Faster than a speeding dump truck, our St. Augustine and St. Johns County history and nature are being demolished.  

Entire forests. 

Whole ecosystems.

Our precious environmental and cultural ecosystems here in what we call "God's country."

Historic buildings.  

Our history and nature are worth saving. 

We, the People, are saving it on a daily basis.  

It takes a village. 

Yes we can.

Yes we do.

Most recent example -- the historic 1953 St. Johns County Jail.  More than 1000 people were illegally arrested in St. Augustine here for First Amendment protected activity, supporting Civil Rights.  Their courage helped bring about the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  Their criminal cases were removed to federal court by William Moses Kuntsler, (credited with almost single-handedly reviving federal removal jurisdiction), and other civil rights lawyers. After removal to federal court, the 1000+ cases were dismissed by United States District Court Judge John Milton Bryan Simpson, for whom the Federal Courthouse in Jacksonville is now named. In some of his orders, Judge Bryan Simpson found that the civil rights protesters were "tortured" in the 1953 St. Johns County Jail. It will NOT be demolished.  No, my friends, we will NOT demolish the 1953 St. Johns County Jail for a parking lot. 

It happened in America during 1963-1964.

The Jim Crow regime in St. Augustine, Florida arrested and jailed more than 1000 people in that jail.  

They were arrested illegally in retaliation for their First Amendment protected activity -- demonstrations supporting civil rights for African-Americans. 

They included Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy,  Sr., the Rev. Cordy Tindell Vivian, Rev. Freddie Lee Shuttlesworth, Rev. Hosea Lorenzo Williams,Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Peabody (mother of Endicott Howard Peabody, then-Governor of Massachusetts, also mother of Marietta Tree and mother of Frances Fitzgerald); Audrey Nell Edwards and the St. Augustine Four, Black school children arrested for protesting, Dr. Robert Bagner Hayling, D.D.S., and the Rev. Andrew Jackson Young, Jr. (later President Jimmy Carter's United Nations Ambassador, a Congressman and Mayor of Atlanta).

The arrested included sixteen (16) Rabbis and one administrator.  It was the largest mass arrest ofRabbis in American history.  Illegally incarcerated in the 1953 Jail our County wanted to demolish, the Rabbis wrote an eloquent statement by the light of one dim bulb -- "why we went." It is read every year on June 18 by the St. Augustine Jewish Historical Society.  

Art Copyright (c) 2023 by the Rev. Dr. Warren Clark.

The Rabbis' letter states:

June 19, 1964

Dear Friend:

St. Augustine is the oldest city in the United States. It was here on St. Augustine’s Day, August 28, 1565, that Pedro Menendez de Aviles first sighted land. In 1965 it will celebrate its 400th anniversary – indeed it has requested federal funds to enhance this historic observance. St. Augustine has other distinguishing characteristics. In American history books yet to be written, this small, neatly kept Florida community will long be remembered as a symbol of a harsh, rigidly segregated, Klan- dominated, backward-looking city which mocked the spirit of the doughty African-born, dark- pigmented priest for whom it was named.

St. Augustine is a tourist town. By far the highest percentage of its income comes from the visitors who walk through its quaint streets staring at “excavations” from the 18th century only now being restored. Most visitors stop at the Slave Market, supposedly only a relic of bygone days. True, they no longer sell slaves in that market, but let no one be deceived into thinking that there no longer exists among this town’s white residents the mental attitude and the psychology which first put slaves on those trading blocks. The spirit of racial arrogance persists and is reinforced by the sway of terror long exerted by hooded and unhooded mobsters.

We went to St. Augustine in response to the appeal of Martin Luther King addressed to the CCAR Conference, in which he asked us to join with him in a creative witness to our joint convictions of equality and racial justice.

We came because we realized that injustice in St. Augustine, as anywhere else, diminishes the humanity of each of us. If St. Augustine is to be not only an ancient city but also a great-hearted city, it will not happen until the raw hate, the ignorant prejudices, the unrecognized fears which now grip so many of its citizens are exorcised from its soul. We came then, not as tourists, but as ones who, perhaps quixotically, thought we could add a bit to the healing process of America.

We were arrested on Thursday, June 18, 1964. Fifteen of us were arrested while praying in an integrated group in front of Monson’s Restaurant. Two of us were arrested for sitting down at a table with three Negro youngsters in the Chimes Restaurant. We pleaded not guilty to the charges against us.

Shortly after our confinement in the St. John’s County Jail, we shared with one another our real, inner motives. They are, as might be expected, mixed. We have tried to be honest with one another about the wrong, as well as the right, motives which have prompted us. These hours have been filled with a sense of surprise and discovery, of fear and affirmation, of self-doubt and belief in God.

​We came to St. Augustine mainly because we could not stay away. We could not say no to Martin Luther King, whom we always respected and admired and whose loyal friends we hope we shall be in the days to come. We could not pass by the opportunity to achieve a moral goal by moral means – a rare modern privilege – which has been the glory of the non-violent struggle for civil rights.

We came because we could not stand quietly by our brother’s blood. We had done that too many times before. We have been vocal in our exhortation of others but the idleness of our hands too often revealed an inner silence; silence at a time when silence has become the unpardonable sin of our time. We came in the hope that the God of us all would accept our small involvement as partial atonement for the many things we wish we had done before and often.

We came as Jews who remember t he millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria. We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.

Here in St. Augustine we have seen the depths of anger, resentment and fury; we have seen faces that expressed a deep implacable hatred. What disturbs us more deeply is the large number of decent citizens who have stood aside, unable to bring themselves to act, yet knowing in their hearts that t his cause is right and that it must inevitably triumph.

We believe, though we could not count on it in advance, that our presence and actions here have been of practical effect. They have reminded the embattled Negroes here that they are not isolated and alone. The conscience of the wicked has been troubled, while that of the righteous has gained new strength. We are more certain than before that this cause is invincible, but we also have a sharpened awareness of the great effort and sacrifice which will be required. We pray that what we have done may lead us on to further actions and persuade others who still stand hesitantly to take the stand they know is just.

