Unanimous! City of St. Augustine Mayor Nancy Sikes-Kline and four other City Commissioners finally had enough of controversial tour company Country Carriages' malarkey, flummery, dupery and nincompoopery . She reviewed CC's history of contract violations.
Five St. Augustine City Commissioners have had enough fast-talking flummery and corporate corpulence from Country Carriages, Inc. After repeated documented code violations involving their horse and carriage "industry" (sic), Commissioners voted to cancel fifteen (15) City franchises with a firm owned by the granddaughter of Jimmy Brock, the late motel owner who poured muriatic acid into the pool at. the Monson Motel in June 1964 amid civil rights swim-in.
Vice Mayor Barbara Blonder, a Flagler College environmental science professor, said that the Country Carriages, Inc horse barn is "not a great place to put a horse barn." Commissioner Cynthia Garris said the muddy site is unencumbered by any grass. City Manager David Douglas Birchim and Assistant City Manager Corey Sackret finally responded to the City's desuetude of law enforcement involving one mismanaged horse and carriage company with repeated documented code violations over eight years, the most of any horse and carriage company.
Three cheers for Mayor Sikes-Kline, Vice Mayor Barbara Blonder, Commissioners Cynthia Garris, Jim Springfield and John DePreter and Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services investigators, and to citizen activists, including Heather Wilson and Patricia Ramos.
We will regulate corporations in our town and speak truth to power. Let that be our legacy.
It's our town and our time. Corporate lawbreakers, beware.
Our horses will be protected and not neglected, "from this day forward," as the late Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Joe Henry would have said it. Civilization demands that animals be treated kindly. As just stewards of this frail planet and all of its creatures, great and small, it is up to us.
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