"Remember the Greediest!" -- 2024 Financial Mismanagement Follies -- Our Anastasia Mosquito Control District of St. Johns County

WHAT'S NEXT?: Open public discussion about illegal "bonus" pay raises for elected Mosquito Control District Commissioners and hiring of next attorney for District. Come speak to Anastasia Mosquito Control District of St. Johns County Commissioners at 5 PM on Thursday, December 12, 2024, 120 EOC Drive.  It's our money. Insults from Commissioner CATHERINE BRANDHORST will not deter us.

Is it time for the ill-advised management of our local Mosquito Control District to retire?

Do some of our American governments practice kakistocracy or kleptocracy?

Which of our local government board members voted its members a $1000 bonus on November 21, and why? 

Four (4) incurious, passive, Anastasia Mosquito Control District District Commissioners voted themselves $1000 Christmas bonuses. Others got bonuses, too. AMCD staff proposed $800, but controversial soon-to-be former Commissioner CATHERINE BRANDHORST pushed to raise it to $1000, and three colleagues went along with her suggestion.  Full disclosure: I filed to run against BRANDHORST, who failed to qualify to run for re-election, missing the deadline by some two (2) minutes.   T.J. Mazzotta was elected to the seat on November 5, 2024. 

This is the same Mosquito Control Commissioner BRANDHORST whom four (4) Commissioners asked Governor RONALD DION DeSANTIS to remove pursuant to Article IV, section 8 of our Florida Constitution for habitually missing monthly meetings, dozens of times.  Without explanation, Goofy GQP Governor RONALD DION DeSANTIS ignored the Mosquito Control Commission's request.  

https://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2022/10/governor-desantis-suspend-awol-st-johns.html

https://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2022/08/mosquito-board-asks-governor-to-fire.html

Wonder why? Our imperious Florida Boy Governor, call him DeSANTIS I, ostentatiously picked fights and removed several elected prosecutors for disagreements on policy. But DeSANTIS I ignored a request to remove BRANDHORST for taking $500/month to attend monthly meetings she missed -- thousands of dollars. It's our money. BRANDHORST changed her party registration to Republican, after which DeSANTIS could not be bothered to acknowledge the Mosquito Control District's request to remove her. 

This same DeSANTIS cracked at President Biden words to the effect he would not even appoint him to a Mosquito Control District. But all of Boy Gov. DeSANTIS' taste is evidently in his mouth, suffering and permitting Brandhorst to continue.

AMCD voted to ask DeSANTIS remove Commissioner Brandhorst was during an election cycle, Democratic Secretary of Agriculture and Consumer Services Nikki Fried would have picked a new Commissioner,  Meanwhile, BRANDHORSTt had changed her party registration to Republican, 

The 27th Amendment, drafted by James Madison and enacted 202 years later, prohibits members of Congress from giving pay raises for members of Congress during their current terms.  But AMCD's four unengaged, uninformed, ill-advised, misguided or greedy-gus Commissioners didn't give a fig.  They sought no legal opinions. They did not research.  Like trained seals, they responded to AMCD's staff crooked coaching.

Did CATHERINE BRANDHORST and Commissioners Trish Becker, Gayle Gardner and Gina LeBlanc illegally give themselves an illegal pay raise?  The $1000 bonus exceeded the pay cap under Florida law.  Their attorney now agrees it was illegal, but advised them they did not need to repeal it formally, because the action was a nullity.  That may be the law review preppy exam answer, but it is contrary to the genius of a free people.  

Mosquito Control must admit error, admit error publicly, reform and replace management, starting with the longtime Director, Dr. Rudy Xue, who suffers and permits third-rate work by subordinates whom he poorly supervises. 