We came from different backgrounds and with different degrees of involvement. Some of us have had intimate experience with the struggle of minority groups to achieve full and equal rights in our widely scattered home communities. Others of us have had less direct contact with the underprivileged and the socially oppressed. And yet for all of us these brief, tension-packed hours of openness and communication turned an abstract social issue into something personal and immediate.

​We shall not forget the people with whom we drove, prayed, marched, slept, ate, demonstrated and were arrested. How little we know of these people and their struggle. What we have learned has changed us and our attitudes. We are grateful for the rare experience of sharing with this courageous community in their life, their suffering, their effort. We pray that we may remain more sensitive and more alive as a result.

We shall not soon forget the stirring and heartfelt excitement with which the Negro community greeted us with full-throated hymns and hallelujahs, which pulsated and resounded through the church; nor the bond of affectionate solidarity which joined us hand in hand during our marches through town; nor the exaltation which lifted our voices and hearts in unison; nor the common purpose which transcended our fears as well as all the boundaries of race, geography and circumstance. We hope we have strengthened the morale of St. Augustine Negroes as they strive to claim their dignity and humanity; we know they have strengthened ours. Each of us has in this experience become a little more the person, a bit more the rabbi he always hoped to be (but has not yet been able to become). We believe in man’s ability to fulfill God’s commands with God’s help. We make no messianic estimate of man’s power and certainly not of what we did here. But it has reaffirmed our faith in the significance of the deed. So we must confess in all humility that we did this as much in fulfillment of our faith and in response to inner need as in service to our Negro brothers. We came to stand with our brothers and in the process have learned more about ourselves and our God. In obeying Him, we become ourselves; in following His will we fulfill ourselves. He has guided, sustained and strengthened us in a way we could not manage on our own. We are deeply grateful to the good influences which have sustained us in our moments of trial and friendship. Often we thought of parents, wives, children, congregants, particularly our teen-age youth, and of our teachers and our students. How many a Torah reading, Passover celebration, prayer book text, and sermonic effort has come to mind in these hours. And how meaningful has been our worship, morning and evening, as we recited the ancient texts in this new, yet Jewishly familiar, setting. We are particularly grateful for what we have received from our comrades in this visit. We have been sustained by the understanding, thoughtfulness, consideration and good humor we have received from each other. Never have the bonds of Judaism and the fellowship of the rabbinate been more clearly expressed to us all or more deeply felt by each of us.

These words were first written at 3:00 a.m. in the sweltering heat of a sleepless night, by the light of the one naked bulb hanging in the corridor outside our small cell. They were, ironically, scratched on the back of the pages of a mimeographed report of the bloody assaults of the Ku Klux Klan in St. Augustine. At daybreak we revisited the contents of the letter and prayed together for a new dawn of justice and mercy for all the children of God.

We do not underestimate what yet remains to be done, in the north as well as the south. In the battle against racism, we have participated here in only a skirmish. But the total effect of all such demonstrations has created a Revolution; and the conscience of the nation has been aroused as never before. The Civil Rights Bill will become law and much more progress will be attained because this national conscience has been touched in this and other places in the struggle.
 

We praise and bless God for His mighty acts on our behalf.
Baruch ata adonai matir asurim. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who freest the captives.

Rabbi Eugene Borowitz
Rabbi Balfour Brickner
Rabbi Israel "Sy" Dresner
Rabbi Daniel Fogel
Rabbi Jerrold Goldstein
Rabbi Joel Goor
Rabbi Joseph Herzog
Rabbi Norman Hirsh
Rabbi Leon Jick
Rabbi Richard Levy
Rabbi Eugene Lipman
Rabbi Michael Robinson
Rabbi B. T. Rubenstein
Rabbi Murray Saltzman
Rabbi Allen Secher
Rabbi Clyde T. Sills
Mr. Albert Vorspan

https://rac.org/why-we-went-joint-letter-rabbis-arrested-st-augustine

Scene of "torture" as found by U.S. District Court Judge Bryan Simpson, the historic 1953 Old St. Johns County Jail housed prisoners until circa 2017.

Sheriff Robert Hardwick stated at a County Commission meeting in 2024 there were plans to demolish the 1953 Old Jail.  During a recess, I advised Sheriff to take his plans to the Cultural Resources Review Board (CRRB).  He did not do so. Instead, some "dim bulb" arachnid apparatchiks, led by dour St. Johns County Administrator "JOY" ANDREWS & Co., who earned her law degree in China, applied for a demolition permit.  

"JOY" ANDREWS & Co. falsely argued the building wasn't historically significant, that only the cell doors and a few other objects were important.  They hired PAUL M. WEAVER, III, an historic preservation expert, to help support their sophistry with a shallow report that reflects poorly on him and the County,

Bumptious County burghers were wrong.  We stopped them. 

Thanks to several reform County Commissioners and some of our friends, including fired former St. Johns County Cultural Resources Director, Mr. Trey Alexander Asner, to Rabbi Merrill Shapiro, to the St. Augustine Jewish Historical Society and the families and friends of the surviving Rabbis who were arrested

With a public CRRB meeting scheduled in the County Auditorium for June 9 (nine days before the anniversary of the Rabbis' June 18, 1964 arrest) St. Johns County Administrator "JOY" ANDREWS on May 7, 2025 at 3:45 announced that our County has halted its demolition demand.  Good career move.   She avoided an international incident. 

On May 7, 2025, at 3:45 PM, County Administrator "JOY" ANDREWS announced that there would be no demolition, and that the space would be utilized after plans are made for adaptive reuse. 

On June 9, 2025 at 1:30 PM, our St. Johns County Cultural Resources Review Board will meet in the County Auditorium.  While Ms. Andrews archly told Commissioners that there was no need for people to speak out on preservation of the Old Jail because the proposed demolition won't be on the agenda, that is at best facetious. 

Thanks to reform Commissioners Ann Taylor and Krista Keating-Josephr, for getting the CRRB meeting moved to the County Auditorium.  For years I have asked the County to hold CRRB meetings in the County Auditorium.  

