Guest Column: It’s November 19, 2024: What’s next?

Ed Slavin
St Augustine, Florida

It’s morning in St Johns County, America. We are happy that on Tuesday, November 19, 2024, three reform Commissioners will become a 60% majority on our St Johns County Board of County Commissioners. Clay Murphy and Ann Taylor will join reformer Krista Keating Joseph. Three cheers! As President Theodore Roosevelt would say, we’re “delighted!”

Former SJC Assistant County Administrator Jerry Thomas Cameron told new county commissioners, “Just because you got elected, doesn’t mean you gained 20 IQ points!” We expect all of our Commissioners will now walk and talk humbly, listen to the people, or else know they will face the consequences.

We have high expectations of our County Commissioners, including Commissioner Krista Keating Joseph, who is a Gold Star Mother. President John F. Kennedy’s mother, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, was also a Gold Star Mother. Her favorite Bible verse was “to whom much is given, much is expected.”

We in St Johns County are blessed to live here. I’ve lived here for 25 years. We have been given so much — nature, beauty, wealth, natural resources, and a democratic republic to secure the blessings of liberty, “a republic, if you can keep it,” as Ben Franklin said at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

Some of our previous commissioners have been perceived as “developer-directed” or “too big for their britches,” spending huge sums on political campaigns to euchre and hornswoggle the victims of overdevelopment and get-rich schemers. Past St Johns County commissions have created then sought to justify their mistakes and to conceal the crisis of overdevelopment. But, as JFK said, “any problem created by man can be solved by man.”

I find that the St Johns County Board of County Commissioners lack a welcoming spirit. Oligarchs rule and citizens are treated as third-class citizens with a sixth-rate government. Demanding special favors, wealthy real estate speculators pester, fund, and unduly influence Commissioners, like maggots on a garbage can in St Augustine. Clogged roads, overcrowded schools and other problems flow from Commissioners’ desuetude, dawdling, delay and indecision, on vital matters ranging from Comprehensive Plan to impact fees to lobbying disclosure. Former Vice President Al Gore, Jr. compared our Nation’s mishandling of environmental problems to a dysfunctional family that won’t talk about its problems.

Past Commissioners have chilled, stigmatized and coerced citizens and our staff, attempting to silence efforts to protect our history and nature. How many historic sites have been destroyed? How many forests have been clear-cut? How much wildlife has been destroyed? Enough.

In a quote by the former slave Cinque, in Steven Spielberg’s film, Amistad (1997), he asked, “What kind of place is this? Where you almost mean what you say. Where the laws almost work. How can you live like that?” So, I ask you, “What’s next?”

Would Commissioners please be so kind as to discuss and vote to:

Respect our Sunshine and Open Records laws, public participation and transparency. As James Madison wrote W.T. Barry August 4, 1822, “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” Our Florida Sunshine and Open Records laws were adopted as Article I, Section 24 of our Florida Constitution in 1992, by vote of 3.8 million Florida voters (83%).

Sadly, some local governments opposed it, and some still seek to undermine it. Sadly, some St Johns County Board of Commissioners and staff have violated these rights, enforcing a de facto oath of omertà, concealing documents from Commissioners, Board members and citizens. “Secrecy is for losers,” as the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said

Our elected and appointed officials work for us. From this day forward, they must answer all of our questions, with no condescension. No more arrogant Commissioner and staff refusals to answer oral and written questions at our annual TRIM budget hearings. Our local officials must adopt a rule to require answers to citizens’ questions during “question time” (not unlike the British Parliament) by adopting the “Mayor Gary Snodgrass rule” from the City of St Augustine Beach, requiring public commenters’ questions to be answered at or after meetings, instead of rudely ignored.

In her splendid 1550 days as Mayor of the City of St Augustine, Mayor Nancy Shaver refused to meet with zoning applicants. She varied from her rule in a case of unfairness to the owners of White’s Wharf. County commissioners should do the same. Let developers put their cases on in public, instead of in secret meetings. If a County Commissioner ever again meets ex-parte with seekers of government favors, kindly make a video record of the meeting. No more secret ex-parte meetings on overdevelopment and government contracts. The subject is always The People’s Business. It’s our money, our government and our business. “Open covenants, openly arrived at,” is our reasonable expectation of probity, as President Woodrow Wilson said of diplomacy.