This is what 388.141 says -- this is the government law on mosquito control districts, which Commissioners swore to uphold after they were elected:

388.141 Commissioners; compensation.— (1) Members of the board of commissioners of independent special tax districts may each be paid a salary to be determined by unanimous vote of the board which shall not exceed $4,800 for each commissioner during any one year; however, this section shall not be construed to limit compensation of district commissioners where higher amounts have otherwise been authorized by special act or general act of local application. Said members may be reimbursed for expenses incurred in the performance of their duties as provided in s. 112.061. (2) No board member of a mosquito control district shall receive compensation except for per diem and travel expenses authorized pursuant to s. 112.061, for serving on more than one special district board in this state. All special districts, regardless of the existence of other specific provisions of law, shall comply with this subsection. History.—s. 2, ch. 59-195; s. 13, ch. 63-400; s. 5, ch. 86-203; s. 13, ch. 91-308.

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Our imperious bumptious Florida Boy Governor, DeSANTIS I, who acts like a king but talks like a queen, ostentatiously removed several prosecutors for disagreements on policy. But DeSANTIS I ignored a request to remove often-AWOL AMCD Commissioner CATHERINE BRANDHORST for taking $500/month to attend monthly meetings she missed -- tens of thousands of dollars. It's our money. Brandhorst changed her party registration to Republican, after which DeSANTIS could not be bothered to acknowledge the Mosquito Control District's request to remove her. This same DeSANTIS cracked at President Biden words to the effect he would not even appoint him to a Mosquito Control District. But all of DeSANTIS' taste is evidently in his mouth, suffering and permitting BRANDHORST to continue. 

Adding insult to injury, BRANDHORST complained publicly in November 2024 that she was underpaid! She complained that she was underpaid for not attending all of those meetings. BRANDHORST's bullinging BS argument won the day, with a 4-0 vote to give everyone on the Board $1000 Christmas bonuses. How spectacularly selfish is that?  It is the height of insolence, incompetence and ineptitude for AMCD staff to propose, their louche lawyers to bless, and for four Commissioners to support illegal bonuses.  It's time for them to go.  Let's hire new staff capable of legal compliance, with respect for our rights under open records laws adopted by 1992 vote of 3.8 million Florida voters (83%).

Thanks to WJCT/Jacksonville Today and WJXT ("The Local Station") and reporters Noah Hertz and Khalil Maycock for their reporting, and to AMCD Commissioner Martha Gleason for her asking questions, demanding answers and expecting democracy!  Three cheers! 

https://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2024/12/st-johns-county-commissioner-of.html

https://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2024/11/bonuses-for-mosquito-control-board-may.html

https://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2024/11/remember-greediest-anastasia-mosquito.html

My father explained to the colloquial term "Christmas tree bill," referring to government actions around the holidays benefitting a select few. What can you say about a government agency whose board members vote to give themselves $1000 Christmas bonuses?  Sounds like a conflict of interest to me.  I was proud to clerk during law school for attorney Dan M. Norwood, who thrice successfully sued Memphis City Council for giving themselves illegal pay increases. 

Wasteful spending seems to be a feature, not a bug, in our independent County Bug Board. Especially around holidays.  

On December 12, 2006, our Anastasia Mosquito Control District of St. Johns County voted to spend $1.8 million on a no-bid luxury jet helicopter. Two days later, District Director Rudy Xue told two ladies from St. Augustine Beach (Robin Nadeau and Ann Palmquist) and me that the no-bid "sole source" helicopter contract  was longtime Mosquito Control Commissioner MARY TARVER WILLIS's "Christmas present." He laughed. Yes, Dr. Xue laughed. 

It's our money. 

We weren't laughing at AMCD waste, fraud and abuse then, and we're not laughing now. Perhaps it's time for Dr. Xue to go. And for his Business Manager, Auditor and CFO to go, too.

Fun fact: After ten months of activism, 2006-2007, with public speakers against the helicopter, including former Army Captain Don Girvan, later a Board member, who during a Board meeting on the FY 2008 budget, was publicly threatened with arrest by AMCD Chair BARBARA BOSANKO, spouse of former County Attorney DANIEL BOSANKO.  BOSANKO was caught on video violating Sunshine laws talking to another Commissioner and an AMCD lawyer. BOSANKO requested that one of Sheriff DAVID SHOAR's deputies be in attendance to chill free speech rights, standing behind the dais, directly behind Commissioners John Sundeman and Jeanne Jackson Moeller, persistent critics of the illegal helicopter purchase.  