For years, those CRRB. meetings were held in a tiny conference room at the County Growth Management (sic) Building.  

Such a bad scene. 

Citizens treated disrespectfully and disdainfully by pro-developer staff.  

At the April 14, 2025 CRRB meetings, five Jacksonville TV news crews got to see how rude they were.

Crammed into a too-small room by small-minded County staff, led by gross Growth Management (sic) Director MICHAEL ROBERSON, who fired Cultural Resources Coordinator Trey Alexander Asner for doing his job too well.

No class.

No podium. 

No public address system.  

No Government TV live streaming video.

Putative minutes taken by County Growth Management (sic) staff, not  Clerk of Courts staff.

Unfriendly "STAFF ONLY signs on the windows of the doors to the room.  

Citizens not allowed in the room before the meetings commenced.   

Citizens interrupted mid-sentence.  

CRRB Chair Leslee Keys demanding that citizens "stand" to speak, when County staff refused to provide a podium.  How gauche and louche. (I declined the Chair's unctuous, ungracious demand, citing ADA/504).   

No class. 

June 9, 2025 meeting will now be in County Auditorium.  Citizens should no longer be treated like jail prisoners and tortured by County staff and CRRB Chair.

What's next:  Local Landmark Designation for the Old Jail, to protect it from demolition?

To be continued.....

Do some louche local government lawyers rather remind us of the dog that did not bark in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes' story, The Adventure of Silver Blaze.

From Wikipedia:

Doyle considered "Silver Blaze" among his favourite Sherlock Holmes stories.^[2] One of the most popular Sherlock Holmes short stories, "Silver Blaze" focuses on the disappearance of the eponymous race horse (a famous winner, owned by a Colonel Ross) on the eve of an important race and on the apparent murder of its trainer. The tale is distinguished by its atmospheric Dartmoor setting and late-Victorian sporting milieu. The plotting hinges on the "curious incident of the dog in the night-time":

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?  Holmes: To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night-time.  Holmes: That was the curious incident.  

Saw an odd article in WaPo May 12, 2025, and responded:

----

From Washington Post, May 12, 2025:

Florida kids love this mosquito center. Just don’t call it a museum.

Standing water displays and artificial dog poop teach St. Johns County residents about mosquito control.

Yesterday at 8:00 a.m. EDT

8 min

10

By Lori Rozsa

ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida — Of all the creatures associated with Florida — alligators, flamingos, manatees — possibly the most consequential doesn’t show up in tourism ads or on travel websites.

Did you know that the mosquito prompted the invention of air conditioning? For that reason alone, it deserves some kind of special recognition. A statue, maybe? A proclamation? How about a museum?

St. Johns County in northeast Florida has seen fit to acknowledge the noxious insect with all three.

And now an eight-foot tall bronze statue of a fierce looking Aedes aegypti stands watch at the entrance to the Disease Vector Education Center — a.k.a. the mosquito museum, the only one of its kind in the United States. The museum sparked some outcry about public funding, but the community has warmed to it.

Despite its ponderous official name, the museum is a colorful, trippy delight: Outside is a mosquito-themed playground, complete with a sliding board designed to look like oversize versions of common mosquito hiding spots — a barrel of water on a stack of old tires. There’s a climbing block made from a concrete culvert (prime mosquito breeding grounds), and a dragonfly-shaped riding toy with a sign that reads, “Dragonflies are good to have around because baby dragonflies eat baby mosquitoes.”

The education center is ostensibly aimed at children but also geared toward teaching adults a little more about the No. 1 insect killer of humankind.

“Florida has the distinction of being one of the most pestiferous places on the planet,” said Gordon M. Patterson, author of “The Mosquito Wars: A History of Mosquito Control in Florida.” “That museum is teaching us that we need to learn something about mosquitoes and viruses and plants and water and our place in that ecology.”

Inside are interactive displays that include a life-size rendition of the front porch of an old Florida cracker house. A lifelike model of a yellow Labrador retriever named Albo — short for the type of mosquito that transmits heartworm — sits in the front yard, near his water bowl. That’s another example of a mosquito attractant. So is a small but realistic pile of Albo’s droppings: a part of the exhibit that makes schoolkids squeal with delight, museum guides say.

Across from that is a realistic slice of swampland: dark green, shadowy and damp, representing ideal mosquito habitat.

Both large displays have touch-screen computers set up that encourage visitors to try to spy mosquito hideouts. Push the right button, and a spotlight shines down on the water bowl, or the flower pot, or the birdbath and a half-dozen other common yard items. It makes the point that mosquitoes can lay eggs in even a teaspoon of water.

A helicopter takes up a big space indoors. Visitors can sit in the pilot’s seat and pretend to control the chopper on an aerial spraying mission as a video of the St. Augustine coastline plays in front of them.

There’s an insectary full of live elephant mosquitos, which are large and look slightly alarming but are actually harmless pollinators that don’t bite people or animals. They do feast on other mosquitos — an unusual bonus.

Those are Genhsy Monzon’s favorites.

“When people come in, the usual reaction is, ‘This is not what I expected,’ but in a good way,” said Monzon, an entomologist and the coordinator at the education center. “They’re just in awe as soon as they walk through the door, and honestly I love that, because that’s the same way I reacted.”

Displays of live creatures — scorpions, ants, a huge honeybee observation hive — highlight arthropods, both the helpful (to humans) and the unhelpful. The exhibits walk visitors through the mosquito life cycle (“Wet, Bloody, and Brief”) and feature digital microscopes to take an even closer look.

“The kids just hear, ‘Oh, there’s bugs!’ and they’re curious,” Monzon said. “And there’s a playground. … We make it fun for them. And that’s why they want to learn.”

Monzon points out that the museum informs visitors “about all kinds of disease vectors”: ticks, tsetse flies, sand flies, black flies, lice and fleas.

Some of the exhibits in the museum look like something from one of the big theme parks 100 miles south in Orlando: large, detailed and visually striking. They were designed by engineers and artists who have worked at Disney World and Universal Studios.