St Johns County is our home, where Commissioners claimed “200 Years of Excellence” upon our Bicentennial (words drafted by County Administrator Hunter Sinclair Conrad, who never applied for his job, and never disclosed that he was an unindicted coconspirator (Clerk E) in a federal bribery indictment on the date of his hiring.

It’s our St Johns County Commission building, it’s our business and it’s our County. It does not belong to foreign corporations, foreign investors and corporate law firms. “A public office is a public trust, ” as Thomas Jefferson said. From this day forward, our St Johns County government must promptly provide all documents as requested, including those on the hostile working environment created, which Commissioners suffered and permitted, under successive County Administrators, while exhibiting fawning obeisance to wealthy zoning applicants and their lawyers.

Restore our freedom of speech, decency, dignity and respect to County Commission’s public interactions. American Attorney General Robert Francis Kennedy said in 1961, “If our Constitution had followed the style of Saint Paul, the First Amendment might have concluded—’But the greatest of these is speech.’ In the darkness of tyranny, this is the key to the sunlight. If it is granted, all doors open. If it is withheld, none.” We must preserve and protect free speech, giving our First Amendment “breathing space.”

No more unconstitutional, illegal gag orders for County employees and residents. No more Caudillos are desired or required. The hoary days of dictatorial County Administrators are over, right?

St Johns County Commissioners must start, instanter, to restore our sacred First Amendment rights to free speech, today, starting by restoring non-agenda public comment at the commencement of every single County meeting. Stop “gaveling” people for modest applause, chilling First Amendment protected activity. Stop violating citizens’ cherished free speech rights, often accompanied by archly abusing procedural rules to interrupt and rule selected citizens as being “out of order.” It is an inconvenient truth that it is our St Johns County Board of Commissioners that has too often been “out of order.” Too big for its britches, our St Johns County Board of Commissioners is a peculiar institution, too often unfeeling, unfriendly, secretive and lawbreaking. It is the other-directed St Johns County Board of Commissioners that is frequently “out of order” with its unconstitutional, illegal policies discouraging First Amendment protected public comment rights.

The Commission has never revoked or apologized for its patently illegal December 2023 censure of beloved reform Commissioner Krista Keating-Joseph found to violate the First amendment by respected Senior United States District Court Judge Harvey E. Schlessinger of the Middle District of Florida, who issued an injunction against the County.

Require, once again, accurate County Commission minutes, summarizing the subject matter of citizen concerns, with links to video. This essential information is no longer included in meeting minutes, with fair reporting inexplicably deleted from our public record of meetings. Amend rules to clarify that Commissioners treat citizens with civility and to encourage dialogue and not chill free speech.

Certain misguided St Johns County Commissioners’ haughty, hateful hauteur, bad habits and history of inane interruptions, insults, scowling, barking, hate stares, glares, eye-rolling and threats are beneath the dignity of a free people. Such unkind, uncouth, unconscionable and unethical County Commissioner actions are no way to welcome public comments. The offending Commissioners in quo never apologized. Does representing St Johns County mean never having to say you’re sorry? How about a resolution apologizing to Commissioner Joseph?

There is not even a receptionist to welcome and help direct citizens at the Administration Building. Why? There is likewise no receptionist at the Growth Management Building — just a computer! How rude. Please establish a reading room for citizens to read our public documents. We need frequent Commission meetings in the evening, to encourage more people to participate. Let freedom ring.

Require lobbying registration, full disclosure, and a ban on percentage of success “contingency fees” for lobbyists. Commissioners have never responded to the clarion call for lobbyist disclosure, and it shows. Ban contingency fees for lobbyists. No percentage fees are allowed for lobbyists in Washington, D.C. or Tallahassee. No percentage fees are allowed in criminal defense or divorce cases.

In 2016, the County Attorney recruited lobbyists to oppose a Commission lobbying registration ordinance that included a $25 annual registration fee. One commissioner damned it as “burdensome”! Require all registered lobbyists to file financial disclosures and wear County photo IDs.

