Proud of Florida for voting to restore voting rights for 1.4 million residents. More proof that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” By vote of 64% of Floridians. Yes we can! Yes we did!
The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.
A referendum in Florida last November ended some of the harshest voting restrictions in the nation for those with criminal records.CreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times
Image
A referendum in Florida last November ended some of the harshest voting restrictions in the nation for those with criminal records.CreditCreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times
It was restorative justice far too long in the making.
After the Civil War, Florida — like many other states in the South — barred anyone with a criminal conviction from voting. Aimed at denying freed slaves full participation in democracy, the policy affected every election in Florida from Reconstruction through 2018, when races for governor and the Senate were so close that they required recounts.
Credit for the largest enfranchisement since women’s suffrage a century ago goes to a determined advocacy campaign, which built enough support that Amendment 4 easily cleared the 60 percentthreshold needed for ratification. It went into effect on Tuesday and extended this basic right to Floridians convicted of all felonies except for murder and aggravated sexual offenses.
The sight of so many Americans eagerly registering to vote was a rare bright spot in a nation where the right to representative government is under strain from onerous ID laws and computerized gerrymandering.
Key to the success of the Florida effort was a message from activists that resonated beyond party politics and above racial resentment. Some experts say that the expansion of voting rights will help Democrats, but one of the leaders of the campaign to restore rights, Neil Volz, was a former Republican lobbyist. And while one out of five black Floridians was kept from the polls by past convictions, nearly 70 percent of those convicted of felonies in the state are not African-American, according to activists.
Over the past two decades, numerous states have scrapped laws — many passed with explicitly racist intentions — that kept citizens with criminal records from the polls. But Florida remained a stubborn holdout. Meanwhile, the number of formerly incarcerated citizens there swelled larger than the population of 11 states. That so many Americans were denied participation in representative government for so long was a stain on our democracy.
Kentucky and Iowa are now the only states where lifetime disenfranchisement laws remain on the books. In 33 states, various groups of people on probation or parole can be denied the right to vote. Only two states — Vermont and Maine — rightly impose no voting restriction based on past convictions.
It is the sanctity of the right to vote itself that helps explain the passion, and tinges of sadness, in the stories coming out of Florida.
“I feel like I am a United States citizen,” Jerry Armstrong told The Times. Mr. Armstrong was registering to vote for the first time at age 45 due to past convictions.
For 150 years, Florida’s democracy was deeply distorted — even as America, also 150 years ago, was born anew and began to make strides toward equality with the passage of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. So it was heartening to see millions of people take to the polls, repudiate a law with racist roots and give back their neighbors their full citizenship.
For more on voting in Florida:
This video, originally published in October, examined disenfranchisement in the state.
Video
3:58How to Get 1.4 Million New Voters
A November ballot measure in Florida could restore voting rights to ex-felons and forever change national politics.Published On
Racism is in the DNA of the Florida Republican Party. Here, we have a new Governor who has done some great things in his first few days in office. But we painfully remember his racist campaign dog whistle, ab initio, against Mayor Andrew Gillum, our Democratic candidate, and his spewing material falsehoods, driving under the inference about an FBI investigation.
Ron DeSantis Didn’t Expunge His Racist Record By Pardoning the Groveland Four
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is already mapping out his legacy. The former United States congressman and committed Trump disciple was sworn into office on Tuesday, but continues to nurse wounds from a bruising November election against Andrew Gillum, the black mayor of Tallahassee, whom he defeated so narrowly that a recount was required. Gillum’s most damning charge against DeSantis was that he is a racist — or more specifically, as the mayor quipped at one debate, “I’m not saying Mr. DeSantis is a racist. I’m saying the racists believe he’s a racist.” Gillum’s evidence included that DeSantis had declined to return a campaign donation from a man who called Barack Obama a “Muslim nigger” on Twitter; attended conferences alongside far-right bigots, including Milo Yiannopoulos, David Horowitz, and Sebastian Gorka; and dog whistled his way into national headlines by imploring Floridians not to “monkey this up” by electing his black opponent.
A majority of voters backed the Republican anyway, but even Senator Bernie Sanders — usually hesitant to accuse anyone of racism — characterized the election as one where “racism reared its ugly head,” adding that DeSantis was “racist and [was] doing everything [he] could to try to play whites against blacks.” These are charges the governor has rejected and, if his schedule this week is any indication, hopes to discredit now that he is in office. On Friday, DeSantis used the inaugural Clemency Board meeting of his tenure to secure a full pardon for the Groveland Four, a group of three black men and one black teenager who were accused of raping a 17-year-old white girl named Norma Padgett in 1949.
According to Gilbert King’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the case, Devil in the Grove, the story Padgett told at the time — and still maintains is true — is that the men approached her and then-husband Willie on a dark stretch of road where their car had broken down on the night of July 16. After first helping the couple, the men attacked Willie, forced Padgett into the back of a car, drove away, and raped her. Contradicting Padgett’s version of events are several key pieces of evidence, including that a medical examiner found no physical signs that she was sexually violated or otherwise brutalized — no bruising, skin breaks or tears, or indication that she was penetrated; that one of the accused, 16-year-old Charles Greenlee, was already in police custody pending an unrelated charge when the crime was alleged to have taken place; and that Greenlee and another man, Samuel Shepherd, confessed only after being severely beaten by the police.
Both Shepherd and Greenlee told their attorneys that they would not have professed guilt were it not for the officers’ pummeling (a third man, Walter Irvin, was also beaten, but did not confess). All three were convicted regardless. Irvin and Shepherd had their convictions overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1951, but Greenlee, the only one not sentenced to death because he was a minor, did not appeal his conviction. Irvin was later re-convicted after his second trial was moved to another county — but had his sentence commuted in 1955 by Governor LeRoy Collins, who decided that neither jury had proven him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The Groveland and Lake County governments apologized to all four of the accused in 2016. The Florida House of Representatives followed suit in 2017.
It can seem futile to try parsing whether a politician is acting in good faith when they pursue grand symbolic gestures like what DeSantis did on Friday. The Groveland Four are all dead now — Ernest Thomas, shot by a white mob while fleeing the Florida Panhandle days after the alleged crime; Shepherd, shot and killed in 1951 by Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, who claimed that he and Irvin had tried to escape custody; Irvin, who died on parole in 1969, 13 years after his second death sentence was commuted to life in prison; and Greenlee, who died in 2012, 50 years after being paroled in 1962. As such, any consolation derived from the pardon mainly benefits the men’s families and those who advocated on their behalf. The men themselves died under a shadow of dubious guilt, some having endured decades of physical and psychological brutality in law enforcement custody and prison. One was lynched.
This is not to say that Friday’s reversal is trivial. “It is a weight lifted, it is a cloud lifted,” said Greenlee’s daughter, Carol Greenlee Crawley, according to the Orlando Sentinel. “It’s the dignity of being a Greenlee restored, it’s the shame taken away.” But nor does it alter the near-total absence of political risk involved for DeSantis, who can now claim solidarity with an anti-racist cause despite having weaponized racism to win election less than two months prior. Perhaps the governor did act out of genuine indignation on Friday in a case where, as he articulated in December, “justice was miscarried” and “acts of evil” were done against the accused for “crimes they did not commit.” His record suggests a less noble explanation. The governor has been unabashed about accusing black men of crimes they did not commit when it was politically expedient to do so. His efforts throughout the 2018 campaign to smear Gillum as a criminal in charge of a city overrun by crime — an allegation that rested, in part, on vastly exaggerating the prevalence of murder Tallahassee — culminated in DeSantis’s repeated insistence that the Tallahassee mayor was being investigated for corruption.
Gillum’s name, it turned out, was conspicuously absent from the indictment the FBI eventually unveiled stemming from their investigation. “He got screwed,” Stephen R. Andrews, the attorney who represented the city manager when a grand jury questioned him regarding the case, told Politico. For DeSantis, pardoning four dead black men whose innocence has already been affirmed by past governors and legislative bodies is the equivalent of Republicans praising Martin Luther King, Jr., on his birthday while maintaining power through anti-black voter suppression. Plausible deniability is a vital asset for the racist politician navigating a political environment where racism, though broadly sanctioned, is still seen as impolitic. Friday gifts the governor with a fair bit of that plausible deniability. But the methods he used to gain power remain inseparable from the result.
NPR story on one of the heroic St. Augustine Movement, Ms. Mary Peabody of Massachusetts, here with Sheriff Lawrence O. Davis, later suspended for corruption by Governor Claude Kirk and removed by 44-2 vote of the Florida Senate, a datum misrepresented on the website of Sheriff DAVID SHOAR, who falsely states that corrupt racist Davis was "exonerated" by the Florida Senate.
Fifty years ago, St. Augustine, Fla., was a quiet, palm-fringed resort town with pastel Spanish colonial buildings. There was warm weather, and the white sand beaches off the Atlantic coast lured thousands of tourists every year. There was also a historic part of downtown that had a building often referred to as "The Old Slave Market," with good reason: For several decades, that had been the building's purpose.
Racial tension in St. Augustine had been bubbling. The town lacked public amenities for blacks — much of the area was segregated. And for years, there had been a growing civil rights movement that had been met with increasingly violent resistance from local whites.
Despite that, it was clear black pushback was growing. As Congress debated passing a civil rights act, black leaders wanted to increase the pressure on elected representatives by highlighting racial injustice and violence in various parts of the country.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. sent a telegram to Mary Peabody's son, Massachusetts Gov. Endicott Peabody. King thanked the governor for the sacrifices of his mother, Mary, and for her willingness to be jailed for the St. Augustine sit-in.
Courtesy of the Civil Rights Library of St. Augustine
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference put out a call for white students in the North to skip the beach on their spring break and come to Florida to protest segregation. Inviting young white people to push for civil rights would bring attention to places where the national media had ignored dramatic racial injustices.
To further increase the pressure, King's deputy, Hosea Williams, visited Boston to see if any elderly Bostonians would volunteer. Williams believed the image of grandmothers being ushered off to jail would be a sure bet in gaining national publicity for places that had been in the shadows. One of Williams' volunteers turned out to be 72-year-old Mary Parkman Peabody, wife of the former bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York and mother of Endicott Peabody, then-governor of Massachusetts.
Historian David Colburn, professor emeritus at the University of Florida, said the SCLC knew St. Augustine was preparing to celebrate its 400th birthday, and decided to hijack the tourist message with a civil rights message.
"It was clear that they were trying to mobilize a civil rights army to come to St. Augustine to lead demonstrations against the segregation policies of the community," Colburn says.
The late governor's brother, Samuel Peabody, says his mother had been involved in what she called "justice issues" for several years.
"She never had a doubt about her opinions, and she stood up," says Peabody, a retired New York businessman. "She was articulate about them at all times."
Mary Peabody poses in the St. Johns County Jail on a return visit to St. Augustine, Fla.
Courtesy of the Civil Rights Library of St. Augustine
The last week of March 1964, Mary Peabody and a few other powerful women flew down to St. Augustine. With members of the SCLC, they tried to attend services at Trinity Episcopal Church. The rector locked the doors.
They attempted to go to several local restaurants, and were turned away. Then the group decided to try for lunch at the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge —which just happened to have a group of reporters staying there.
Mary Peabody, says Colburn, was clear about the probable consequences: "She even ran into an old friend on the street in St. Augustine as they were going to the hotel restaurant, and was asked what she was doing there and said, 'Well, I'm about to get arrested!'"
Which was true. She spent two nights in the local jail before her youngest son, Malcolm, was allowed to bail her out. Samuel Peabody says he got word a week later, when he returned from a trip abroad:
"I was not told about it at all. What surprised me was I saw my mother on the front page of every newspaper in the country!" he recalls. "Or at least every newspaper where I was at the time." (Southern newspapers were the exception, for obvious reasons.) The picture of Mary Peabody, with a proper handbag and pearls, her white hair topped by an ever-present hat, made national news.