But in keeping with the St. Augustine vibe — the historic Castillo de San Marcos National Monument is about six miles away — the mosquito museum is less about theme-park fun and more about education.

“We’re not Disney World here in St. Augustine; we are history,” said Richard Weaver, the mosquito control district’s business manager. “And really our museum ties into that very well.”

Weaver, who helped to research and design many of the exhibits, stops himself before he says more.

“I said the word ‘museum,’ which is banned by us.”

That brings up a thorny subject involving disease vectors, politics and tax dollars.

Mosquito control is serious business in Florida. Most of the state’s 67 counties and many cities across the state have districts that work full time to contain the insects, some of them with elected officials who oversee multimillion-dollar budgets.

Mosquitoes are disease vectors, which means they can transmit diseases between species. Among them: malaria, dengue fever, West Nile virus, yellow fever, and Zika virus. More than 700,000 people die each year from vector-borne diseases, according to the World Health Organization.

Controlling them is key to keeping Florida survivable for 23 million residents and 143 million annual visitors. The Anastasia Mosquito Control District of St. Johns County, founded in 1948, is one of the best-known agencies dedicated to mosquito control. Researchers there work with universities and governments around the world, along with groups such as the World Health Organization.

Executive Director Rui-De Xue had the idea of a building a mosquito education center after visiting one in China several years ago. Supporters envisioned it as another tool in “understanding the tiny yet formidable mosquito,” as the center’s visitor guide puts it.

There was pushback from some residents and county commissioners about using tax dollars, but the mosquito district — which has an annual budget of about $9 million — forged onward. The district’s board said it makes sense to educate the public about things people can do to control mosquitoes: clean birdbaths every few days, empty the dog’s outdoor water bowl daily, dump out anything that holds standing water.

To get past the consternation over what critics called a bug museum, the name became the Disease Vector Education Center.

Monzon said more than 11,000 people visited in the first year, many of them part of school groups. The museum closes Mondays and Tuesdays to host school field trips. The rest of the week, it’s open to the public with free admission.

Sandra Gewehr visited when she was in town for the annual Arbovirus Surveillance and Mosquito Control Workshop last year. She recommends it, calling it a “smart and unusual choice” for tourists, especially families.

“While the subject matter is serious, the center does an admirable job of making it approachable and fun for children,” said Gewehr, who is director of research and development at the European Mosquito Control Association and based in Greece. “There are elements designed specifically to engage younger audiences — things they can touch, see up close, and interact with.”

Patterson, a history professor at the Florida Institute of Technology as well as a mosquito book author, gave the museum designers some tips and mosquito information. He likes the final results. There’s a historical timeline and exhibits that show the “epic battle” between humans and mosquitoes that was once mostly waged with chemicals — DDT used to be the insecticide of choice — and, more recently, with environmental controls.

He’s especially pleased with one display that lets visitors feed live mosquito larvae to a tank full of gambusia, also known as mosquitofish. The fish can consume up to 500 larvae a day and are seen as an environmentally friendly alternative to chemicals.

“I was knocked down at the level of expertise that they were able to deploy,” Patterson said. “We oftentimes think of history as just being driven by figures who stand on podiums and give talks, but sometimes something as small as a grape seed can cause more mischief and lead to more changes in the human population.”

Where to go

Our favorite destinations: Take our destination quiz to choose your own adventure. Then read about 12 dream destinations at the top of our wish list — without the crowds.

Travel like a local: Residents share their favorite places in our top city guides: New Orleans, Rome, Tokyo and Mexico City.

National parks: Explore tips from locals for visiting Yosemite, Glacier and Everglades.

Tales from the road: Trace a route along the southern coast of Puerto Rico. See how jamón gets made in the heartland of Spanish pork.

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Anyone who has ever watched reruns of the 1965-1971 CBS tv comedy series,"Hogan's Heroes.", will remember the catchphrase of the comedic John Banner character, Sgt. HANS GEORG SCHULTZ "I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing! I know nothing. Nothing!"). Here in St. Johns County, amid massive deforestation, overdevelopment, and corruption, unjust stewards like juvenile joyless "JOY" ANDREWS, our maladroit county Administrator, cats paw Commissioners like SARAH ARNOLD and CHRISTIAN WHITEHURST, and their accomplices, including Deputy County Administrator JESSE DUNN, Growth Management (sic) Director MICHAEL ROBERSON, et al. all remind us of Sgt. HANS GEORG SCHULTZ:

On January 8, 2020, I posted on this blog in honor of my late friend, mentor and former USDOL environmental whistleblower client, FBI, HUD and EPA Senior Special Agent Robert E. Tyndall: 

Wednesday, January 08, 2020

FBI, HUD, EPA Senior Special Agent Robert E. Tyndall (Ret.), R.I.P.