It is embarrassing that we lost $786,785 to embezzlement over more than five (5) years under former Sheriff DAVID BERNARD SHOAR. It’s our government and our time and our money. With a Commission-appointed budget officer, let’s improve County government internal controls and provide a public list of them, as I requested. In response to my requests, our mismanaged county has still never provided a list of its internal controls. Why? The public must be better protected from insider threats. The County’s malfeasant auditors were poorly supervised, and the County settled its lawsuits against them only because of its own malfeasance, which included failure to include an attorney fee provision in one of their engagement letters.

Reform our budget process as we know it, beefing up internal controls and procedural safeguards, with a forensic audit of weaknesses in County internal controls. Our County budget process is deeply flawed, with few questions from Commissioners and no answers to citizen questions. The county never answered my 104 questions on the FY 2024 budget at our mandatory 2023 Truth in Millage Act (TRIM) hearings.

Our County must:

• Require detailed budget justifications for every line item. F.S. 129.021.
• Vote on budget line items when Commissioners consider our budget.
• “Turn every page,” as Pulitzer Prize winning Robert Caro said about historic research.
• Ask questions, demand answers and expect democracy.
• Designate a county budget officer. That is BoCC’s prerogative, not the job of the County Administrator or her deputy (her former boss, Jesse Dunn, Director of the Office of Management and Budget). F.S. 129.025.
• Adopt a resolution requiring Constitutional officers’ budget proposals to be presented by May 1 of each year, allowing time to discuss them in Administrator budget hearings. F.S. 129.03(2). Passage of the resolution would mean for the first time that we can discuss in detail and ask questions about tentative Sheriff, Supervisor of Elections, Clerk of Courts and Comptroller, Tax Collector and Property Appraisers budgets at our annual May budget hearings.
• Consider Zero Based Budgeting, as President Jimmy Carter supported. Don’t assume every department or office gets an increase. Some need to be cut. My late mentor, United States Department of Labor Chief Administrative Law Judge Nahum Litt, said, any government budget could be cut by 10%. Every government needs to examine every expenditure with a gimlet eye, and stop extravagant spending on what President Abraham Lincoln would have called “flubdubs.” For every spending request and every piece of legislation ask, “Is it based on need, or greed?” (As Senator Gary Hart asked his staff to evaluate every single legislative proposal as a freshman Senator in 1975). Like a good steak, our budget is well-marbled with fat. We need to enlist all of our citizens to examine our budget with a gimlet eye. It is up to all of us.
• Expose, eliminate and extirpate organizational and individual conflicts of interest. Enact a tough St Johns County Ethics Ordinance and County Ethics Commission second to none. Conflicts of interests are to be scrupulously guarded against. All conflict-of-interest laws are based upon Matthew 6:24, “A man cannot serve two masters”, which the unanimous Supreme Court decision by Chief Justice Earl Warren deemed to be both a “moral principle” and a “maxim which is especially pertinent if one of the “masters” happens to be economic self-interest.”
• We need tougher local laws, fairer public hearings and more effective enforcement to extirpate corruption, discrimination and secrecy. Initiate an anti-bribery campaign, with Public Service announcements, signs and advertising.
• Reform our Tree Protection ordinance to end deforestation and clearcutting. Commissioner Krista Keating-Joseph proposed it, but developers and their corporate-funded catty cat’s paws opposed it, ending efforts to provide a fair hearing. Only Commissioner Isaac Henry Dean spoke in support of half of it. But three developer-aligned Commissioners caterwauled along with developers and their commercial allies.
• Create, recruit, hire and inspire a strong qualified county-wide environmental and land use planning organization and staff to comply with all applicable laws and to help us preserve and protect what we know and love here, including our precious cultural and environmental heritage in what we locals like to call “God’s country.” Create a County Environmental Board with legal powers to halt or limit devious developers’ wetland-filling, wildlife-killing, deforestation, and clear-cutting.
• Preserve, protect and defend our public employee and contractor rights to report problems and remedy wrongdoing. Encourage and protect whistleblowers, to end corruption as we know it. Always hold anyone who would presume to retaliate against a whistleblower accountable. Inform employees and contractors of their rights. Adopt a County whistleblower protection policy, ordinance and resolution. Comply with collective bargaining agreements. Treat employees fairly, paying living wages. End favoritism, sexual harassment, secrecy and retaliation against ethical employee whistleblowers.
• Require “Truth in Development.” Full disclosure of scientific data and transparency in development, starting with disclosing the names of every single beneficial owner and investor in every single development project. Apply fair discovery rules and Rules of Evidence for administrative proceedings, including testimony sworn under oath and establishing citizens’ rights to question developer witnesses. Don’t allow dilatory developer “sandbagging” of citizens by withholding “expert” testimony until after citizens speak. Stop ignoring objections to hearings without oaths or valid expertise. Administrative hearings must not longer be a kabuki dance, with sandbagging and developer cat’s paws denying justice and fair hearings. Lobbyists must register. No excuses.
• Enact a one-year moratorium on residential development hearings and decisions, to allow sufficient time under Florida law so that “We, the People,” and our elected County Commissioners can work to understand the nature of our overdevelopment problem lawfully, legally, and protecting everyone’s rights to property and to honest government. Then we can adopt revised laws to protect residents and property owners and adopt rational rules.
• Reform our St Johns County Board of County Commissioners. Provide for legislative assistants for each Commissioner, unwisely ended circa 2010. Provide for five single-member County Commission districts, like the School Board has, in order to reduce the influence of developers’ Big Money and empower of citizen legislators. Add two at-large Commission seats, as we had until 1998, with only two of seven Commissioners running county-wide and the rest elected from single-member districts. Adopt a working committee system, with committees to vet budgets and development proposals before they are sent to the full Commission.