It was a turning point.
Black St. Augustine residents had been working to break segregation for years before Mary Peabody's arrival, but her presence in March 1964 made their struggles visible. Malcolm Peabody says his mother knew her job wasn't the same as black local protesters, and was aware she played a very specific role:
"She did not face the danger that so many of them did, but the fact that she was able to generate the publicity made her special."
That publicity was a catalyst for other demonstrations soon after, some of them quite violent. The St. Augustine Movement would become known as one of the most critical — and until recently, one of the least-known — campaigns in the civil rights history.
1. Good editorial, good actions by Gov. Ronald Dion DeSantis. He's acting to restore integrity to government. Impressed. 2. I am especially Impressed by Governor's suspension of Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel and Okaloosa County School Supt. Mary Beth Jackson under Florida Constitution, Art. IV, Sec 7 (see full text down below) What do you reckon? 3. Action Alert: Please ask Gov. DeSantis to order an independent forensic audit and investigation of Sheriff David Shoar, then suspend him under Art. IV, Sec 7. Thank you. 4. The $700,000 embezzlement by Shoar's Finance Director requires a Grand Jury. So does the September 2, 2010 homicide of Michelle O'Connell and the ensuing nearly nine year coverup. 5. Here's what our Florida Constitution, Art. IV, Sec. 7, says about our Governor's power to suspend Sheriff Shoar: SECTION 7. Suspensions; filling office during suspensions.— (a) By executive order stating the grounds and filed with the custodian of state records, the governor may suspend from office any state officer not subject to impeachment, any officer of the militia not in the active service of the United States, or any county officer, for malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, or commission of a felony, and may fill the office by appointment for the period of suspension. The suspended officer may at any time before removal be reinstated by the governor. (b) The senate may, in proceedings prescribed by law, remove from office or reinstate the suspended official and for such purpose the senate may be convened in special session by its president or by a majority of its membership.... (c). (snip--section re: elected municipal officer indicted for crime may be suspended from office ....)
RECORD EDITORIAL: DeSantis comes out swinging Posted Jan 13, 2019 at 2:01 AM
Rumors flew after former Gov. Rick Scott left in the middle of inauguration events for Gov. Ron DeSantis. Scott’s people said he needed to get ready for his own swearing in. But those close to both say it was much more about swearing — period.
Seems Scott and DeSantis had a tiff that led to some behind-the-scenes verbal fisticuffs. Now we have a good idea of what happened and why.
DeSantis has come out of his first week in office swinging, and Rick Scott took much of it on the jaw.
Scott, you’ll remember tried everything to name three new Supreme Court Justices. The courts intervened and DeSantis gets to do the picking.
Scott also used his last days in office to pay back political debts in the form of appointments to boards and committees. The News Service of Florida reports Scott made 84 political appointments the two days prior to DeSantis’ inauguration.
To his credit, DeSantis recalled all 84 appointments. He said some may stick, but it’s a good bet the vast majority will not. This is in-your-face politics — or is it a turn away from political politics?
One of the appointees was Carlos Beruff, a South Florida developer known for dirty dealings and contempt for environmental regulation. He’s currently facing an ethics complaint for actions on the Southwest Florida Management District. One of his developments is charged with moving an eagle’s nest — another for destroying a county-owned conservation area.
His appointment was to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Committee. Imagine a bigger joke ... or a more up-yours act for a retreating Rick Scott.
DeSantis was also quick to tackle the growing environmental woes of Lake Okeechobee and its drainage to the Gulf and Atlantic — the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie Rivers respectively.
One of his first bombshells, and likely to become one of the more remembered, was this week’s request for the resignation of the entire South Florida Water Management District.
It recently approved a lease agreement with sugar company Florida Crystals on land to be set aside for the new reservoir OK’d by the legislature in 2017 — 16,000 acres for a nearly million-dollar annual lease. The issue was posted on the SFWMD agenda the night before approval.
And that’s only the last travesty of the group.
Who was on that board? All eight members were Rick Scott appointees.
DeSantis has given an early nod of approval for House Bill 239 which would set up a total ban of fracking in Florida.
He’s going full guns for the environment, or at least appearing so. What we may take from all this is DeSantis is moving in a direction the Republican legislature has handily avoided. He’s making wary friends in both the state Democratic Party and environmental groups.
His committee recalls and outright firings also point to Rick Scott’s pandering until his last day — attempting to leave the state infested with his lapdogs and cronies, all in great shape to help him rule from Washington, D.C.
What his quieter critics are now hoping to see in his vowed fight to restore the everglades (he wants an initial OK of $2.5 billion for projects) is he begins to hold Big Sugar accountable for its part of the muck and the mess, rather than putting the cleanup completely on the shoulders of the taxpayers.
Some of the blame for Lake Okeechobee mess is, as Big Sugar says, the fault of private septic tanks. DeSantis’ team is already looking at some type of matching fund program for conversion to sewer systems.
It’s a great start for both the environment and a little partisan healing. We watch it unfold with cautious optimism.
Before entertaining a half million dollar expenditure on acquisition of 91-93 Coquina Avenue, the City of St. Augustine needs::
a general policy of neutral application on land acquisitions for climate adaptation.
answers to Open Records requests
City Manager John Patrick Regan, P.E. is putting the cart before the horse, again.
-----Original Message----- From: Ed Slavin Sent: Sun, Jan 13, 2019 10:28 pm Subject: Request No. 2019-45: City of St. Augustine policies
Dear Ms. Galambos: -----Original Message----- From: Ed Slavin To: dgalambos Sent: Sun, Jan 13, 2019 10:28 pm Subject: Request No. 2019-45: City of St. Augustine policies
Dear Ms. Galambos:
A. Please send me all City of St. Augustine policies concerning:
City's Data Quality Act compliance and adaptation for City ordinance on data-based decisions
City administrative practices and procedures and Comprehensive Plan provisions for designating Adaptation Areas under the 2011 Community Planning Act
City acquisition or disposition of land to cope with:
nuisance flooding
expected levels of global ocean level rise, 2019-2100
City plans for intergovernmental cooperation and planning on ocean level rise and environmental issues
City purchasing practices
City land acquisition procedures
City real estate management rules
City ethics officer
City ombuds process
City efforts to increase transparency,
City regulation of organizational conflict of interest
City procedures for disclosure of names of Commissioner and staff professional clients,
City requirements for disclosure of all investors or beneficial owners of projects, businesses or real estate proposed for:
City zoning hearings
City leases,
City purchases.
B. Please place ALL City policies, on any subject, on the website.
Thank you.
With kindest regards, I am,
Sincerely yours,
Ed Slavin
904-377-4998
www.cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com
www.edslavin.com
A. Please send me all City of St. Augustine policies concerning: City's Data Quality Act compliance and adaptation for City ordinance on data-based decisions City administrative practices and procedures and Comprehensive Plan provisions for designating Adaptation Areas under the 2011 Community Planning Act City acquisition or disposition of land to cope with: nuisance flooding expected levels of global ocean level rise, 2019-2100 City plans for intergovernmental cooperation and planning on ocean level rise and environmental issues City purchasing practices City land acquisition procedures City real estate management rules City ethics officer City ombuds process City efforts to increase transparency, City regulation of organizational conflict of interest City procedures for disclosure of names of Commissioner and staff professional clients, City requirements for disclosure of all investors or beneficial owners of projects, businesses or real estate proposed for: City zoning hearings City leases, City purchases. B. Please place ALL City policies, on any subject, on the website.
Thank you.
With kindest regards, I am, Sincerely yours, Ed Slavin 904-377-4998 www.cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com www.edslavin.com
ef022b201614c8ff628e5c82dd4b3c1c.jpg
-----Original Message----- From: Ed Slavin Sent: Sat, Jan 12, 2019 10:59 am Subject: Request No. 2019-38: Samuel Troy Blevins e-mails, 2018-2019
Dear Mr. Regan, Vice Mayor Freeman and Ms. Galambos, et al.: 1. Please send me all e-mails between the City of St. Augustine, City Manager John Regan, Public Works Director Michael Cullum, Vice Mayor Leanna Sophia Amaru Freeman, et al., and Mr. Samuel Troy Blevins, 2018-2019. 2. If you claim any constitutional or statutory privilege, please provide a privilege log/Vaughn index listing the particular document(s) and the legal basis of such assertion(s), so as to allow for City Commissioners or state or federal courts to rule on such assertions. 3. Please feel free to call if you have questions -- this data is essential to a robust and uninhibited discussion of what the City Manager deems an "Item of Great Public Importance," item 7.B.2. on the January 14, 2019 City Commission meeting:
Items of Great Public Importance 7.B.1. Program update for the ongoing Resiliency, Adaptation and Sustainability Program. (M. Cullum, Director, Public Works). 7.B.2. Discussion of potential Coquina Avenue land acquisition. (M. Cullum, Director, Public Works). Thank you. With kindest regards, I am, Sincerely yours, Ed Slavin 904-377-4998 www.cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com www.edslavin.com
-----Original Message----- From: Ed Slavin Sent: Sat, Jan 12, 2019 2:37 pm Subject: Re: Request No. 2019-39: Coquina Avenue 2030 Sea Level Rise Maps -- Data Quality Act and Fiduciary Duty Questions
Dear Mr. Regan, Ms. Lopez, Mr. Cullum, Ms. Galambos, Mayor Shaver, Vice Mayor Freeman, Commissioners Horvath, Sikes-Kline and Valdes, et al.: 1. Please send me any documents showing City consideration or distribution to Commissioners and Davis Shores neighbors of these two 2030 Sea Level Rise Maps in connection with the proposed purchase of the property at 91-93 Coquina Avenue:
2. Please share copies of these two maps with journalists and residents attending the January 14, 2019 City Commission meeting. 3. Please put these maps on tv when I speak at the podium. 4. Please put City or other staff experts under oath. 5. Please allow cross-examination of City staff by residents on data quality and fiduciary duty issues. 6. Please vote to allow full, fair robust and uninhibited public comment after what the City Manager deems an "Item of Great Public Importance," item 7.B.2., on the January 14 meeting agenda:
Items of Great Public Importance 7.B.1. Program update for the ongoing Resiliency, Adaptation and Sustainability Program. (M. Cullum, Director, Public Works). 7.B.2. Discussion of potential Coquina Avenue land acquisition. (M. Cullum, Director, Public Works). 7. Failing that, please vote to take item 7.B.2 off the agenda as not ready for prime time discussion or vote.
Thank you. With kindest regards, I am, Sincerely yours, Ed Slavin 904-377-4998 www.cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com www.edslavin.com
-----Original Message----- From: Ed Slavin Sent: Sat, Jan 12, 2019 10:43 am Subject: Request No. 2019-39A: Leanna Freeman client list
Dear Vice Mayor Freeman: Please send me your client list. Thank you. With kindest regards, I am, Sincerely yours, Ed Slavin 904-377-4998 www.cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com www.edslavin.com
Dear Mr. Regan, Vice Mayor Freeman and Ms. Galambos, et al.: Please send me any background investigation of Samuel Troy Blevins in connection with attempted sale of Coquina Street swamp land in connection with robust and uninhibited discussion of what the City Manager deems an "Item of Great Public Importance," item 7.B.2. on the January 14, 2019 City Commission meeting:
Items of Great Public Importance
7.B.1. Program update for the ongoing Resiliency, Adaptation and Sustainability Program. (M. Cullum, Director, Public Works).
7.B.2. Discussion of potential Coquina Avenue land acquisition. (M. Cullum, Director, Public Works).