1. I am heartbroken. My heart goes out to the entire Tyndall family and to all of Bob's many friends and former colleagues with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and Environmental Protection Agency Inspectors General.
2. As a young lawyer,  I was honored to have Bob Tyndall hire me to represent him in a landmark federal environmental whistleblower case, in which he stood up for what is right, winning a legal precedent, for all time, to protect federal environmental crimes investigators from retaliation by government managers.  The case of Robert E. Tyndall v. EPA Inspector General was decided as one of the first two decisions, on the first working day of the U.S. Department of Labor Administrative Review Board, on June 14, 1996, reversing two (2) misguided DOL administrative law judges who denied Bob his day in court.  The case swiftly settled later that year.  As a result of Bob's environmental whistleblower disclosures, controversial EPA Inspector General John C. Martin was fired in 1996.  Martin served for  thirteen (13) years as EPA Inspector General, during which time Martin often abused government resources to coverup crimes and intimidate ethical employees, including scientists and administrative law judges.  To this day, EPA OIG special agents and supervisors investigating environmental crimes cite Bob's case to managers who try to pressure them to perform coverups.  It is legally protected activity for government investigators to do their jobs without fear or favor, and to recuse themselves if compromised -- we owe this all to Special Agent Bob Tyndall.  Read decision here:
https://www.oalj.dol.gov/PUBLIC/WHISTLEBLOWER/DECISIONS/ARB_DECISIONS/CAA/93CAA06D.HTM
3. Bob Tyndall never "went public" about his case until years later.  Bob finally wrote about it in a 2006 letter to the St. Augustine Record, defending my honor, stating in pertinent part:
"Late in my career, I would not and could not sign my name to a report that resulted in a cover-up of major criminal wrongdoing by highly placed EPA officials. I was left with no choice but to file an environmental whistleblower case. Other than Ed Slavin, I was encouraged to persist only by my wife, Lynda, Congressman John Dingell's office (whose investigator referred me to Ed Slavin), and then-journalist Tony Snow. Ed completely documented EPA's attempted cover-up of $100 million in acid rain research fraud, conflicts of interest, waste and abuse."
"Ed represented me in my U.S. DOL environmental whistleblower case against EPA and its inspector general, winning a precedent-setting case that protected future environmental investigators' rights, reversing two DOL judges."
"Ed has always been a fighter, especially against an unresponsive judiciary who cares little about ruined careers."
"The unrelenting stress the EPA subjected me to nearly took my life. Thus, Ed's work was truly a life-saver. As a result of Ed's so-called "overzealous" work, the EPA IG abruptly resigned in December 1996, following a history of harassing whistleblowers."
"Public officials, who retaliate against citizens for questioning their actions demand to be investigated. "Public jobs belong to the "people" -- the occupant of such office is a trustee; a custodian -- always. We have forfeited our "rights" when we refer to the government as "them." No, never. It is "We" the people. Trust me, Ed Slavin is not for sale. The First Amendment is not dead, yet." 
Full text here:
https://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2006/12/letter-slavins-work-saved-life-of-us.html
4. Bob Tyndall was a good and decent man who brought many white collar criminals to justice over a long and distinguished government  career as a special agent with the FBI, HUD Inspector and EPA Inspector General.  He sent corrupt government officials and contractors to prison.  He chafed  at government pressures not to enforce the law without fear or favor, as in his eight-year criminal antitrust investigation of the ductile iron pipe industry.  Those pressures and stresses shortened his life.  At Raleigh-Durham Airport, Bob almost died with a heart incident caused by these pressures.
5.  Bob Tyndall was a wonderful family man, a talented musician, a wit, a storyteller, a mimic and a scholar of American history.  As a student, he conducted tours of the Justice Department Building as a young FBI employee.  I shall always treasure the time when Bob toured Brian and I around Colonia Williamsburg, Virginia, after he and Lynda retired there.  Bob was the best tour guide in Colonial Williamsburg, as evidenced by his being designated to tour around then FBI Director Robert Swan Mueller, III and his wife.
6. I shall never forget the loving kindness that Bob Tyndall showed me in rushing to California to help me in a nuclear whistleblower case where we all thought my life was in danger -- Bob saved my life.  The corporate defendant knew that Bob had my back.  His sworn declarations, admitted into evidence in the cases of NASA, EPA and other ethical employee whistleblowers, made the difference -- thanks in part to the vision of one of my other legal mentors, the late U.S. Department of Labor Chief Administrative Law Judge Nahum Litt, whom I advised when, during my clerkship, Nahmi and USDOL OALJ hired University of Miami Law School Professor Michael Graham, who wrote USDOL Rules of Evidence containing extra hearsay rules for administrative proceedings (because we trust judges more than juries),  See, e.g., 29 C.F.R. 18.803(28), written in the spirit of F.R.Civ. P. Rule 1, providing for the "just, speedy and inexpensive determination" of civil actions, stating inter alia:
(28) Written reports of expert witnesses. Written reports of an expert witness prepared with a view toward litigation, including but not limited to a diagnostic report of a physician, including inferences and opinions, when on official letterhead, when dated, when including a statement of the expert's qualifications, when including a summary of experience as an expert witness in litigation, when including the basic facts, data, and opinions forming the basis of the inferences or opinions, and when including the reasons for or explanation of the inferences and opinions, so far as admissible under rules of evidence applied as though the witness was then present and testifying, unless the sources of information or the method or circumstances of preparation indicate lack of trustworthiness, provided that a copy of the report has been filed and served upon the adverse party sufficiently in advance of the  hearing to provide the adverse party with a fair opportunity to prepare to object or meet it. The adverse party may not object to the admissibility of the report unless the adverse party files and serves written objection thereto sufficiently in advance of the  hearing stating the objections, and the grounds therefor, that the adverse party will make if the report is offered at the time of the hearing. An adverse party may call the expert as a witness and examine the witness as if under cross-examination.
7. Bob Tyndall was for decades a talented Baptist church organist. He was honored to be invited to play the organ at Luray Caverns, Virginia, which uses stalactites and stalagmites to play music in caverns underground.  He wrote and published Christian music; one of my proudest possessions is a cassette tape of some of the religious songs that he wrote, "99 44/100% Pure Gospel Piano Music."
8. Bob Tyndall had great courage in standing up to white collar crime, corruption and wrongdoing.  We need more Americans like him today in law enforcement and government, people who will indefatigably investigate white collar crime and corruption.
9. When the history of ethical environmental law enforcement employees is written, Bob will be in it.
10. He's in Heaven now, and I miss him already.  Godspeed, brother!

On March 11, 2025, elected Mosquito Control Commissioner Martha Gleason of Ponte Vedra resigned in protest of AMCD mismanagement and wasteful spending, including 41% cost overruns on a $4.5 million Mosquito.Museum. 

Five people have applied to be appointed to Ms. Gleason's seat by Florida Secretary of Agriculture and Consumer Services Wilton Simpson: former AMCD Commissioners Don Girvan, a former Army Captain with expertise in helicopters. Mr. Gary Howell and Ms. Catherine Brandhorst; as well as former St. Augustine Beach Police Chief Richard Hedges, and Mr. Branden Balloni, President of the Northeast Florida Marine Association.  