• Create a proper, lawful St Johns County Charter Review Commission to evaluate and propose possible better form of government, with greater efficiency, economy, transparency and checks and balances. Improve employee and citizen rights protections and a charter for limited government in the Sunshine. Put the Charter Review Commission’s proposals on the ballot. In 2008, then County Administrator Michael David Wanchick proposed a deeply flawed, half-baked “starter-charter,” which “We, the People” defeated twice that year on its demerits. No lawful advisory committee suggested the Charter text. Why? Oligarchs’ unsophisticated proposal would have required 20% of all County voters sign petitions to amend it. They ignored our reasoned and documented requests for a “charter of freedom,” rather than a charter that would have empowered takeovers of local city and town governments (St Augustine, St Augustine Beach and Town of Hastings) and of independent special taxing districts (Airport Authority, Mosquito Control District). We, the People, rightly defeated the bad proposed Charter twice in 2008. Charter governments in some 20 other Florida counties limit the powers of government, something Oligarchs did not want — the reason why Charter government discussion was never revived under successive ill-advised Commissioners and Administrators, 2009-date.
• Require County jobs be posted and advertised and require people apply for jobs and conform to merit protection principles. Without either attorney ever applying, St Johns County Board of Commissioners spent our money to hire a County Administrator (Hunter Sinclair Conrad, 2019-2023) and the current County Attorney (Richard Komando) who never so much as applied for their jobs. There was no background investigation, posting or advertising. St Johns County Board of Commissioners picked Conrad on November 19, 2019, upon the unexpected public firing of County Administrator Michael David Wanchick (2007-2019). Mr. Conrad submitted his resignation before being fired.
• Enough flummery, dupery and nincompoopery. It’s our County. It’s our money. It’s our government. From this day forward, all County legal jobs must be advertised in Florida Bar Journal: no excuses. County attorney applicants must submit their published and unpublished writing samples, college and law school transcripts, references, with public interviews and thorough background investigations.
• Preserve, protect and defend our history and nature. Now. Restore and revive Cultural Resources Department and protect its integrity and independence. Reinstate wrongfully eliminated Cultural Resources director, Trey Alexander Asner.
• Create an Office of Ombudsman, Chief Economist and Chief Scientist to assist citizens and taxpayers. Employ a Chief Economist and Chief Scientist to assist Commissioners in evaluating impact fees and environmental impacts. Developers present high-priced experts while the under qualified St Johns County Board of Commissioners staff live in fear of retaliation. Staff contribute little to discussions about the impacts of overdevelopment. Developers are like hucksters, telling Commissioners anything (publicly or privately) to complete the sale. Our County staff needs to provide independent expertise, instead of being like cheerleaders, pom-poms flying, arachnid apparatchik accomplices to an orgy of overdevelopment.
• Focus on protecting public health from known environmental health hazards. There is no state OSHA legal protection for public employee safety in Florida since Jeb Bush helped abolish Florida OSHA in 2000; private sector employers are covered by federal OSHA, but Florida chose to delete protection for state and local government employees. Florida should invite federal OSHA coverage for government employees.
• Enhance the powers of our SJC Clerk of Courts Inspector General, with job protections and enhanced budget, with authority to investigate any local government agency, subject to a County Charter approved by the voters.
• Reform government purchasing as we know it. Reform government contracting procedures. Report all instances of possible bid-rigging. Guard against government employees self-dealing (as with former Utilities supervisor fired for selling SCADA products to the County for years without criminal prosecution).
• Stop giving tax holidays to corporations as “incentives,” selling our soul to secretive unknown owners and investors for unknown reasons, including recently formed shell companies. Fully disclose all meetings with those who would seek tax holidays.
• Restore and revive SJC’s Intergovernmental relations committee: encourage local governments to work together to preserve and protect this magical place. Let’s encourage all of the governments in St Johns County to communicate better to solve problems like overdevelopment, sharing research and background investigations on developers.
• Support statewide legislation to revise impact fees as we know them. Stop subsidizing metastatic growth — unchecked growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of a cancer cell. Our County’s Quisling approach to developer influence is a disgrace.
• Help solve the affordable housing crisis. Consider joining federal antitrust and unfair trade practice litigation accessing root causes of skyrocketing housing costs, e.g., challenging landlords shared use of algorithms to raise prices of rental units. Allow accessory dwelling units (“mother-in-law” or garage apartments. Discuss affordable housing opportunities, including those available under F.S. 125.01055. Let’s create a Public Housing Authority to help people get access to HUD Section 8 Housing Vouchers here, instead of only after burdensome out-of-county travel.
• Revise, reform and expand Neighborhood Bill of Rights, to protect homeowners’ and renters’ reasonable investment-backed expectations under the Bert J. Harris, Jr. Private Property Protection Act.
• Support enactment of a St Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore, first proposed by then St Augustine Mayor Walter Fraser in 1939, and endorsed by the County’s Congressman and both Senators from Florida in that year. Read my October 13, 2023 statement before the St Johns County Legislative Delegation.
• Improve response to citizen requests. Enthroned, seduced and distracted by Big money campaign contributions and lack of individual staff for Commissioners, people writing Commissioners don’t get so much as an answer, breaching the standard of care and reasonable expectations of probity.
• Citizens call and e-mail Commissioners, too often without response. In person or in correspondence, citizens raise concerns about County operations damaging their property or violating their rights or both. Our County officials are doing little to remedy problems. Citizens respectfully ask for consideration of proclamations, too often without response (including proposed proclamations for Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday, Worker Memorial Day, Gay Pride and School Choice). Citizens deserve better than this. County Commissioners need their own staff to help them supervise the County Administrator, as Florida law contemplates.

