Letter: Attend freedom rally tomorrow night

Dear Editor:

Senior City Attorney, Ron Brown, and Assistant Attorney, Carlos Mendoza, not elected by the people, apparently believe they are hired to usurp power from the private sector to grow a bloated city bureaucracy.

Both of the attorneys’ big pay checks, however, are paid for by the city residents they often plot against. The rest of us have to tighten our financial belts in difficult times. All the City Commissioners have to do is ask their attorneys to find new ways to “legislate” us.

Brown says “It is within the rights of the city to control the year to year permits.” What about the rights of the citizens who expend large amounts of capital to start up and grow a business which requires city permits? According to the Senior City Attorney, the city controls those licenses and can take them back any time they want to. Each time they do, however, like in their current attack on the St. Augustine Transfer Company, you can expect the owner’s business to crash.

How about the City issuing carriage licenses over the past fifty years? At one time, they weren’t worth a lot, but in this decade permits have sold for $25,000 each and been rented out for $1500 per month. In 2004 St. Augustine Transfer was valued as a multi-million dollar company, and sold in hard times for reportedly between one and two million dollars in 2008.

Imagine the stock market selling you stocks worth little, but having the right to confiscate them from you decades later without compensation if they become valuable. That is the case of what our current City Commissioners are attempting to do to St. Augustine Transfer Company. As Mendoza says, “monopolies are legal if they are regulated.” Of course, according to our City Attorneys’ dictionary, it could mean their right to regulate your business’s execution-like a government seizure of 32 of your 42 licenses.

City Manager, Bill Harriss, once explained carriage licenses like this: your company owns them and pays the City tax on them. How different is that than the City’s first attempt in Ordinance No. 2010 to raise carriage license fees (tax) from $80.00 per year to $5,000 a year? After a public outcry, they dropped it down to $1000 which is still an unprecedented increase of 12 & ½ times the current rate.

Ron Brown has stated, “If the city should choose to revoke all liquor permits within the city it has the right to do so.”
The City plans to regulate Ghost Tours next. Once again, Ghost permits used to be not all that valuable. But with the tours growing and being seen as a cash cow over the past several years by the City, they are about to introduce you to new meanings behind words like “regulate”, “control” and the “City’s rights” and you too will wake up from a ghostly and ghastly slumber one day to realize that your rights, like St. Augustine Transfer’s rights, have been seized from you in a bloodless coup de grace.

If you are tired of constantly hearing about the city of St. Augustine Commission’s rights and never about your rights, I have planned a Freedom Rally for Tuesday evening, August 31, on the steps of our City Hall, King Street, at 8 p.m. Together, we will peacefully but emphatically protest our current City Commission’s attempted government take-over of businesses in St. Augustine and its overregulation of individuals including musicians and artists. Candidate for Mayor, Donald Heine, will be the featured speaker.

Are you willing to give an hour to protect your rights! I’ll see you there!

Terry Herbert
St. Augustine, FL