Thank you. With kindest regards, I am, Sincerely yours, Ed Slavin 904-377-4998 www.cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com www.edslavin.com
-----Original Message----- From: Ed Slavin To: patti.kight ; legalpublicrecords Sent: Sat, Jan 12, 2019 2:49 pm Subject: Request No. 2019-41: Samuel Troy Blevins DBPR file, license no. SL3274236
Dear Ms. Kight and Ms. Smith: Please send me the DBPR file on Samuel Troy Blevins, real estate sales associate license no. SL3274236. Thank you. With kindest regards, I am, Sincerely yours, Ed Slavin 904-377-4998 www.cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com www.edslavin.com
-----Original Message----- From: Ed Slavin Sent: Sat, Jan 12, 2019 3:09 pm Subject: Request No. 2019-42: Ethics and Organizational Conflict of Interest Review of City of St. Augustine Vice Mayor's proposed Coquina Avenue land acquisition
Dear Mr. Regan, Ms. Lopez, Mr. Cullum, Ms. Galambos, Mayor Shaver, Vice Mayor Freeman, Commissioners Horvath, Sikes-Kline and Valdes, President Suskauer, Chair Scott, Ms. Kight, Ms. Smith, Mr. Anderson, Ms. Doss, and Ms. Stillman, et al.: 1. Please send me any documents showing City of St. Augustine, Florida Bar, DBPR, Florida Real Estate Commission or Florida Ethics Commission ethics and organizational conflict of interest review concerning proposed City purchase of the property at 91-93 Coquina Avenue what the City Manager deems an "Item of Great Public Importance," item 7.B.2., on the January 14, 2019 meeting agenda:
Items of Great Public Importance 7.B.1. Program update for the ongoing Resiliency, Adaptation and Sustainability Program. (M. Cullum, Director, Public Works). 7.B.2. Discussion of potential Coquina Avenue land acquisition. (M. Cullum, Director, Public Works).
2. Please include:
a list and analysis of all of real estate sales associate Mr. Samuel Troy Blevins' consulting, lobbying, real estate or other clients,
a list and analysis of all of the law or mediation clients of Vice Mayor Leanna Sophia Amaru Freeman, Esq., and
legal analysis of potential ethics violations or conflicts of interest under Florida Bar, DBPR, FREC, and Florida Ethics Commission or other rules, laws, opinions and decisions.
Thank you. With kindest regards, I am, Sincerely yours, Ed Slavin 904-377-4998 www.cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com www.edslavin.com
-----Original Message----- From: Ed Slavin Sent: Sun, Jan 13, 2019 8:22 pm Subject: Request No. 2019-44: 91-93 Coquina Avenue MSBU or MSTU Funding
Dear Mr. Regan, Ms. Lopez, Mr. Cullum, Mr. Grant, Ms. Galambos, Mayor Shaver, Vice Mayor Freeman, Commissioners Horvath, Sikes-Kline and Valdes, et al.: 1. Please provide the documents on any City staff research on a special ad valorem property tax assessment of neighboring properties and MSTU and MSBU funding for the proposed purchase of the property at 91-93 Coquina Avenue. 2. If none exists, please: A. provide the documents explaining whatever possessed City staff to propose spending without discussing MSTU and MSBU funding, as on dredging to benefit particular property owners, and B. kindly provide a memo on MSTU/MSBU funding at or before the January 14, 2019 meeting. 3. Failing such a memo and financing research, kindly take item 7B2 off the agenda as not ready for prime time. Thank you! With kindest regards, I am, Sincerely yours, Ed Slavin 904-377-4998 www.cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com www.edslavin.com
As if floor-planned by Republicans and their Russian disinformation allies, Confederate monument and memorial fixation helped cost good Democrats a Senate seat and the positions of Governor, Attorney General and CFO in the Florida Cabinet.
Andrew Gillum and other Democrats were misguided, costing votes. Even though Mayor Gillum wise distanced himself from Gainesville minister Rev. Ronald Rawls, Jr., the contretemps helped drive away voters. Call Rawls what he is: an undercover Republican.
From The New York Times, a perhaps overly pessimistic but sobering account:
Stung by Florida Midterm Losses, Democrats See a Swing State Drifting Away
Democrats in Florida narrowly lost races for the Senate and for governor in November, signaling the state’s move toward becoming more reliably Republican.CreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times
Image
Democrats in Florida narrowly lost races for the Senate and for governor in November, signaling the state’s move toward becoming more reliably Republican.CreditCreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times
PEMBROKE PINES, Fla. — After a painful midterm election for Florida Democrats that showed this crucial swing state drifting away from them, a group of party activists gathered at a Cuban restaurant last month to receive some bitter medicine — and a sober warning — to go with their croquettes and plantain chips.
Democrats started organizing Latino voters too late, didn’t tailor their message for an increasingly diverse community and ultimately took Latino support for granted, a Florida pollster told about 50 members of the Democratic Hispanic Caucus of Broward County.
Democrats will lose again in 2020 if they don’t move swiftly to win over Hispanics, the pollster, Eduardo Gamarra, told the group. “You just need to start now,” he said.
With the swearing-in last Tuesday of two newly elected Republican leaders, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Senator Rick Scott, Florida has become a more reliably red political bastion, making the path to Electoral College victory that much tougher for the 2020 Democratic nominee.
ADVERTISEMENT
For Republicans, Florida stands out as the best political news from an otherwise grim year, a show of strength in a state that has voted for every presidential winner since 1992 and seems to be growing more favorable to their party at a moment when demographic changes are lifting Democrats elsewhere. The successful courting of up-for-grabs Hispanics, the surge of transplanted senior voters, the solidifying support in conservative North Florida: All illustrate why this prized battleground state is tilting to the right.
As for Democrats, they remain just as shellshocked as they were after Election Day, when it became clear that Bill Nelson, the state’s longtime senator, and Andrew Gillum, the electrifying young mayor of Tallahassee, had lost by exceedingly close margins. As of Tuesday, there was still only one Democrat in statewide office.
“We just live in a red state here,” said Alex Sink, a former Democratic state official who once narrowly lost a bid for governor. “I think it’s just tilted toward the Republicans now, and I hate to say that.”
The question looming over the state going into 2020 is the same one Democrats are wrestling with elsewhere: How can the party narrow its losses with voters who are older — and in many cases white — without alienating younger, nonwhite voters?
What is so agonizing for Democrats is that 2018 did little to clarify the best path. The party put forward Mr. Gillum, a 39-year-old black progressive, and Mr. Nelson, a 76-year-old white moderate who had been in elected office for nearly half a century. Mr. Nelson lost by about 10,000 votes and Mr. Gillum didn’t fare much worse, losing by about 32,000 votes.
ADVERTISEMENT
In other words, the party pursued two differing approaches in the same state and the same year — nominating a progressive who could mobilize voters difficult to turn out in midterms as well as a moderate who would appear more amenable to persuadable voters — and both failed.
That has done little to extinguish the intraparty debate, after a banner year for Democrats nationally, when they gained 40 House seats and seven governorships amid a backlash against President Trump.
Some moderates, including Ms. Sink, say flatly that Democrats would have won the governorship had they nominated former Representative Gwen Graham, who narrowly lost to Mr. Gillum in the primary. “What would they have pinned on her?” asked Ms. Sink, alluding to Mr. Gillum’s left-wing politics and to an F.B.I. investigation into potential corruption in public real estate development in Tallahassee under Mr. Gillum.
More broadly, the pragmatic wing of the party argues that the only way to win in such a dead-center state is to promote consensus-oriented candidates who can limit Republican margins in Florida’s rural and exurban areas.
Gov. Ron DeSantis and his wife, Casey, arrived for his inauguration ceremony in Tallahassee on Tuesday.CreditLynne Sladky/Associated Press
Image
Gov. Ron DeSantis and his wife, Casey, arrived for his inauguration ceremony in Tallahassee on Tuesday.CreditLynne Sladky/Associated Press
Ms. Graham said the results last year made it clear that “you have to have a candidate who can make a difference in areas where having a D behind your name makes people suspicious.”
Mr. Nelson, the recently ousted Democratic senator, says he has a preferred 2020 candidate, who he thinks might turn things around: former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“I would say of the whole crowd, I think Biden would have the best chance in Florida,” Mr. Nelson said of the 2020 field, allowing that he has encouraged his former colleague to run and believes he would be perceived “as moderate enough.”
ADVERTISEMENT
But these sorts of assessments make progressives want to pull their hair out.
Pointing to the near-identical results, they argue that many of the state’s conservative-leaning voters made little distinction between Mr. Gillum and Mr. Nelson. Mr. Gillum’s supporters also note that he improved upon the losses of the last two Democratic nominees for governor, who were both white.
“He got closer than anybody else did,” said State Senator Oscar Braynon II, a Miami-area Democrat, pointing to how African-American turnout spiked from the last race for governor and suggesting no other candidate could have done that.
If the Democrats’ challenges in Florida are difficult to resolve, they are easy enough to diagnose.
Florida is a microcosm of the country — and some of what is dogging Democrats in the state reflects the party’s broader challenges.
“This is not a progressive state,” said Philip Levine, the former Miami Beach mayor who also ran unsuccessfully for governor. “And that, in my opinion, is representative of the state of our country today. Florida is America.”
Florida’s rural white voters, as elsewhere, have abandoned their ancestral allegiances and become reliable Republicans.
At the same time, Fox News-watching seniors from the Northeast and Midwest are flooding the state’s retirement communities. They can be counted on to vote regularly, and they are increasingly supporting Republicans.
“You have a lot of retirees who reminisce about their childhoods every time they hear Donald Trump say ‘Make America Great Again,’” said Representative Darren Soto, an Orlando Democrat. “And they vote in a higher percentage than anybody else.”
ADVERTISEMENT
These transplants descending on Central Florida, the Gulf Coast, the Panhandle and parts of the Atlantic Coast run the socioeconomic gamut but share the same Republican loyalties. For example, two of the three counties with the strongest turnout in November were retiree hubs with notably different profiles.
The party’s best-performing county in the state was Sumter, the Central Florida enclave that is home to the Villages retirement community and its thousands of golf cart-driving, middle-class seniors. But turnout was nearly as strong in Collier County, a more well-heeled community on the gulf that includes Naples.
Mr. Gillum and Mr. Nelson both received less than 35 percent of the vote in Collier County and less than 30 percent in Sumter County. These voters have little connection to state politics, are largely grounded in national issues and are overwhelmingly supportive of Mr. Trump.
Mr. Nelson still sounded in near disbelief weeks after his loss, which he attributed to Mr. Scott’s self-financing and the faulty design of the Broward County ballot, which all but hid the Senate race on a bottom corner of the page.
People protested Mr. DeSantis as he was sworn in on Tuesday.CreditLynne Sladky/Associated Press
Image
People protested Mr. DeSantis as he was sworn in on Tuesday.CreditLynne Sladky/Associated Press
But he seemed particularly anguished as he recounted losing the county where he grew up.
“We only got 43 percent,” he said of Brevard County, contending that many there were not aware of his roots or what he had done for nearby Cape Canaveral.
Mr. Nelson recalled setting up a press round table at a local restaurant with a former NASA administrator who was supporting his campaign. When his staff arrived, he said, the manager on duty was so rude they decided to move the event elsewhere.
“He was just a Trump guy,” said Mr. Nelson, lamenting the state and country’s drift toward what he called political “tribalism.”
ADVERTISEMENT
More unique to Florida is the Republican Party’s success at cutting deeply into the Democrats’ share of the Latino vote.
Hispanic voters in Florida are more ideologically diverse than elsewhere in the country, and Democrats have lagged behind Republicans in understanding the nuances of these voters. According to a postelection survey conducted by Mr. Scott’s campaign, which courted the bloc relentlessly, he won 48 percent of the Latino vote.
He and Mr. DeSantis both broadened the traditional Republican pitch to Cubans — that they represent the party of freedom — to woo more recent Central and South American immigrants who have also fled authoritarian regimes. And Mr. DeSantis used Mr. Gillum’s support from Senator Bernie Sanders to label him a “socialist,” which has a more sinister connotation with these more recent émigrés than with many Americans.
