Mayor-Elect Nancy Shaver scores for the “outsiders”

In a hotly contested mayoral race, the likes of which St Augustine has not seen in the past eight years, the “silent majority” went to the polls and cast their votes for mayor-elect Nancy Shaver; ordinary citizens, many of whom feel they have been treated as “outsiders”, while political cronies sipped champagne and jetted off to Spain on taxpayer-financed junkets.

The 2014 election will be written in the history books as a turning point for America’s Oldest City; it is only the second time that a woman has held the mayor’s seat, Shaver has only lived in town for the last five-years, and there is a sense in the community that the people are still in control — not the privileged few elitists who consider themselves “royalty”.

The voters embraced a belief that only an “outsider” could break up what was described as “good old boy” relationships between the defeated mayor, Joe Boles, a local attorney, and his business partners, closest influential associates, and hand-picked political minions.

For example, Historic City News exposed the recent manner in which Boles’ partner, developer Len Weeks, himself a former mayor, ignored permitting requirements and ignored warnings of city code violations that led to the otherwise avoidable collapse of the 200-year-old Don Pedro Farnell House at 62-A Spanish Street. In the aftermath, Weeks chose to resign as chairman of the Historic Architectural Review Board under threat of certain removal.

Weeks and Boles are also partners in the Florida Cracker Café building through a questionable lease approved by the city commission on July 24, 1989. The land lease was granted extensions and modified to accommodate the bank who loaned money for the building while it was the City of St Augustine who owned the land. Boles and his partner sold their interest in the restaurant years ago, but retained the lease – priced pennies-on-the-dollar to market value – without the benefit of obtaining approval of the sub-lessors by the city, as required.

The outgoing mayor, Joe Boles, was also criticized when public pressure over the failed 450th Commemoration, that some have characterized as nothing more than a city-wide money pit, resulted in a 3-2 split vote, with Commissioner Leanna Freeman and Vice-Mayor Nancy Sikes-Kline dissenting, when Boles used his two pocket votes to ram through another nearly $1 million party allowance.

The glimmer of aristocracy around City Hall is beginning to pale. Pork barrel projects are looking less certain. The days are numbered for insider contracts, like the recently terminated $78,000 consultant agreement with Boles’ political supporter, Charlie Seraphin. The citizens are taking back their government and the peaceful revolution at the ballot box is only the first step in regaining a City Hall that thinks about the residents, merchants, and local taxpayers first — not the flights of fancy of extravagant wastrels of public funds.