Nevertheless, we persisted.

We, the People were finally heard and heeded and won unanimous cancellation of the illegal helicopter purchase, in violation of District purchasing policies and the Restatement of Contracts, 2d, Sec. 178 (Contracts Against Public Policy).  We got a full refund, too,

Also at the behest of longtime AMCD Commissioner MARY TARVER WILLIS, AMCD also bought $3.2 million worth of swampland near I-95 and SR16 for its headquarters, buying it from the influential Usina family, with no appraisal, no survey and no competitive bidding. Stinky? You betcha. 

Some say government should be run like a business.  My response: what kind of business, with what kind of internal controls, management, supervision, oversight, ethics and legal compliance? Is AMCD still run being run like a country store or a Third World dictatorship, after all these years?  

Even though We, the People exposed the no-bid contract, AMCD is still run by amateurs.  AMCD's Director is President of the American Mosquito Control Association and the Business Manager is President of the Florida Mosquito Control Association.  Together, some of their bad decisions reek of cronyism and impulse buying.

Four (4) AMCD Commissioners voted -- after 36% in cost overruns on what is now a $4.5 million Mosquito Museum -- November 21, 2024 to spend yet another $50,000 on the Mosquito Museum, refusing requests by Commissioner-elect T.J. Mazzotta and me to wait until December when Vice Chair Martha Gleason could attend. 

Those same four (4) elected officials also voted November 21 to give $1000 Christmas bonuses to themselves, while approving similar bonuses for some staff.  Florida law caps pay for Mosquito Control Commissioners at $400/month.  Our local District adds $100 a month for "expenses." But the extra $1000 beggars description. Is it an illegal pay raise?

As if conferring holiday gifts or spending our tax money like drunken sailors, or rebarbative politicians spending Other Peoples' Money, those four (4) Commissioners clicked their heels and followed the staff recommendation, raising an $800 bonus to.a $1000 bonus.  They have delusions of adequacy. 

Remember their names: recently re-elected Anastasia Mosquito Commissioners Gayle Gardner (Chair) and Gina LeBlanc, joined with lame duck, often AWOL Commissioner Catherine Brandhorst and second-term incumbent  Commissioner Pangiotta "Trish" Becker (whose term expires in 2026).  These four Mosquito Control of Commissioners voted themselves and staff $1000 Christmas bonuses and elected to rush $50,000 closeout of two buildings, depriving Commissioner Gleason of a fair meeting and decision (she was out sick).

By November 22, 2024 e-mail, Commissioner Martha Gleason refused to accept the $1000 Christmas bonus that her colleagues voted themselves when she was unable to attend due to illness. 

Martha Gleason, ill with bronchitis, with her mother having surgery, could not attend.  Four Commissioners refused to honor requests that they show comity and courtesy and waiting until December to vote on this $1000 Christmas bonus and other items.  Their lack of comity and courtesy and respect is stunning.  It has blown up in their faces, now that their November 21, 2024 vote was declared illegal by their attorney.

The AMCD's proverbial Christmas stocking was full, including a controversial a $50,000 Christmas check for selected government contractors for work on the $4.5 million Mosquito  Museum, which has already seen a 36% cost overrun and with the resolution capping spending ignored in Commissioner Gleason's absence, with Board Chair Gayle Gardner, ignoring requests by Commissioner Martha Gleason, by Commissioner-elect T.J. Mazzotta, and me. Chair Gardner did not inform fellow Commissioners that Commissioner Gleason was ill; wonder why? She rushes through meetings. It backfired when she voted herself a $1000 raise. 

AMCD still suffers from lax procedures and lackadaisical management.  During the project, Commissioners ineptly agreed to an arbitration clause, waiving our mosquito control district's Seventh Amendment rights to civil jury trial, then voted against invoking arbitration to enforce our contract.  