Beyond Hispanics, Florida Republicans have long outperformed Democrats in their organizing efforts, especially when it comes to mobilizing reliably conservative voters in off-year elections. The party has had a virtual stranglehold on state government for more than two decades, giving it an advantage when it comes to redistricting, fund-raising from special interests and creating a farm system of new candidate talent.
Democrats have not won the governor’s mansion since 1994. The only Democrat in statewide office is Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, whose election represented one of the few bright spots for Florida Democrats this year, in addition to a ballot measure restoring voting rights to ex-felons.
Ms. Fried’s success offered Democrats a few clues for how to win in the state: She ran on legalizing medical marijuana, gun control and addressing Florida’s toxic algae. And Ms. Fried spent the last 24 hours of her race in a decidedly unusual region for a Democrat: Florida’s deep-red Panhandle.
“There are so many issues that transcend partisan politics, and too many times we all get into our pigeonholes of what we’re supposed to say and what we can get behind,” she said.
ADVERTISEMENT
Last month, the local party leaders hosted Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, during Art Basel Miami Beach, one of the year’s biggest events. Over lunch at Joe’s Stone Crab, Democrats made the case for bringing the party’s 2020 convention to Miami, acknowledging they could use the boost, according to Dan Gelber, the current Miami Beach mayor.
“Our toast tends to fall butter side down,” he said.
Few Democrats know that better than the veteran Hispanic activists who gathered in Broward County a few days later to listen to Dr. Gamarra, a professor at Florida International University who studies public opinion among Latinos.
“It’s the same thing over and over and over again,” said Maurice A. Ferré, who served as Miami’s first Hispanic mayor from 1973 to 1985. The Democratic Party, he said, “feels that they can turn the switch on just a couple of months before.’’
Well, it never worked that way,” he said, “and it never will.”
A version of this article appears in print on of the New York edition with the headline: Democrats Seek Best Lure as Florida Drifts Away. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Veritable basket of deplorables. Every good Christian must renounce these ninnies, boobies and misanthropes.
By Brooke Sopelsa
The U.S. Senate last month unanimously passed a bill that would explicitly make lynching a federal crime. Not everyone, however, is pleased with passage of the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act.
Liberty Counsel, an evangelical nonprofit that opposes gay rights, and its chairman, Mat Staver, are taking issue with the bill’s inclusion of LGBTQ people.
Founder and Chairman of the Liberty Counsel Mat Staver, right, speaks during live nativity scene outside of the Supreme Court in Washington on December 12, 2018.Zach Gibson / Getty Images file
"The old saying is once that camel gets the nose in the tent, you can't stop them from coming the rest of the way in," Staver said in an interview with conservative Christian news outlet OneNewsNow. “This is a way to slip it in under a so-called anti-lynching bill, and to then to sort of circle the wagon and then go for the juggler [sic] at some time in the future."
Staver told OneNewsNow that his organization, which has been labeled an anti-LGBTQ “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is lobbying lawmakers in the House to have them remove the bill’s “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” language before taking a vote.
Similarly, the group encouraged Congress in November to remove language about "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" discrimination from a trade agreement with Mexico and Canada.
Liberty Counsel did not immediately respond to NBC News' request for comment.
The anti-lynching bill, introduced in June by the Senate’s three black members — Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.— applies to lynchings motivated by a victim’s “actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.”
In a statement released shortly after the bill’s unanimous Senate passage on Dec. 19, Booker called it “an emotional and historic day.”
“For over a century, members of Congress have attempted to pass some version of a bill that would recognize lynching for what it is: a bias-motivated act of terror. And for more than a century, and more than 200 attempts, this body has failed,” Booker stated. “We have righted that wrong and taken corrective action that recognizes this stain on our country’s history.”
The bill notes that at least 4,742 people, mainly African-Americans, were reportedly lynched in the U.S. from 1882 to 1968.
Last year, I contacted St. Johns County Tourist Development Commission Executive Director Tara Meeks about how to use bed tax money to reopen the Castillo de San Marcos. No response. TDC meets today at the St. Johns County Administration Building Auditorium a/k/a 'Taj Mahal." Next meeting is in March? County administrators deserve to be questioned about why they don't care about the quality of the tourist experience and don't care about the low wages paid our tourism workers. The spectacle of our National Park Service rangers being unpaid and our world class history being closed deserves attention. Our NPS park rangers are the best tourism workers in town We have their backs and our government officials must speak out in their support. Now. Never again. As Dr. King said, "Our lives begin to end the moment we stop caring about the things that matter."
More coverage by POLITICO on the Florida Senate's toxic hostile working environment, in which former Senate Appropriations Committee Jack Latvala's misconduct resulted in a $900,000 settlement, after the Senate filed a SLAPP litigation against U.S. EEOC.
From POLITICO:
The rules were crafted by state Senate President Bill Galvano, a Bradenton Republican.
Senate Democrats don't want to talk about new rules criticized by sexual harassment experts
TALLAHASSEE — Most of Florida’s Senate Democrats aren't talking about their support for new state Senate rules that raised concerns with sexual harassment experts, and some leaders briefed on the rules don’t appear to know exactly what they voted on.
POLITICO asked all 17 state Senate Democrats why they supported the changes. Only five responded and just one gave a direct answer. Michelle DeMarco, communications director for the Senate Democrats, acknowledged that she had received questions from POLITICO, but never responded.
The silence from the caucus, including its leaders, comes in the wake of a sweeping rewrite of the process that governs potential misconduct investigations, including those related to harassment. Those changes were quickly passed last month during the chamber’s post-election organizational session. Rules changes, which are proposed by new presiding officers, are often viewed as purely procedural in nature and generally get approved quickly.
This year, the Senate used the opportunity to propose a significant overhaul of how it handles rules complaints filed against senators.
The changes apply to any rule complaints, but they were crafted in the continuing aftermath of rules complaints that helped force the resignation last year of former state Sen. Jack Latvala (R-Clearwater) after two sexual misconduct investigations.
In one of those cases, an outside special master recommended that quid pro quo allegations against Latvala be turned over to law enforcement. They were, but charges were never brought. Under the new rules, rules complaints would no longer have to be turned over to a special master; the rules open up the possibility that such complaints could go through two select committees appointed by the Senate president without an outside investigation.
Last week, some sexual harassment experts reviewed the new rules and expressed concern with those changes, saying they couldpresent a challenge to victims who want to use the Senate rules complaint process.
The rules were crafted by state Senate President Bill Galvano, a Bradenton Republican. He had Rules Committee Staff Director John Phelps brief Senate Democratic Leader Audrey Gibson and Sen. José Javier Rodríguez, a Miami Democrat and Harvard Law School graduate who is the caucus’ point person on rules issues.
Galvano said the new rules were designed to “avoid ambiguity,” and that there is an option for two committees because each one will now have a clearer role in the rules complaint process.
It’s rare for members of the majority party to publicly challenge their Senate president, but Democrats also refused to give an opinion on the rules changes when asked.
Gibson said she pushed for an option to have closed committee hearings to protect the privacy of sexual conduct investigations, which is part of the new rules. But she also originally told POLITICO it was “not my understanding” that two committees appointed by the president could be used, rather than an outside investigation, under the new rules.
After additional questions, she later said she wants a process that requires that outside review. “I believe in a process that includes an outside special master/investigation,” Gibson said in a text message to POLITICO. “Thank you.”
She did not return several follow-up questions about why she supported new rules that don’t require an outside investigation, if she feels like she was misled when being briefed on the rules, or whether she had read them or simply relied on Phelps’ briefing.
Rodríguez initially told POLITICO that the new rules, which now include the option of going through two select committees, don’t “add an extra layer" to the process. He did not respond to multiple follow-up questions seeking clarity on his original answer.
State Sen. Linda Stewart (D-Orlando) was the only caucus member to directly answer questions about her support for the new rules. She said “for now yes” when asked if she supports the changes.
“My understanding is it gives more power of review and assignment to the president, but does not take special master out of process,” she said.
Last month, state Sen. Lauren Book (D-Plantation) told POLITICO she thought the rules were more comprehensive, and thought they were a “step in the right direction.” She plans on filing a bill this session to change state government’s sexual harassment policies.
State Sen. Victor Torres (D-Orlando) said he had no comment on the rules changes and referred questions to Gibson and Rodríguez.
POLITICO sent at least one request for comment to the other 13 Senate Democrats, none of whom responded.
Katie Betta, a Galvano spokesperson, said that no Democrats expressed concerns about the rules changes, and that each change suggested by Democrats was included before the rules were passed by the 40-person chamber.
“Every suggestion made by Leader Gibson and Senator Rodriguez was incorporated,” Betta said. “The final draft was emailed to all of the Senators in advance of the Organization Session. Senators were asked to review the draft and to contact the president ... if they had any questions or concerns.”
“No Senator expressed a specific concern to President Galvano,” she said.
The rules complaint process played a big role in Latvala’s downfall.
A complaint was filed by veteran aide Rachel Perrin Rogers alleging sexual misconduct by the powerful Pinellas County lawmaker. Those allegations were substantiated after an outside investigation by Special Master Ronald Swanson, who recommended allegations of trading sexual favors for legislative support be turned over to law enforcement. They were, but prosecutors declined to bring charges.
The two outside investigations into Latvala came after POLITICO reported in November 2017 that six women had made claims that Latvala sexually harassed and groped them.
He resigned shortly after the release of the investigations.
Florida Senate General Counsel Jeremiah Hawkes told me yesterday that "the settlement speaks for itself." What did he mean by that?
Will former Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Jack Latvala be required to reimburse Senate for $1,457,000?
That's $900,000 for money paid out in settlement to one of Latvala's women victims, Rachel Perrin Rogers, who is now forbidden to work or apply for work with Senate again, ,and more than $557,000 for law firm bills, including a SLAPP action in federal court against EEOC.
Florida Senate should have settled sexual harassment case sooner, senator says
Sen. Wilton Simpson's longtime staffer, Rachel Perrin Rogers, had accused former Sen. Jack Latvala of sexual misconduct.
State Sen. Wilton Simpson said Monday that the Florida Senate should have settled a sexual harassment case with his chief legislative aide sooner, rather than dragging it out over a year.
Rachel Perrin Rogers, who accused former Clearwater Sen. Jack Latvala of sexual harassment in 2017, filed her complaint against the Florida Legislature in January 2018. She settled the case last week for $900,000.
Simpson, a Republican from Trilby, said Monday they should have settled earlier out of "respect" for Perrin Rogers and what she went through.
Her accusations that Latvala, a powerful senator overseeing the Senate's appropriations committee, shook up Tallahassee and led to the senator's resignation. Two separate investigations supported her claims and the claims of other women.
Perrin Rogers' complaint against the Senate alleged the body "knew, or should have known, of the unlawful conduct of Senator Latvala and did not take any steps to prevent his abuses and protect its employees."
Under the terms of the settlement, Perrin Rogers resigned Jan. 4 and is not allowed to seek employment in the Senate. The settlement also prevented other senators and staffers from testifying in the case.
Simpson said he was not involved in the settlement.
"Rachel did a great job for District 10 when she served with me," Simpson said. "It's going to be a loss to the Senate."
Sign up for the Daily Buzz newsletter
Get the top five stories from the Tampa Bay Times political team emailed to you Monday-Friday at 3p.m.
Excellent article from Dennis Dean, a leader of the local residents opposed to the proposed City of St. Augustine's controversial paid parking plan using smartphone app technology and a 35 cent surcharge every time someone parks, a scheme supported mainly by histrionic St. Augustine Beach Mayor UNDINE CELESTE PAWLOWSKI GEORGE, benefitting dodgy startup PASSPORT LABS, INC., owned in part by BAIN CAPITAL, which only invests in companies making 50% or more in profit.