Captain Girvan has extensive experience with helicopters in Vietnam.  As a civilian, Don Girvan showed courage under fire when in 2007 he was threatened with arrest by AMCD Chair Barbara Bosanko to opposing the purchase of a no-bid luxury $1.8 million Bell Jet helicopter in capable of killing a single skeeter. 

No appointment is expected until after the 2025 Florida Legislature adjourns sine die.  The Republican dominated Legislature is feuding with Governor RONALD DION DeSANTIS and it has still not passed a budget, its only mandatory duty in the Florida Constitution

Other-directed former St. Johns County Congressman RONALD DION DeSANTIS, our Florida Boy Governor, is funded by campaign contribution from Big Pharma and Big Business.  His veto will be overridden, but he's appealed to his base -- mean and base special interests. 

From News Service of Florida:

By NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA

PUBLISHED: May 15, 2025 at 3:54 PM EDT

Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday he will veto a bill that seeks to expand lawsuits by some people pursuing medical-malpractice claims involving the deaths of family members.

DeSantis said the proposal (HB 6017) to repeal a long-controversial 1990 law will cause insurance premiums to “skyrocket” by allowing people to expand economic damage claims to include non-economic damages.

“What that is going to do, is that’s going to lead to a flood of lawsuits against practitioners, against hospitals. Malpractice premiums are going to go up,” DeSantis said during an event in Dade City.

DeSantis said he relied upon input from people at health care hospitals and physicians.

“It was pretty overwhelming in terms of the concern,” DeSantis said.

Under the 1990 law, people who are 25 years old or older cannot seek what are known as “non-economic” damages in medical-malpractice cases involving deaths of their parents.

Also, parents cannot seek such damages in malpractice cases involving the deaths of their children who are 25 or older.

The bill, which the governor has not received yet, was strongly supported during the 2025 legislative session by people who allege their family members were killed by medical malpractice.

ealth-care and business groups have lobbied against it.

Lawmakers could revisit the issue, as DeSantis suggested putting limits on monetary awards.

“What I suggested that was done — I know there was some support for it in the Senate — is that if you had caps on the amount of damages, people could see that and would disincentivize a lot of jackpot justice,” DeSantis said.

Damage caps have been a lightning-rod issue for decades, with health-care groups backing such limits and plaintiffs’ attorneys fighting them.

Supporters of the repeal have said the law prevents people from getting justice for deaths caused by medical malpractice.

“This is a 35-year-old law that needs to be repealed. … It’s unjust. It shouldn’t be on the books,” Senate bill sponsor Clay Yarborough, R-Jacksonville, said before the Senate voted 33-4 to pass the bill on May 1.

The House approved the measure in a 104-6 vote on March 26.

We expect Florida's new Black History Museum in St. Augustine will help remedy the misguided efforts to mislead us about our history and culture.  FromFlorida Phoenix:

COMMENTARY

Don’t let Florida sugarcoat its history of Jim Crow

Era’s dark legacy haunts state to this day – and don’t forget it.

BARRINGTON SALMON

MAY 16, 2025 7:00 AM

 Civil rights demonstrators being marched off to jail after defying restraining orders in Tallahassee, 1963, via State Archives and Library of Florida.

“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.” – James Baldwin

There is a deep irony that the face of resistance against Ron DeSantis’ efforts to conceal and misrepresent Florida’s Black history has lived the very history that the governor and his arch-conservative/MAGA buddies are working so hard to erase.

Racism and discrimination are poisons that have infected every part of this country and all of its institutions, including the legal and criminal justice system, education and academia, the military, the media, and healthcare. Segregation, discrimination and legal and de facto separation of the races was never stamped out and is rearing its ugly head again thanks to arch-conservative elements seeking to return the state and the country to a time when Black people occupied a place several tiers below their white counterparts.

Although the governor is wont to sugarcoat the brutality of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and the casual, ruthless treatment of African Americans in Florida, 84-year-old historian and scholar Dr. Marvin Dunn is living proof of the lies and emptiness of the DeSantis/MAGA narrative.

He and other Black people carry in their bones the wretched history that DeSantis and others so desperately want to hide.

‘I know Jim Crow’

“I knew Jim Crow. I grew up in Florida under his dark, suffocating wings. I knew him intimately, as did every Black person I knew growing up in Deland and Miami in the 1940s and 50s,” Dunn writes in his book, “A History of Florida: Through Black Eyes.”

“He hovered over every aspect of the first twenty-five years of my life, sucking ambition from me. I grew up during the last vestiges of his reign. I was so used to seeing the signs that read, “Whites seat from front – Colored seat from rear” on public buses that, when they were finally removed in the 1960s, sometimes I thought I still saw them there.

“Even after his death, Jim Crow was, for a while, omnipresent mentally and emotionally in our lives; such had been his reach. No black person I knew escaped the impact of the Jim Crow system or the possibility of being killed for no other reason than being black. A black person in Florida, during the time I grew up, lived with a pervasive awareness of the limitations a racist society imposed and of the impact those limitations imposed upon one’s life.”

With the passage of time, fading memories, and historical misinformation and disinformation, DeSantis and others seek to soften the violent, random, heartless system and spare the descendants of the perpetrators the pain of memory.

Against this background, Dunn’s is one voice standing up to the DeSantis political steamroller. He is a man whose actions are consistent with his values and beliefs. Dunn’s stories, books, lectures, and interviews serve as a poignant reminder of the power and potency of Black people.

Racial caste system

Dunn, 84, is countering the lies, hateful rhetoric, suppression of free speech and dissent, and efforts to intimidate critics and anyone standing up to DeSantis and the MAGA horde.

Dunn was born in DeLand and grew up in the segregated South to a family that endured the indignities of Jim Crow and struggled economically because of racism and segregation, not because they didn’t work damn hard.

Dunn says in his book that in June 1940, he was born in an orange grove barn in the Blackberry community of DeLand. Corinne Elizabeth Williams, his mother, was a housecleaner and cook, and his father, James C. Dunn Sr., was a fruit and vegetable picker. The family were migrants who harvested crops in DeLand and Hicksville on Long Island, N.Y., he recalled.