In conclusion, this is an exciting week for St Johns County.

As they roll up their sleeves on the first day of their four-year terms, our two new County Commissioners and three incumbents would all do well to remember what President Jimmy Carter said in his Inaugural Address in 1977: “Let us learn together and laugh together and work together and pray together, confident that in the end we will triumph together in the right.”

The American dream endures. We must once again have full faith in our country–and in one another. I believe America can be better. We can be even stronger than before. Let our recent mistakes bring a resurgent commitment to the basic principles of our Nation, for we know that if we despise our own government, we have no future. We recall in special times when we have stood briefly, but magnificently, united. In those times no prize was beyond our grasp.

But we cannot dwell upon remembered glory. We cannot afford to drift. We reject the prospect of failure or mediocrity or an inferior quality of life for any person. Our Government must at the same time be both competent and compassionate.

We have already found a high degree of personal liberty, and we are now struggling to enhance equality of opportunity. Our commitment to human rights must be absolute, our laws fair, our national beauty preserved; the powerful must not persecute the weak, and human dignity must be enhanced.

We have learned that more is not necessarily better, that even our great Nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems. We cannot afford to do everything, nor can we afford to lack boldness as we meet the future. So, together, in a spirit of individual sacrifice for the common good, we must simply do our best.

What’s next? You tell me. It is up to us.