From FOLIO WEEKLY:
BACKPAGE EDITORIAL
Pay to Play
St. Augustine Beach parking scheme doesn’t please residents
Posted
BACKPAGE EDITORIAL
FOLIO WEEKLY welcomes Backpage submissions. They should be 1,200 words or fewer and on a topic of local interest or concern. Send submissions to mail@folioweekly.com. Opinions expressed on the Backpage are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Folio Weekly.
The City of St. Augustine Beach did not notify or consult the residents about their paid parking plans, even though they have been passing ordinances and working to implement this for over a year. Is it a coincidence that our first notice was after the election? According to a recent online poll, approximately 95 percent of residents did not know about the scheme, and 100 percent were against it. Now that we are asking questions and voicing our concerns, our voices are being suppressed, and public requests for documents are being ignored.
There is a disconnect between the city and its residents. Why? I blame the city manager’s office. If they had notified the residents a year ago when this effort was conceived, we wouldn’t be here now. There should have been workshops, discussions and suggestions with the community to determine if this was a viable idea before spending city resources and wasting all of our time.
The most pressing issues need to be resolved now.
1. We need a homogenous parking program. It is imperative that the city has the same vendor as the county, because of adjacent property lines. Anything else would confuse and aggravate visitors.
2. We need proper notification. Property owners deserve due process.
3. We need to clarify property rights. The ownership of the plazas and right-of-way are in dispute. The city government claims exclusive ownership, but has denied numerous public requests to prove ownership. This is violation of state Sunshine Laws.
4. We need equal application of the law. The proposed paid parking plan does not apply to businesses and residents equally. Many businesses currently use the plazas for their own parking.
5. We need ADA compliance. The city is required to accommodate up to 12 van-sized parking spots for vehicles with wheelchairs. There are currently no plans to accommodate the disabled.
6. We need a complete financial business plan. How much is this going to cost?
The short answer: a lot. Here’s a breakdown. Enforcement personnel will have to be hired and provided salaries, benefits, insurance, training and supervision, not to mention new vehicles, insurance, maintenance, and the additional burden on our police department to defend violations in court. There will be court and administrative costs. Hundreds of thousands of dollars will be required up-front for improvement to existing parking spaces. There will be legal challenges on constitutional grounds.
We will lose visitors, who may never return after realizing they now have to pay to park in their favorite beach city. The city will be collecting parking fees from residents at a discount, which will drop the average rate collected significantly.
When we account for all the real costs of this proposal, I believe we will see that it will negatively impact visitors, property owners, residents, business owners and their employees. And it is not likely to generate revenue at all. We actually stand to lose money. The point is, we don’t know because there is no financial business plan and we don’t want it anyway.
St. Augustine Beach is one of the top beach destinations in the country, and we should not be begging and scheming for revenue. We are so mismanaged that we don’t have funds to fix the roof of City Hall or maintain our own streets. We need—and deserve—a city that works for the people, a city that is accountable and transparent. We should not be looking for new ways to tax the residents, businesses and visitors for paid parking lots. No, thank you! The community is telling the commissioners to PARK IT.
___________________________________
Dean is the owner of Island Builders of North Florida and administrator of the Facebook page No Paid Parking in SAB. He built his forever home in St. Augustine Beach nearly 30 years ago to get away from the taxes, traffic and over-development of Southern California.
It’s Washington, D.C., Jan. 21, 2017, and attorney Emma Collum is helping to coordinate the more than 27,000 women who had taken buses north from all over the state of Florida to participate in the inaugural Women’s March. Incidentally, the event made history as the largest and most logistically complex mass assembly this nation has ever seen. Battalions of fired-up progressives crossed the Beltway to challenge the very legitimacy of the incoming Trump Administration, which was even then hopelessly mired in scandal. The Women’s March headquarters was, quite naturally, the Watergate Hotel—at least, the parts of the hotel that weren’t earmarked for inauguration festivities.
“I had to go up there a week before the march,” Collum said. “I was in the basement with about 30 other organizers. There was definitely a difference between what we were doing and the celebrations that were happening on the first and second floors.”
Two years later, it’s a different story, and that story is being written by women who have been empowered and emboldened by the snowball effect of the Women’s March’s early efforts. The band is back together for the third annual march, taking place in dozens of cities around the United States this Saturday, Jan. 19. There are at least nine “sister marches” in Florida, with two in NEFla. These demonstrations mark the crucial next step in the political evolution of the local feminist community.
No one really knew exactly what the original Women’s March would look like until it happened, and by all accounts, it vastly outperformed even the most optimistic projections. It was an epochal day in American politics as well as the politics of this community. In Jacksonville, between 2,000 and 3,000 people gathered. Another 2,000 showed up in St. Augustine. Those numbers, while impressive, were dwarfed by the turnout in other parts of the state: at least 5,000 in West Palm Beach, 10,000 in Miami, 10,000 in Sarasota, 14,000 in Tallahassee and 20,000 in St. Petersburg.
The national numbers were absolutely insane, wholly unprecedented: 22,000 in Houston, 25,000 in Charlotte, 50,000 in San Diego, 50,000 in Austin, 50,000 in Philly, 60,000 in Atlanta, 75,000 in Madison, 100,000 in Oakland, 100,000 in Portland, 150,000 in San Francisco, 175,000 in Boston, 175,000 in Seattle, 200,000 in Denver, 250,000 in Chicago, 400,000 in New York City and 750,000 in Los Angeles. What began as an expression of discontent with an American election quickly became an international affair, with satellite marches in at least 150 cities outside our borders.
All in all, the inaugural Women’s March was, without question, the largest mass gathering of people at any time for any reason in the history of the world. Not since 9/11 had the nation’s collective consciousness been so fully in-sync with itself. And this time it was for relatively good reasons. What began as a protest of Trump morphed quickly into a celebration of the participants themselves.
Shockwaves reverberated around the world, but the epicenter was Washington, D.C. Just one day after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, more than one million people massed on the National Mall, and The Resistance was born right before his eyes. All reports indicated that the White House was, as the kids say, “triggered,” thrust into a state of reactionary panic from which it has yet to escape.
Skeptics on the left and right were quick to dismiss the day’s events as an outpouring of emotion without real action to back it, social media activism at its most extreme. But they were totally wrong. The Women’s March led directly to an unprecedented surge in political activism among those who were there. It ultimately played a key role in the Democratic takeover of Congress last November. Out of 237 women on the midterm ballot, 95 of them won, many coming from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. In fact, there’s a bidding war for female talent on both sides of the aisle, as the future of American politics is now crystal clear for the first time in a long while.
Women’s March Florida is a registered 501(c)4 nonprofit that exists separately and distinctly from the national organization; many other states are set-up similarly. Collum, the president, founded the group the day after Trump was elected in November 2016.
“It started with asking volunteers to get buses up for the inaugural march in Washington,” she said. “Along the way, as we started spreading out into a statewide network. What happened was we would have these meetings to get people excited about getting on the buses, and these meetings would become circles of women and allies talking about their concerns, much of which came from the vitriol related to the election.”
There are now nine chapters across Florida. Each is run independently, according to their own internal priorities. The degree of overlap among cadres remains unclear, but certainly the general perception of the Women’s March as a monolithic movement run from the top down is patently false.
Andrea Reyes, co-chair of the Women’s March immigration subcommittee, has been working with law enforcement and the community to address allegations of rampant wrongdoing at ICE facilities in the area. She’s also been helping fundraise for Jacksonville Area Legal Aid. She views her involvement with the Women’s March as critical in raising awareness of these issues, a theme repeated by her peers in regard to their areas of interest.
“It does help to have a known name,” Reyes said. “It’s been really nice, because we have the support, the advertising, the promotion of the events through social media.”
Almost from Day One, however, the Women’s March has been criticized both locally and nationally as too white, too passive, too centrist. Progressives are most vociferous in their attacks, while the right still maintain a slightly mocking attitude that barely conceals the very real fear it has of a radicalized female base—fears that were confirmed last November. In the conservative imagination, the Women’s March is by its very nature too radical, too vigilant, too intersectional, as can be seen from conservative media’s frequent critiques of original organizers like Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory.
The progressive critique has taken on a life of its own, becoming a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that continues to color perception of the group. Local organizers take it personally, as they should, and they push back against what they assert to be a false narrative.
“We have reached out extensively to the black community,” said Bonnie Hendrix, captain of the Jacksonville chapter of Women’s March. “If you look at our list of speakers last year, it was very diverse. We had more voices from the black community than we did from whites.”
“Something that was really important to us,” said Collum, “was that if we allowed the march to be just about white women who could afford it, then it would be an ethics failure.”
From the outset, intersectionality was a primary goal of the movement on both local and national levels, with special efforts made to reach out to women of color, organized labor and the LGBTQ community.
“It was really important to us that the voices that were going to be heard were the ones that most mattered,” said Collum.
“A lot of times, when you think of feminism, you think of white feminism,” says Mary Cobb, whose St. Johns chapter has taken the lead in pushing for intersectionality in the Women’s March. “At first, I didn’t really get it. The more I worked, and the more I progressed, the more I saw the truth in that. People who are oppressed, we need to put more focus on them, because their victory and their liberation is tied up into mine.”
Cobb helped establish an anti-lynching memorial in St. Johns County (stolen on the eve of its dedication) and has brought those interests to bear in the Women’s March movement. She helped put together this year’s St. Augustine March, organized by Women’s March St. Johns and Indivisible St. Johns (though Cobb will be joining the national march in Washington, D.C. on the day).
This year’s marches, dubbed The Women’s Wave, will be held this Saturday, Jan. 19. Nine sister marches are planned, with the biggest one in Orlando. The Jacksonville event is sponsored by the Women’s Center of Jacksonville, one of the truly essential organizations in this community. It begins with a rally at Hemming Park at 11 a.m., followed by a march to the Supervisor of Elections Office on Monroe Street and then a return to the park. There, the rally resumes with art by Hope McMath and Yellow House, music by Mama Blue and a slate of speakers including Audrey Gibson, Tracie Davis, LJ Holloway, April LaNubian Roberts Ranna Abduljawad of the Arab American Community Center of Jacksonville, and Coalition for Consent founder Christina Kittle.
More than a dozen grassroots organizations have already reserved tables to work the crowd that day. With local elections in full swing, and a number of prominent women vying for key political positions (like Sunny Gettinger, Tracye Polson, Katrina Brown, Lisa King and particularly Anna Brosche, who’s now officially running to be the city’s first female mayor), one should expect a strong crowd and a level of energy that might even exceed previous years. Best-case scenario is that party politics are set aside in favor of presenting a unified front with bipartisan appeal.
Hendrix took the lead in getting everyone together for the conference call that comprises the bulk of this article.
“We’re gonna have a strong focus not only on the core women’s issues like reproductive rights, healthcare and immigration,” she said, “but gun violence, which disproportionately affects marginalized communities.”
Of course, this is a serious concern for women as well, given the explosion of domestic violence in Northeast Florida.
A sister march, led by Andrea Lee, is being held in St. Augustine, where attendees will gather in Davis Park at 10 a.m. before marching over the Bridge of Lions to Castillo De San Marcos, where the actual rally will commence around noon. Speakers include Dr. Dorothy Israel, Paige Mahogany Parks of Transgender Awareness Project, Cheryl Anderson of Everytown for Gun Safety, poet Joanna Brown, Monique Sampson of UNF’s Students for a Democratic Society, Marianne Wareham of Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, St. Johns Education Association president Michelle Dillon, Women’s March St. Johns leader Trish Becker and the legendary Dorothy Pitman Hughes, whose famous photograph with Gloria Steinem is iconic among feminists and emblematic of intersectionality within the movement.
“We’re all in this together,” says Hendrix. “We may wear different T-shirts, and we may wear different labels, but we’re all fighting for the same thing.”
Two years in and the fight has only just begun for the Women’s March and its affiliates, but so far they are winning, bigly.