There's a clever story in T. Harry Williams Pulitzer Prize winning biography about the late Louisiana U.S. Senator Huey Pierce Long's puppet Governor, Oscar K. Allen, a/k/a "O.K. Allen": Huey Long's brother Earl Long said of Gov. O.K. Allen, "A leaf blew into his window once, and he signed it."  Sound famliar, SJC?

Oscar Allen

  

As Brian Wallace said shortly after we moved here in 1999, "It's crooked around here!"  

Yes my friends, that's the way it is around here, where I've lived for 25 years.  There are still problems with our local government mosquito control agency's staff and Board 

Mosquitos kill some 700,000+ people annually worldwide. 

Our Anastasia Mosquito Control District of St. Johns County needs public scrutiny, investigations, and a new Auditor and new Attorney. It's wasting our money (again) and avoiding public scrutiny.  Enough flummery, dupery and nincompoopery. 

While I flunked accounting in college, I learned  about purchasing from my mother, visiting her office and learning from her wisdom and experience as a longtime purchasing secretary for Camden County College in Blackwood, N.J.  When our Anastasia Mosquito Control District of St. Johns County contemplated buying a $1.8 million luxury Bell Jet helicopter without competitive bidding.  

My late friend Robin Nadeau asked me to look into Mosquito Control's aerial program.  So I asked my mom if she would buy a $1.8 million helicopter. Mom advised: "Absolutely not!'"  xxxx

My late mentor, USDOL Chief Administrative Law Judge Nahum Litt would often advise me to ask,"Cui bono? (Who benefits?).   

Funded by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, I helped expose hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. Tennessee Valley Authority overspending on coal from the business associates and friends of Senator Howard Henry Baker, Jr.  The semester when I was supposed to be taking an accounting course, I was too often focused on accounting for government waste and corruption. Taking Greyhound busses to Tennessee with law books in my backpack, I missed classes and then very foolishly took my accounting mid-term and the final on the same day.  While I flunked accounting, I was learning valuable lessons about about las internal controls.  See GAO report here: xxxx

My mother often said, "experience is a hard school, but fools know no other."  

For 25 years, I have lived in St. Johns County, suffering under one-party rule amidst overdevelopment, one of the most corrupt places in Florida, where the former County Commission Chair, THOMAS MANUEL, went to federal prison for bribery. His nemeses, like too many here, might as well have flunked accounting in real life (IRL) by lax internal controls, leading to $786,785 in embezzlement under longtime Sheriff DAVID SHOAR, who legally changed his name from "HOAR" in 1994.  When SHOAR ran for State Senate in the 2024 closed Republican Primary, he got 25% of the vote in the district.

Our secretive, seemingly sneaky money-wasting Anastasia Mosquito Control District of St. Johns County is an independent special taxing district, funded by property taxes, and recently also from grants from corporations and governments. In the past, AMCD came close to being abolished after public indignation over its mendacity and moronic money-eating ways, including that $1.8 million no-bid luxury Bell Jet helicopter. (We, the People got the contract cancelled, with a full refund of our deposit, back in 2007.) Full disclosure: in 2024 I received 55,600 xx votes running for Mosquito Control (38%). 

While Mosquito Control is a force for good, is it also a pusillanimous previcator or recididivs t perpetrator of waste, fraud, abuse, misfeasance, malfeasance, nonfeasance?

Local taxpayers have purchased a $5 million mosquito museum or education center,  fraught with delays, cost overruns, poorly drafted contracts, incurious counsel, and maladroit auditors.

Uninformed Mosquito Control Commissioners voted 4-1 to waive our sacred Seventh Amendment to jury trial and agree to an unconscionable mandatory arbitration provision (then-Commissioner Jeanne Jackson Moller, dissenting).

Remember the greediest!  (Inspired by 1970s tiny page one New York Times ads at holidays once exclaimed, "Remember the Neediest!)

While contemplating your SJC property tax bills & sales taxes here in Oligarch-ruled overdeveloping St. Johns County, let us remember at the holidays "Remember the Greediest!"

xxxxx