergeant.  Does any of that sound “woke liberal” to you? Even the local St. Johns County Republican Party has disowned the incumbents and endorsed Ann Taylor and Ann-Marie Evans  - known as “the Anns” - causing all kinds of bogus endorsement slates to crop up. Beware of the “SJC Trump Club” which is not associated in any way with Trump, and whose “endorsements” are voted on by just 4 people. They just became a PAC that's running commercials calling the three incumbents "the only Trump Republican candidates."  Pure lie.  Also beware of the “Conservative Coalition of SJC” which magically appeared recently to “endorse” the incumbents. “St. Johns Truth” is more pro-developer propaganda as is the “St. Johns County Neighborhood Coalition” PAC which pretends to be a grass roots organization, but is funded by developers.  In contrast to the Anns who have no skeletons in their closets, Whitehurst and Dean harbor many.    Whitehurst was sued by his own customer for using a counterfeit Rolex part in a Rolex watch repair. He charged her over $1,000 at his Fast Fix business, which resulted in him paying out a settlement deal in mediation, January 2024. Whitehurst hasn’t paid his 2022 business property taxes as of this writing.   In 2007-8, he had two liens on his condo due to not paying his monthly condo assessments.  In 2018, he was sued for defaulting on a business loan of $7,926.25. What is he doing on the commission of a $1.5 billion revenue county when he fails to pay his taxes and tries to rip off customers?  Then there’s Henry Dean who earned about $400,000 through his "business" Henry Dean & Associates, LLC, during his eight years as county commissioner, but he hasn't disclosed the name of a single client. Do you think his clients may include some of the top seven companies listed at the beginning of this email or any other conflicted client?  If so, Florida Statute 112.313-7 says there can be no conflicts for public officers.  How do we know if there are any if not one client's identity has been disclosed?  We ask Henry Dean to disclose his complete client list with verifiable supporting documentation. Regarding his lobbying for the polluting sugar industry, Dean went by the name "Isaac H. Dean" for seven years. Was that to protect his reputation as a “conservationist?”  To further help the incumbents, two spoiler candidates have unethically been planted last minute in the Anns’ races; one is a friend and co-worker of Whitehurst’s current (or very recent) social media manager, James Higbee. Her name is Weston Ferguson. The other spoiler candidate is Whitehurst’s (current or recent) social media manager’s grandfather, John Higbee III. Both spoiler candidates' stated goals are to end all development and end all clearcutting -- obviously  to siphon votes from Ann Taylor and Ann-Marie Evans and increase the odds of victory for Whitehurst and Dean who will continue to overdevelop and clearcut our county, if re-elected.  In other dirty tricks, the Anns' large wooden campaign signs are regularly taken. After filing a police report, they put GPS trackers on their signs - one of which was stolen. The tracker led police to the property of a developer who had donated $5,000 to the PAC for Roy Alaimo and $1,000 to his campaign account. Among the four large signs stashed on the developer's property were three of the Anns', and  one of Alaimo's opponent - Clay Murphy. Report from First Coast News here. We've since learned that this developer has a very large project coming before the commission on primary election day! You truly can't make this stuff up. Commissioner Krista Joseph's lone votes AGAINST many decisions that are not in our best interest have put a target on her back.  She recently voted alone in favor of the millage rate rollback.  Commissioner Joseph is such a threat to developers that Henry Dean made the motion to not only censure her, but also to allocate tax dollars for attorneys to try to convict her of an election crime. The other three developer-funded commissioners voted with him – threatening to jail the Gold Star mom whose son died for our country and whose husband is terminally ill. They underestimated Krista’s courage. She filed a lawsuit in federal court saying her first amendment rights had been trampled. A federal judge ruled in Krista's favor. That nightmare, created by Henry Dean and backed by Whitehurst, Alaimo, and Arnold, is over.  Now you know how two conservative, God-fearing, Republican moms were turned into “radical, woke, tax-and-spend liberals” on your TV screen and in your mailbox.   If Ann-Marie Evans and Ann Taylor are elected in the decisive August 20th Republican primary, we will have three fiscally conservative commissioners who are not funded by developers and whose first priority is quality of life for residents.  They will be careful stewards of your tax dollars. They will not cater to developers when revising the county’s Comprehensive Plan as commissioners are now doing. We should not be expanding our development boundaries and using high population growth projections, but that is what will occur if Whitehurst and Dean are re-elected. It’s already underway, but it won’t be too late to rescind their plans if the Anns are elected in November. Ann-Marie Evans has seven children including three teens in our schools.  Ann-Marie owned a thriving law firm, and is a former victim advocate and public records officer. She has been researching wasteful spending in our county. Ann-Marie is not anti-development, and in fact received the endorsement of the Northeast Florida Association of Realtors. (She was also a licensed real estate agent.) See Ann-Marie's TV spot here. Please see the first link on her website which brings you to her response to the attack ad allegations. Ann Taylor is a Mom of two sons in our crowded schools, and a former business woman of 25 years who worked for Fortune 500 Companies. She is currently HOA board president. A strong advocate, Ann fought to stop a wood burning polluter in Henry Dean’s district after residents had suffered for two years and DEP fines had reached $20,000. She also fought to stop the district from rezoning children away from the school they had always attended – a disruption to education that is occurring county-wide due to overcrowding. See Ann's TV spot here. Please see the first link on her website which brings you to her response to the attack ad allegations.  Ann and Ann-Marie will bring compassion, wisdom, transparency and ethics to the jobs of county commissioner, Districts 1 and 5. And they will always return your emails or phone calls, unlike the four developer-funded commissioners who are busy serving special interests – not yours.  The Anns want to see more involvement in government from residents, and have proposed some evening meetings to accommodate residents who work.  Please see their websites to learn about their plans to take back St. Johns County, and to represent you.  The future of our county is in your hands. VOTE in your best interests.   Please forward this email to as many St. Johns County residents as you can. The developers may outspend us, but there is strength in our numbers. If this was shared to you, you can SUBSCRIBE HERE.    DONATE and learn more about Ann Taylor here and Ann-Marie Evans here.  Also, scroll through Fight For St. Johns County posts to share on Facebook here.   1   Florida Division of Elections and St. Johns County Supervisor of Elections 2   “There is no Plan B” Ponte Vedra Recorder 10/13/22 3    #2 schools: Fl. Dept. of Ed.;  traffic increase: 2020 – 2023 Transportation Analysis Spreadsheets, SJC 4    Whitehurst text message to constituent, July 19, 2024 5    “ Dean said, ‘ I certainly support their cause and I would vote for it if it was on the agenda , ’” April 30, 2021, WJCT News 6    “ Commissioner Henry Dean called for moving forward with crafting a mask mandate for the publi c Florida ” Times Union, June 30, 2020 7    Florida  Division of Elections and Federal Election Commission 8   Facebook, St. Augustine News group, Dean's own comment 9   St. Johns County B OCC agendas and minutes 10  Meeting, Palm Valley Community Center, 5/16/24 11   FloridaLobbyist.gov 2009 – 2015 “Isaac H. Dean ” Florida Crystals (Also lobbyist for Sugar Cane Growers of FL in 2008)     Paid electioneering communication paid for by Our St. Johns County, 1174 Neck Rd. Ponte Vedra Beach, FL   32082  Our mailing address is: Our St. Johns County, 1174 Neck Rd., Ponte Vedra Beach, FL  32082 Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.