Waiting on similar enterprise reporting in Florida and other states. Pressures since Reagan on Social Security disability ALJs are also part of the problem. Former U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) once quipped that SSA ALJs ruling too often for claimants get sent to "remedial judging school."
When your income depends upon your opinion, professionalism goes out the window.
From the Nashville Tennessean:
Denied: How some Tennessee doctors earn big money denying disability claims
TENNESSEE DOCTORS ARE PAID TO REVIEW APPLICATIONS TO THE FEDERAL DISABILITY PROGRAM. HOW MUCH THEY EARN DEPENDS ON HOW FAST THEY WORK. SOME DOCTORS WORK VERY FAST.
By the time Alan Chrisman was diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer, he was too sick to work. The cancer had spread to his lungs. His doctors said he may never get better.
Chrisman, 59, applied for disability, the federal safety net program he contributed to with every paycheck during his 30 years working as a stonemason.
But a doctor hired by Tennessee’s Disability Determination Services to review applications quickly concluded Chrisman wasn’t sick enough to get the $804 monthly benefit.
That physician, Dr. Thomas Thrush, is one of about 50 doctors contracted to review applications for Tennesseans seeking disability.
How some doctors earn big money denying disability claimsMichael Schwab, Nashville Tennessean
The doctors are paid a flat rate for each application file they review. How much they earn depends on how fast they work.
Thrush, like many of the doctors who contract with the state, works very fast.
In fiscal year 2018, he reviewed — on average — one case every 12 minutes.
Thrush’s productivity has paid off. He earned $420,000 for reviewing the applications of 9,088 Tennesseans applying for disability during the year ending June 30. He has made more than $2.2 million since 2013.
On average, 80 percent of the cases he reviewed were denied.
Tennessee has among the highest denial rates for disability applicants in the nation, rejecting 72 percent of all claims in 2017. The national average for denials was 66 percent.
Outside experts and former and current state employees say it’s impossible to review cases so quickly without making mistakes that lead to wrongful rejections of disability benefits.
In Chrisman’s case, Thrush failed to obtain one critical piece of evidence: a discharge paper from a hospital that stated Chrisman’s cancer was inoperable and had metastasized. The prognosis clearly qualified him for disability, even under the complex rules set by the Social Security Administration. The mistake was discovered only after Chrisman hired a lawyer.
A USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee investigation examined 5½ years of data for physicians and psychologists who review disability applications. The investigation found that between January 2013 and July 2018:
• Some doctors raced through cases. More than half of all contract physicians outpaced the federal standard of 1.5 cases per hour, and 1 out of every 5 doctors doubled that pace.
• A whistleblower was fired. The contract of a former medical consultant was terminated in 2017 after he raised concerns about some physicians reviewing a high volume of cases.
• Speed pays. Seven high-volume doctors billed for more than $1 million each between fiscal 2013 and 2018. These physicians’ annual payments range from $103,000 to $451,000. By contrast, the acting chief of the Social Security Administration, a Cabinet-level position, earned $240,000. For some physicians, this was not their sole source of income.
• Staff doctors take more time. The state employed a small number of staff doctors whose compensation is not tied to the number of cases they review. These doctors reviewed cases at a rate that is in line with federal recommendations. They typically earned less than $150,000 annually, according to the state’s salary database. Beginning this year, however, the state is terminating all doctors on salary and relying only on contract physicians.
• Some doctors have a history of misconduct. At least two doctors under contract with the state are felons, including Thrush. Two other physicians had their medical licenses placed on probation. Another physician had his license revoked twice in the past 20 years and now works on a restricted license that bars him from treating patients.
Five current and former contractors and state employees said they believe disability applicants are being wrongfully denied in an effort to process as many applications as possible. Most spoke to The Tennessean on the condition of anonymity, for fear of reprisal.
“It’s like a cash register,” said one contract physician. “From our perspective it’s unethical. From a consumer’s point of view it can be a tragedy.”
One doctor who raised the issue through official channels lost his contract. Dr. John Mather, the whistleblower, was the former chief medical officer for disability programs at the federal Social Security Administration, and worked as a contract doctor for the state after he retired.
“Who knows how many applicants for disability benefits have had their applications denied without justification,” he said.
Mather said he warned James Stanfield, director for the state disability department, and Raquel Hatter, then commissioner of the Department of Human Services, in 2016 about the dangers of some doctors performing large numbers of reviews. The Human Services Department’s general counsel responded in a letter saying there was nothing illegal or fraudulent.
Mather emailed the Social Security Administration, which referred the matter to the Office of Inspector General. That office determined no investigation was warranted. Mather met with auditors at the Comptroller of the Treasury, then received no further response.
In 2017, Stanfield declined to renew Mather’s contract.
“I don’t think they care about the claimant,” Mather said of administrators. “They just want to see the cases out. I don’t think they care too much about quality. People who are high producers — they are very happy to have them around.”
Current and former personnel said they were speaking up now because they want an outside investigator to review all cases to ensure individuals have not been wrongly denied.
“These findings are troubling,” Tennessee U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper said in a statement. “Physicians, especially those dealing with state and federal funds, should be careful and thorough in their work. Social Security Disability Insurance is a vital program, and we have to keep it strong.”
A spokesman for the Department of Human Services, which oversees the disability program in Tennessee, disputed any connection between how fast doctors review case files and their mistakes.
“We have no reason to believe that doctors that average faster reviews are more prone to have errors in their reviews,” Sky Arnold said in a statement.
The Social Security Administration provided its own statistics that showed Tennessee doctors were spending on average 47 “medical minutes per case.” Patti Patterson, a spokeswoman, noted that was more than the national average of 38 minutes.
But the federal data adds the time multiple physicians spend reviewing the same case, a common occurrence when someone is claiming both a mental and physical disability requiring two different specialists. The state data analyzed by The Tennessean details each doctor’s speed.
A letter brings crushing news
For weeks, Chrisman did not feel well. Some days he would lose control of his bowels.
After stonemason work became scarce, he got a job as a maintenance man at a McDonald’s in Sevierville, Tennessee, two years ago. One day in November 2017, he showed up to work at the restaurant and promptly soiled himself.
At the insistence of his wife, Joyce, he headed straight to a walk-in clinic. It was his first medical visit in a long time. The Chrismans cannot afford insurance.
He was referred to a doctor, then another. The diagnosis was swift.
Chrisman had late-stage cancer of the intestine. The cancer had spread. There were two spots on his lung.
A golf ball-sized tumor and about a foot of his intestine were removed in surgery.
Weakened by chemotherapy and radiation, emaciated after shedding 40 pounds, and in extreme discomfort with tubes protruding from his backside, Chrisman occasionally can’t sit or stand. On a good day he can walk outside to pick up a single log for the fireplace in the couple’s unheated two-bedroom cabin.
The Chrismans earned about $32,000 a year between his earnings and his wife’s $10 hourly wage cleaning laundry at a Smoky Mountain resort. The mounting medical bills and Chrisman’s lost wages devastated his wife, who tried to arrange payment plans with medical providers.
Chrisman applied for disability in November 2017.
The rejection letter came six months later.
“Although your therapy is currently causing you discomfort, it is expected these effects will be temporary,” said the denial letter, based on the recommendation from Thrush.
Joyce Chrisman cried when she read the letter.
Mistakes unlikely to be caught
The disability process has two layers of oversight designed to catch errors, but doctors know there is little likelihood anyone would catch a mistake in denying someone's application.
First, a quality assurance department in Nashville spot-checks approvals and denials to make sure staff and doctors have followed procedures. Then, federal regional offices review a portion of disability applications.
Tennessee has consistently ranked high in the quality of its case reviews, averaging a 95.8 percent quality rating since 2016, said Arnold, the state spokesman. In 2017 DDS earned a Social Security Administration "Phoenix Award" for its performance.
But the state and federal offices review a tiny percentage of denied disability claims for accuracy.
By law, half of all approvals by state DDS personnel are reviewed by Social Security Administration staff — a provision meant to safeguard public funds.
The law, however, doesn’t set specific requirements for denials. As a result, the Social Security Administration reviewed fewer than 2 percent of all rejections, according to an analysis by the National Organization of Social Security Claimants' Representatives.
“If the adjudicator is making poor decisions, if they tend towards denials, they’re just not going to be reviewed,” said Jen Burdick, an attorney with Community Legal Services of Philadelphia. She is is among advocates nationwide asking for Social Security to review more denials.
Wrongful denials may be appealed, but long delays for a hearing can take a devastating toll in lost wages, lack of access to health care and medical bills. In fiscal year 2017, at least 9,570 people died waiting for their disability appeals to be heard.
Speed pays — sometimes millions
The Social Security Administration oversees two disability programs: Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, for low-income individuals without a work history, and Social Security Disability Insurance for workers who become disabled.
The federal government delegates to the states the administration of the programs. Tennessee received $8.5 million last year from the Social Security Administration to hire medical consultants with a variety of specialties to review medical records.
These doctors never examine claimants in person, although they occasionally order a physical exam by another doctor.
Seven days a week, setting their own schedules, the doctors swipe their badges to access secured floors of a brown and glass office building on the outskirts of downtown Nashville, logging into a computer system that generates a queue of cases to review.
Some applications contain just a few pages. Others include hundreds of pages of doctor’s notes, hospital reports, X-rays, lab results and employment records. Doctors must write a brief report to justify their findings, too.
The decision to grant or deny benefits is officially made by a state employee, but doctors who work for the state say it is their recommendation that carries the most weight.
For this work, the doctors are paid a flat fee ranging from $30 to $47 per case. Doctors also bill $68 per hour in most instances for the time they spend consulting with staff or mentoring other physicians.
Like Thrush, some of these doctors work very fast.
Dr. Kanika Chaudhuri, a pediatrician, evaluated 3,872 cases last fiscal year, averaging more than four cases per hour when she worked. She earned $192,000 in fiscal 2018 and $1.1 million since 2013.
Out of all the cases Chaudhuri reviewed over the five years, 78 percent were denied, according to data provided by the state.
State officials later noted that the denial data included cases in which multiple doctors made assessments, meaning Chaudhuri and other doctors may not have made the final assessment.
Asked whether she felt pressured to review cases too quickly, Chaudhuri said:
"No direct pressure. They recommend that we must keep up. They always recommend you do your best. There are so many applications and so few doctors. We are overwhelmed with cases."
Jenaan Khaleeli, a psychologist, has averaged 4½ cases an hour since 2013. Nearly 80 percent of those cases were denied. Over the five years, Khaleeli earned $1.2 million, including $209,000 in fiscal 2018.
Dr. Frank Pennington, an ear, nose and throat specialist who is also a felon, earned $144,000 reviewing cases in fiscal 2018, and more than $1 million since 2013. During the five-year period he reviewed 20,835 cases, at a rate of three per hour.
Pennington is one of five contract physicians with a history of misconduct. Pennington is confined to the administrative practice of medicine after three separate felony cocaine convictions and two stints in federal prison in the 1990s.
Thrush had his license placed on probation for four years in 2008 after he pleaded guilty to prescription fraud in 2006.
Arnold, the DHS spokesman, said the physicians were all doctors in good standing while employed.
"It's important to remember these are not forward-facing doctors," Arnold said. "Their role is to examine medical records and reports. They do not meet with patients in person."
Thrush, Pennington and Khaleeli did not respond to messages.
'A flawed system'
Tennessee’s pay-by-the-case model — and the sums paid to contract doctors — surprised even advocates and attorneys who routinely assist people with disabilities.
“There is an obvious financial incentive under such a payment arrangement — to process cases as quickly as possible,” said Russ Overby, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee, who represents individuals seeking disability.
“I am concerned that some clients who are in fact eligible for disability benefits will be denied because there has not been a sufficient review of the case.”