He vividly remembers that every aspect of Black life was suffocated by the rigid racial caste system that consigned African Americans to second- and third-class citizenship manifested in inferior living accommodations; the worst-paying jobs, and a joke of an educational system. Black schools were in deplorable condition, the books were hand-me-downs, and children often had to walk miles to school in all types of weather, often passing sturdy, well-constructed white schools on the way.

“For most blacks of my generation in Florida, and I suspect elsewhere, the inferiority of our blackness was instilled in us by the people who were closest to us, our parents and grandparents,” Dunn writes.

Disrespect

“Jim Crow ruled. We used the colored water fountain at the Volusia County Courthouse. The water was not chilled as it was in the white fountain. We used bathrooms in the basement that were marked for ‘colored.’ I noticed that when I went downtown with my mother to shop, whites had the privilege of skipping ahead of us. Essentially, in the South at that time, a white person was not expected to wait until a black person was served, which would have been an act of subservience, or at least, respect.”

Noted Civil Rights attorney Benjamin Crump captured Dunn’s life’s work.

“As Black history is scrubbed from classrooms, Dr. Marvin Dunn is planting truth — literally. Under a tree at FL Int’l Univ, he’s teaching the Rosewood massacre and handing out banned books. In a state erasing our past, Black educators are once again forced to be the curriculum,” Crump wrote.

Meanwhile, after being named chair of the FIU Psychology department, Dunn co-produced several video documentaries. His FIU archival collection now consists of more than 4,000 photographs and images reflecting the Florida Black experience.

As a historian specializing in Black Florida history and culture, Dunn is founder and president of the Miami Center for Racial Justice and is known for organizing the “Teach the Truth” tours, which highlight Florida’s history of racial violence. Center staff members take participants to historic sites related to the history of racial violence in the state.

Dunn’s books include his “History of Florida,” “Black Miami in the Twentieth Century,” and “The Miami Riot of 1980: Crossing the Bounds.” In July 2024, the center received a Mellon Foundation grant of $1.5 million to extend this work to Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

‘Insult to injury’

Except for an occasional phenomenon like Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, or Gloria Lockerman, Dunn remembers, Black Floridians saw little that was worth emulating.

“Adding insult to injury, this was by design, and Florida itself was complicit in it by subjecting us to a segregated education system that intentionally depicted African Americans primarily as laborers,” he writes in his “History.”

“My education in Florida schools skipped over slavery with a few drawings of slaves picking cotton and appearing happy to be doing it. They had neat little cabins with little black children playing in the background. Florida was complicit because it imposed upon us a racist educational system that denied us our heroes, heroines and fighters. It was an effective, intentional and insipid way of milking ambition from generations of black Floridians,” Dunn writes in his “History.”

DeSantis’ Florida, and by extension about half of America, are places where one group of people believe they have the God-given right to alter the truth, expurgate historical facts, and suppress the racial violence, lynching, and destruction of Black communities in Ocooe and Rosewood in the early 20th Century. They’re intent on erasing the savagery and casual violence and diminishing the accomplishments Black Floridians wrote into history.

William DC Clark, a South Florida retired firefighter and paramedic, argues African Americans and their allies must fight like hell against this tyranny of the minority on all fronts.

“By now everyone knows that Trump (and DeSantis) are trying to erase any significant gains that Blacks have made. They’re trying to make it look like we didn’t even exist. Some say they’re trying to take us back to the day when we were considered 3/5ths of a man,” Clark, president of the DCS Mentoring Program in Miami, told me in a recent interview.

Passive no more

“But what gets me is, when most reporters report on the latest DEI snub or latest firing of a top-ranked Black person, they do so as if they were reporting on someone being given a ticket for jaywalking.

“Maybe they feel the same way as Trump. Maybe they’re so used to many of us being so passive that it’s normal to them. But this is anything but normal and contrary to their beliefs, some of us will die for our freedom. FAFO if you want to … .”

The days of Blacks only having the option of cleaning white people’s homes; being prohibited from entering through the front door; being forced to step off the sidewalk when white people approached; enduring busing to get an education; and keeping Blacks in line are dead.

Dunn and Clark are the tip of widespread resistance in Florida and elsewhere to the grotesque efforts by Ron DeSantis and the Republican-majority Legislature, GOP leaders, policymakers, and donors to drag the country back to Jim Crow.

DeSantis and his hobgoblins probably think they’ve won this battle because the opposition is afraid and confused, and too many have been cowed into silence. But all of us need to do as Clark and Dunn have done and continue to fight against the forces of ignorance by organizing, protesting, engaging in civil disobedience, and using the courts, literature, music, and theater arts. Because, despite what the MAGA crowd posits, African Americans are Americans too.

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BARRINGTON SALMON

Journalist Barrington Salmon lived and wrote in Florida (Miami and Tallahassee) for 20 years. He is a 2017 Annenberg National Fellow (University of Southern California) who currently freelances for publications including the National Newspaper Publishers Association/Black Press USA, Trice Edney Newswire and Al Jazeera. He was educated in the United Kingdom, Jamaica and the U.S. Salmon lives in the nation's capital and can be heard on his Livestream video blog “Speak Freely with Barrington Salmon.” Connect with Barrington on Speak Freely + follow him on Twitter/X (@bsalmondc), Instagram and on his Facebook pages, Barrington Salmon & BarringtonSalmonWrites.

Our former St. Johns County Congressman, Boy Governor RONALD DION DeSANTIS, is risking a Florida state government shutdown as part of his performative puffery. Here is FSU English Professor Diane Roberts' May 5, 2025 column from Florida Phoenix:

COMMENTARY

Florida Republicans are eating their own

And they’re not putting up with DeSantis’ games anymore.

DIANE ROBERTS

MAY 5, 2025 7:00 AM

 Reps. Fabian Basabe, left, and Dean Black, right, sit in a near-empty House chamber as the regular session struggles to come to an end on May 2, 2025. (Photo by Jay Waagmeester/Florida Phoenix)

Florida’s elected representatives are fighting like weasels in a sack.