Carrie Hobbs Guiden, executive director of The Arc of Tennessee, advocates for individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities who occasionally apply for Social Security disability benefits. Doctors have to invest the time to properly review cases, she said, especially when it involves people with untreated mental health issues.
“If they’re getting paid based on how many they get done, that’s a flawed system,” Guiden said. “That’s not encouraging quality. You have to question if the purpose is to deny as many people as possible.”
Under pressure to meet 'workload goals'
State disability determination departments face enormous pressures to meet "workload goals" set by the Social Security Administration.
In 2018, the Social Security Administration set a goal of 103,161 disability applications to be cleared by Tennessee's office.
The staff and consultants needed to clear those cases in Tennessee have shrunk by 24 percent between 2010 and 2016.
Failure to meet goals can result in a financial penalty from the federal government, according to Jeffrey Price, the past legislative director for the National Association of Disability Examiners.
Doctors elsewhere push back
About half of all state disability offices in the United States operate on a similar model to Tennessee’s, in which physicians reviewing applications are paid by the case, according to Price.
The contract model, in which doctors receive a fee for each assessment, introduces some risks, Price said.
“If you were paid by the case, it behooves you to sign off on as many cases as you can,” he said. “I think that model at least has the potential for increased error rates.
“A doctor can review cases effectively at about two cases per hour,” Price said. “You’re hoping that the doctor will actually look at the whole case, not just what the examiner wrote.”
Doctors like Thrush, who processed more than five cases per hour, might be valued in an office trying to shovel itself out of a large caseload, Price said, but the pace is implausible.
“I think that would be dangerous, actually,” Price said. “Inherently you would be missing something if you’re looking at five cases an hour.”
At the North Carolina Disability Determination Services office, where Price has worked for nearly 40 years, managers recently asked doctors to process an average of three cases per hour instead of two. Doctors in that office are all on staff, as opposed to contractors.
“Some of our doctors are pushing back,” Price said. “They say that’s too many.”
A rule put into place by the Social Security Administration in 2017 has made the work of DDS physicians even more critical in deciding an outcome of an application.
Previously a “treating physician rule” required DDS to give more weight to the opinions of an applicant’s personal doctor than doctors hired by DDS. That rule was eliminated, giving doctors hired by DDS more influence in deciding the outcome of applications.
'Something needs to be done'
After Chrisman was denied, he and his wife found a lawyer in Sevierville tofile a request for reconsideration.
In September, Joyce Chrisman came home from work and brought the mail inside their cabin. The letter from Social Security said, “We found that you became disabled under our rules on November 8, 2017.” That was the day after she urged Chrisman to visit the walk-in clinic.
Another physician had examined Alan Chrisman's file and recommended he be granted disability.
“We said ‘wow,'” Chrisman said. “We couldn’t believe it.”
George Garrison, his lawyer, said he was troubled by The Tennessean's findings.
“People come to me at a point they’re about to lose everything they’ve got,” he said. “They’re sick. They’re dying. They’re having to deal with a complex system.”
The benefit meant that Joyce Chrisman no longer had to worry about paying medical bills. The bills would be paid dating back to the time her husband applied for disability.
His disability approval also automatically qualified Alan Chrisman for TennCare, which is now covering his ongoing chemotherapy, medications and hospitalizations.
Chrisman sits on his couch most of the time. He’s on his 11th dose of chemotherapy. After his 12th next month, he will return for a scan. “Then we’ll go from there,” he said.
Thinking about the months he spent rejected — when he and his wife were barely scraping by — Chrisman gets angry.
“Something needs to be done,” he said. “They’re either getting too much of a caseload or they’re getting greedy.”
Reach Anita Wadhwani at awadhwani@tennessean.com or 615-259-8092 and on Twitter @AnitaWadhwani.
Another day, more puff pieces and PR-generated "news" in the St. Augustine Record. Pitiful. Does not even mention the controversy occasioned by the anti-Gay ownership of this chain restaurant. Pitiful.
No Chick-fil-A? St. Augustine location will soon shut its doors for a remodel
By Travis Gibson tgibson@staugustine.com Posted at 1:36 PM Updated at 1:37 PM St. Augustine Record
The lone Chick-fil-A in St. Johns County is shutting its doors Feb. 1 in order to conduct thorough renovations including an expanded kitchen, more parking and a double drive-thru.
It’s a much-needed upgrade for the U.S. Highway 1 location, according to Christy Lamm, marketing director for the St. Augustine location that opened 17 years ago.
The remodel will double the kitchen size, add canopies and fans for drive-thru workers and include interior upgrades such as new tables and chairs.
“The goal of the remodel is to take care of our employees and serve our guests as fast as possible,” Lamm said Thursday.
Lamm said some of the construction has already started and the plan is for the restaurant to reopen sometime in mid to late March. A Grand Reopening is planned at that time.
Chick-fil-A has also filed for construction of another restaurant in St. Augustine, this one at the intersection of S.R. 16 and Inman Road. The restaurant would be 4,992 square feet and include an indoor playground.
In 2018, the American Customer Satisfaction Index’s Restaurant Report 2018 named Chick-fil-A the most popular fast food restaurant in America for the third year in a row.
A few years ago, when I was teaching at Yale, I made an announcement to my class. I said that I was going to have to cancel office hours that day because I was dealing with some personal issues and a friend was coming up to help me sort through them.
I was no more specific than that, but that evening 10 or 15 students emailed me to say they were thinking of me or praying for me. For the rest of the term the tenor of that seminar was different. We were closer. That one tiny whiff of vulnerability meant that I wasn’t aloof Professor Brooks, I was just another schmo trying to get through life.
That unplanned moment illustrated for me the connection between emotional relationships and learning. We used to have this top-down notion that reason was on a teeter-totter with emotion. If you wanted to be rational and think well, you had to suppress those primitive gremlins, the emotions. Teaching consisted of dispassionately downloading knowledge into students’ brains.
Then work by cognitive scientists like Antonio Damasio showed us that emotion is not the opposite of reason; it’s essential to reason. Emotions assign value to things. If you don’t know what you want, you can’t make good decisions.
ADVERTISEMENT
Furthermore, emotions tell you what to pay attention to, care about and remember. It’s hard to work through difficulty if your emotions aren’t engaged. Information is plentiful, but motivation is scarce.
That early neuroscience breakthrough reminded us that a key job of a school is to give students new things to love — an exciting field of study, new friends. It reminded us that what teachers really teach is themselves — their contagious passion for their subjects and students. It reminded us that children learn from people they love, and that love in this context means willing the good of another, and offering active care for the whole person.
Over the last several years our understanding of the relationship between emotion and learning has taken off. My impression is that neuroscientists today spend less time trying to locate exactly where in the brain things happen and more time trying to understand the different neural networks and what activates them.
Everything is integrated. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of the University of Southern California shows that even “sophisticated” emotions like moral admiration are experienced partly by the same “primitive” parts of the brain that monitor internal organs and the viscera. Our emotions literally affect us in the gut.
Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington has shown that the social brain pervades every learning process. She gave infants Chinese lessons. Some infants took face-to-face lessons with a tutor. Their social brain was activated through direct eye contact and such, and they learned Chinese sounds at an amazing clip. Others watched the same lessons through a video screen. They paid rapt attention, but learned nothing.
ADVERTISEMENT
Extreme negative emotions, like fear, can have a devastating effect on a student’s ability to learn. Fear amps up threat perception and aggression. It can also subsequently make it hard for children to understand causal relationships, or to change their mind as context changes.
Even when conditions are ideal, think of all the emotions that are involved in mastering a hard subject like algebra: curiosity, excitement, frustration, confusion, dread, delight, worry and, hopefully, perseverance and joy. You’ve got to have an educated emotional vocabulary to maneuver through all those stages.
And students have got to have a good relationship with teachers. Suzanne Dikker of New York University has shown that when classes are going well, the student brain activity synchronizes with the teacher’s brain activity. In good times and bad, good teachers and good students co-regulate each other.
The bottom line is this, a defining question for any school or company is: What is the quality of the emotional relationships here?
And yet think about your own school or organization. Do you have a metric for measuring relationship quality? Do you have teams reviewing relationship quality? Do you know where relationships are good and where they are bad? How many recent ed reform trends have been about relationship-building?
We focus on all the wrong things because we have an outmoded conception of how thinking really works.
The good news is the social and emotional learning movement has been steadily gaining strength. This week the Aspen Institute (where I lead a program) published a national commission report called “From a Nation at Risk to a Nation at Hope.” Social and emotional learning is not an add-on curriculum; one educator said at the report’s launch, “It’s the way we do school.” Some schools, for example, do no academic instruction the first week. To start, everybody just gets to know one another. Other schools replaced the cops at the door with security officers who could also serve as student coaches.
When you start thinking this way it opens up the wide possibilities for change. How would you design a school if you wanted to put relationship quality at the core? Come to think of it, how would you design a Congress?
David Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author of “The Road to Character” and the forthcoming book, “The Second Mountain.”
Another thinly sourced article, PR-generated. Cigarette smoking is a lawful activity. Rather than deal with cigarette butt litter qua litter, with signage, education and ashtrays, the control freaks want to create a crime and collect fines.
The misguided, well-meaning would-be beach nanny-ninnies sponsoring this legislation are inviting litigation.
California Governor Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown, Jr. thrice vetoed a more Draconian version of this legislation during the last four years.
This bill should not be enacted. It's a diversion from meaningful legislation, like halting development in wetlands.
From St. Augustine Record:
Cigarette butts an ‘overwhelming’ problem on local beaches
Florida could soon join a growing list of cities and states that have banned smoking on public beaches. In New Jersey, a new law banning smoking on public beaches went into effect this month. Gulf Shores, Alabama banned cigarette and e-cigarette smoking on its public beachfront, and Maine and Hawaii banned smoking on state-owned beaches in recent years. [JENNY KANE/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS]
By Travis Gibson tgibson@staugustine.com Posted Jan 17, 2019 at 2:01 AM The day after last year’s Independence Cay celebration, 175 volunteers took to St. Johns County beaches to clean up the mess.
The group of volunteers, led by local nonprofit Keepers of the Coast, picked up nearly 5,000 cigarette butts scattered across the sand. Cigarette butts, which contain plastic fillers, are one of the most common trash items found on Florida beaches. Sen. Joe Gruters, R-Sarasota, wants to change that.
“My whole goal is to get butts off of beaches,” Gruters told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “To me there’s nothing more disgusting than when I go out to the beach and reach into the sand and pull up a cigarette butt.”
On Jan. 2, Gruters introduced SB 218, legislation that would ban smoking on Florida’s public beaches. Anyone caught smoking would up to a $25 fine or 10 hours of community service.
“I have heard from numerous volunteers who help clean up the beach that the number of cigarette butts is overwhelming,” said Undine George, St. Augustine Beach mayor.
George said she would personally like to see the law get passed, but added that she isn’t a fan of over-regulation and feels bad for smokers who continue to lose places where they can smoke legally.
There aren’t many examples of smoking laws, like the one proposed by Gruters, but a few are starting to pop up in recent years. In New Jersey, a new law banning smoking on public beaches went into effect earlier this week. Violators can be fined up to $1,000. Gulf Shores, Alabama banned cigarette and e-cigarette smoking on its public beachfront, and Maine and Hawaii banned smoking on state-owned beaches in recent years.
Gruters told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune that the Florida beach smoking ban has attracted bipartisan interest and he believes it has a chance of advancing in the Legislature when it convenes in March. State law currently keeps local governments from regulating smoking. A 2012 court ruling nullified Sarasota County’s ban on smoking at parks and beaches.
If the state law does go into effect, George said she could see a potential problem with enforcement at St. Augustine Beach.
“That will be very difficult to regulate,” George said. “Is that what I want officers spending time to enforce that? It could take away from time from things that are more hazardous.”
Ideally, George would like to see cigarette smokers pick up after themselves.
“It’s a shame that people don’t have respect for fellow beachgoers and the environment,” said George, adding that she will continue to keep an eye on the proposed legislation.
Gruters told WFTS if the law went into effect it would include designated smoking areas near the beach like at a pavilion or parking lot, but not on the sand.
If passed, the proposed beach smoking ban would take effect July 1.
Good news. Evangelicals are coming to their senses about the insane President Donald John Trump.
As Abraham Lincoln may have said, "“You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
White evangelical support for President Trump slips in the midst of the government shutdown
The partial government shutdown that began Dec. 22 caused roughly 420,000 federal employees to work without pay. This week, the IRS said it will recall thousands of workers to handle tax returns. (Jan. 17) AP
A new poll shows that support for President Donald Trump is slipping among white evangelical Christians as the government shutdown continues.
The latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll shows that 66 percent of white evangelical Christians approve of the job Trump is doing as president, whereas 23 percent disapprove and 11 percent are unsure.
That is a change from the December NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll. A month ago, 73 percent of white evangelical Christians approved of the job Trump was doing. Seventeen percent disapproved and 9 percent were unsure.
The margin of error for the December poll is +/- 3.7 percentage points and +/- 3.8 percentage points for the January poll.
White evangelicals are considered to be a part of Trump's base. Exit polls for the 2016 presidential election showed an overwhelming number of white evangelical voters cast their ballots for Trump.
However, interviews conducted Jan. 10-13 for the new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll occurred in the midst of the longest government shutdown in the country's history.
Overall, Trump's approval rating is down. In January, 39 percent of U.S. adults approve of the job he is doing as president, 53 percent disapprove and 8 percent are unsure. In December, 42 percent of U.S. adults approved, 49 percent disapproved and 9 percent were unsure.
"Multicolored monstrosity" on trial. Dodgy AKERMAN lawyers bill Miami developer KEY INTERNATIONAL and the DIEGO ARDID FAMILY to beat up on the City of St. Augustine Beach's rational decision, which was based on the evidence. Another case of corporate lawyers run wild. THOMAS INGRAM (PICTURED BELOW with CINDY LAQUIDARA, former Jacksonville City Attorney) was one of the arrogant AKERMAN lawyers who billed the City of St. Augustine some $200,000 to help City Manager WILLIAM BARRY HARRISS avoid and evade arrest for dumping a landfill in a lake. AKERMAN AND HARRISS then argued that the City should be permitted to take 40,000 cubic yards of contaminated solid waste in 2000 truckloads to the south end of Lincolnville, plop dirt on top of it, and call it a "park."
The contaminated solid waste is now in a landfill, and the south end of Lincolnville is Dr. Robert S. Hayling, D.D.S. Freedom Park. Why? Because We, the People stood up to the City of St. Augustine and pompous privileged lawyers from AKERMAN SENTERFITT. Photos below from City of St. Augustine Beach hearing last year, unanimously rejecting "multicolored monstrosity."
Attorneys make their case in Embassy Suites water park decision
The new Embassy Suites by Hilton St. Augustine Beach Oceanfront Resort opened in 2018, but officials (sic) are still trying to add a water slide and play area to the development. [PETER WILLOTT/THE RECORD]
By Sheldon Gardner Posted at 2:01 AM January 17, 2019 St. Augustine Record The city of St. Augustine Beach’s efforts to keep a children’s water park to be built in the Embassy Suites went to the courtroom on Thursday morning.
Attorneys for the city and Key Beach North, the developer, made their cases before Judge Lee Smith in St. Johns County court. It’s not clear when Smith will decide the matter, but he asked attorneys to file proposed orders by Feb. 1.
Embassy Suites opened in late 2018 on the beachfront at the north end of A1A Beach Boulevard, and it caused controversy in the community over its size.
In June, the City Commission rejected a proposal to change the development agreement to allow for a water park. Among other factors, city officials said the structure was out of character for the beach and out of character for the original development agreement, which proposed a “peaceful resort environment.”
Concerns about the water park included its height because land at the site is elevated. Though the equipment is 28 feet tall, it would reach more than 40 feet into the air, planning board Chair Jane West said in 2018.
Key Beach North appealed the Commission’s denial to Circuit Court and is seeking a decision by the judge to force the city to allow the water park. If Smith decides against the city, the matter could also be sent back to the city for another review.
The arguments focused on whether the Commission appropriately applied City Code in rejecting the park.
Attorney Cindy Laquidara, who represented Key Beach North, said water slides are allowed in commercial areas and the water slide meets requirements of code such as height and setbacks. She said the city applied rules that weren’t objective, and that the city can’t apply arbitrary findings to turn down a development feature allowed by City Code.
“The criteria isn’t that people show up and they don’t like it,” she said. “That can’t be the criteria.”
Mulligan said City Code backs the Commission’s decision to turn down the water park in part because it doesn’t fit the character of the area, which he described as “pristine.” As Mulligan spoke, renderings of the water slide were shown.
“This multicolored monstrosity is proposed to be put on the northeast corner of their property. ... (A provision in city regulations allows) the city of St. Augustine Beach to prevent something that doesn’t fit in,” he said.
From Gainesville's WUFT, about Gainesville City Commission taking a positive step on protection of the environment from the scourge of plastics. I love the song that Bert Hodge of Lonesome Bert and the Skinny Lizards sings about Throwaway Island, the huge agglomeration of plastic trash in the Pacific Ocean.
Looking forward to St. Johns County, St. Augustine and St. Augustine Beach considering this ban.
Gainesville Bans Expanded Polystyrene, Certain Plastic Bags As Of August 2019
Gainesville City Commission’s final approval of the single-use plastic bags and expanded polystyrene ban took place Thursday night.
For the last year, Commissioner Adrian Hayes-Santos has spearheaded the movement.
“We need to protect our environment for future generations,” he said.
Small businesses around Gainesville have both mentally and literally prepared for this change.
Andrea Arredondo, a cashier at La Tienda, said being more sustainable will be great for the restaurant. (Madi Spector/WUFT News)
Andrea Arredondo, a 23-year-old cashier at La Tienda, said she thinks the change will be great for the Mexican restaurant. She suggested that the restaurant could start using organic bags or ceramic plates for their customers to be more sustainable.
“We give a lot of plastic every day,” she said. “So, I think reducing in here will really make a difference.”
However, the ban on Styrofoam might prove to be more difficult than that on plastic.
“As far as the plastic bags, I think that’s going to be a pretty easy transition,” said Danielle Ward, the store manager of Ward’s Supermarket. “It’s an easy fix for us.”
“Unfortunately, as far as our Styrofoam, that might make it a little more difficult,” she said. “We’re going to have to really think on exactly what we want to do.”
One of the exemptions in the ban will be plastic bags used for fruits and vegetables at grocery stores. (Madi Spector/WUFT News)
The new ordinance describes what Ward refers to as Styrofoam as expanded polystyrene, as Styrofoam is technically a proprietary name for a type of polystyrene foam product. Ward’s Supermarket is prepared in their produce department for this change. They are ready to use recyclable materials. But Ward said their deli will face a challenge.
“I don’t know what we’re going to use as something different than Styrofoam,” she said. “But we’ll definitely look into that and see what alternatives there are out there.”
Ward encouraged her customers to start becoming used to not using plastic for shopping. She said it would be wise for her them to start to transition now.
Her cousin, Milan Mixton, the assistant manager of the Natural Foods Department, said the family-owned business is excited for this change. They will have to do research on new alternatives, but their produce section is already using decomposable, cardboard-based materials for their organic products.
Last December, Commissioners Gigi Simmons and Helen Warren spoke in defense of small businesses finding it difficult to transition to new materials.
In the original draft of the ordinance, Commissioner Hayes-Santos introduced a hardship exemption that would allow businesses who make less than $500,000 annually to opt out of the ban. In December, he claimed that he didn’t think it was still necessary.
A separate vote to keep the exemption in the ordinance has been set to the first meeting in March.
In regards to Ward’s Supermarket, Mixton said it’s possible there will be a small price increase for their supplies, but she’s sure it’s something they will be able to absorb.
“It’s not like we’re the only store that will be dealing with that increase,” she said. “I think it will be minimal because alternate materials have been on the market for quite a while now, nationally. So, I think prices are starting to come down on those things.”
She predicts it will not financially impact the supermarket’s customers.
Both plastic newspaper holders and grocery story bags for fruits and vegetables are two exemptions from the ban.
According to Hayes-Santos, the city will be partnering with multiple nonprofit groups to help educate citizens and consumers. These will include the Chamber of Commerce, Zero Waste Gainesville, Keep Alachua Beautiful and the local Girl Scouts Troop.
The city commission unanimously passed the ordinance to ban. Gainesville is now the second city in Florida to do this — the first being Coral Gables. Gainesville’s ban takes effect Aug. 1.
Loosey’s Downtown has been prepared for the change since 2017 when it stopped using plastic bags and straws. (Madi Spector/WUFT News)
If Michelle Obama had taught at a madrassa, MICHAEL PENCE would have been ululating. But this unjust steward and his wife are sending dog whistles to homo-haters, as his wife techs at a school that invidiously discriminates against GLBTQ people and families. PENCE is a nattering nabob of negativism. Bigots lost their culture war, as Pat Bushannan declared in 1992, or their "30 Years War on Homosexuality" that Jerry Falwell declared in 1978.
Vice President Mike Pence defended second lady Karen Pence’s decision to take a teaching job at a school that discriminates against LGBTQ individuals and families, suggesting that the uproar over it is an attack on Christianity.
During an interview with the Catholicism-focused Eternal World Television Network on Thursday, Pence said that the attacks on the Immanuel Christian School, which bans LGBTQ employees, students and families, were offensive to his family.
“To see major news organizations attacking Christian education is deeply offensive to us,” Pence said.
“We’ll let the critics roll off our backs,” the vice president continued. “But this criticism of Christian education should stop.”
The interview comes just two days after HuffPost broke the news that Karen Pence accepted a job at the Immanuel Christian School in Northern Virginia. The school refuses to admit any students who participate in or condone homosexual or bisexual activity and included in its 2018 employment application a requirement that applicants pledge not to participate in or condone “homosexual activity,” or violate the “unique roles of male and female.”
The employment application also says the school believes in a definition of marriage that strictly includes “one man and one woman” and notes that “a wife is commanded to submit to her husband as the church submits to Christ.”
In its parent agreement, the school reserves the right to expel a student if they, their parents, or someone in their household engages in homosexual or bisexual activity, or supports or condones that behavior.
Virginia is one of dozens of states that do not prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual and gender identity.
Mike Pence on Thursday said that religious schools like Immanuel Christian School were a part of American tradition and are protected by the constitutional right of freedom of religion.
“We have a rich tradition in America of Christian education and frankly religious education broadly defined,” he said.
“We celebrate it. The freedom of religion is enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.”
Others see Pence’s decision to teach at Immanuel Christian School, which includes students from kindergarten to eighth grade, as an endorsement of discrimination against the LGBTQ community.
“It’s disturbing Second Lady Karen Pence would put her stamp of approval on an institution that actively targets LGBTQ students at one of the places where they should feel the safest,” Sarah Kate Ellis, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, said in a statement.
Ellis noted that many young students coming to terms with their gender identity turn to the arts as a “safe haven.”
“As an art teacher, I suspect [Pence] is aware of that,” she said.
A spokeswoman for the second lady said that Pence was previously employed by the school for 12 years while her husband, Mike Pence, was in Congress.
“It’s absurd that her decision to teach art to children at a Christian school, and the school’s religious beliefs, are under attack,” Pence spokeswoman Kara Brooks told HuffPost.
In a statement to USA Today, the second lady said she was “excited to be back in the classroom and doing what I love to do. I have missed teaching art.”
/s3.amazonaws.com/arc-wordpress-client-uploads/tbt/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/13092359/simpson.jpg)