The Senate versus the House; the House versus the governor; the governor versus everybody.

They’re so furious they can’t even see straight.

The governor has one job: Look after the best interests of the people of Florida, who are crying out for affordable insurance, housing, decent public schools, clean water — small stuff like that.

But he prefers to spend his time yelling about “woke” education and exhorting cops to pick up anyone who looks “illegal,” even if they’re U.S. citizens.

The Legislature has one job: Pass a budget during their two-month session.

They haven’t managed to do it yet. They went home on Frida but they didn’t get around to the budget. They say they’ll reconvene in a week.

The Senate wants to cut sales tax on clothes costing under 75 bucks, reduce the business rent tax from 2% to 1%, and give a one-time credit for vehicle registration fees.

The House wants to slash sales tax on everything and spend $4.4 billion less than the Senate.

The two chambers are supposed to be negotiating a compromise, but Speaker Daniel Perez says senators aren’t playing nice, dismissing their proposals “unacceptable” and “patronizing.”

Senate President Ben Albritton politely insists he won’t pass massive tax cuts “at the expense of the long-term financial stability of our state.”

Such tax cuts would pretty much insure county and municipal governments — police, firefighters, parks, roads, libraries — would take an enormous hit.

The governor says cutting sales tax will only help those dang tourists — AKA Florida’s No. One industry, especially the dastardly Canadians. (Who’s going to tell him they’re vacationing elsewhere these days?)

He wants to go even bigger (and dumber), abolishing property taxes or at least upping the homestead exemption.

If you rent or you depend on local services, you’re out of luck.

Dissing DeSantis

At the moment, both chambers are either openly flouting or ostentatiously ignoring directives from the governor’s office.

The Senate has refused to confirm a slew of his nominees, including University of West Florida trustees and heads of the Department of Children and Families and the Agency for Healthcare Administration.

In an attempt to stop the washed-up-politician-to-higher-ed-sinecure pipeline, the House has passed a bill to bring university presidential searches back into the sunshine, letting taxpayers know who’s under consideration.

DeSantis is outraged: “They want the universities to be able to pursue a leftist indoctrination agenda,” he says, a statement that suggests he has never met members of the Florida House.

The governor seems trapped in a perpetual temper tantrum, calling Daniel Perez “terrible,” “rotten,” “treacherous,” and “a tool of the Left.”

This “tool of the left” is the same Daniel Perez who’s such a good little MAGA he got the House to pass a bill called “Tackling and Reforming Unlawful Migration Policy” — also known as the TRUMP Act.

DeSantis had called a special session in January, demanding legislators adopt his bill, giving him near-monarchical power over private businesses and law enforcement, all in the name of fighting the sinister foreigners infiltrating the state to pick tomatoes and put up drywall.

Instead, the Legislature gaveled out, then gaveled in their own special session, thumbing their noses at the governor to whom they once bowed down before.

This is what happens when you 1. Run against Trump; and 2. Become politically irrelevant.

Mutual snark

Perez and DeSantis have been snarking at each other for months, but now their reactionary-Republican-on-reactionary-Republican war has gotten hotter than Tallahassee in August.

Not only has the House defied the governor, its healthcare budget committee has been digging into Hope Florida, a charity founded by Casey DeSantis.

Ms. DeS is generally assumed to be running for governor in 2026.

Hope Florida claimed to be about keeping needy people off that nasty ol’ gubmint assistance, funneling them to church programs and other private aid groups.

“Hope Florida is not a program,” says Casey DeSantis. “Hope Florida is an idea, Hope Florida is a philosophy.”

Problem is, as Rep. Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola says, Hope Florida also looks a lot like “conspiracy to commit money laundering and wire fraud.”

Oh, dear.

Here’s what happened: Centene Corp., a Fortune 500 company and Florida’s biggest Medicaid contractor, overcharged for prescription drugs.

It could happen to anyone! Just ask Sen. Rick Scott.

Centene settled with the state for $67 million.

The DeSantis administration told the Legislature about $57 million of that. But $10 million that should have been divided between the state and the feds somehow got donated to the Hope Florida Foundation.

Hope Florida promptly funneled that $10 million to two political committees, one called “Save Our Society From Drugs” (they mean fun drugs, not Advil) and the other “Secure Florida’s Future.”

SFF is controlled by the Florida Chamber of Commerce, which uses it to make dark money campaign contributions.

Nothing shady there, right?

You call this ‘clean’?

It gets better (or worse if you give a damn about ethics and the rule of law): Within a few weeks these two dodgy outfits directed $8.5 million of their windfall to another one, “Keep Florida Clean” (not making this up), the purpose of which was to defeat Amendment 3.

That was the amendment seeking to legalize marijuana. It narrowly lost in the 2024 elections.

Guess who controlled the Keep Florida Clean PAC?

James Uthmeier, attorney general of the State of Florida and DeSantis’ former chief of staff and presidential campaign manager.

A lot of that money paid for ads against Amendment 3, an action that was probably illegal.

Rep. Andrade accuses Uthmeier of “money laundering and wire fraud.”

Uthmeier dismisses Andrade as a tool of “Big Marijuana.”

He says he wasn’t involved in the Hope donation thing.

Or, not very involved, or even aware of what it was, though he swam in the tightest inner circle of DeSantisWorld, up to his eyeballs in some of the governor’s stupidest ideas, including building a golf course in the fragile habitat of Jonathan Dickinson State Park.

The evidence suggests he was very involved.

Meanwhile, DeSantis is in full hissy-fit mode, accusing legislators of working with Democrats and the “liberal media” to trash his wife’s pet charity and derail her political ambitions.

In one of his weird rants he says, “Some people feel threatened by the First Lady, accusing the Legislature and the press of “doing narrative.”

He goes on: “You know, if you’re looking at 2026 and you’ve got some horse, you don’t want her anywhere near that. You’re very worried because she runs circles around their people.”

 ‘Mistakes were made’

Rep. Andrade slaps back: “I don’t care if she files to run for governor,” adding, “Given how much credit she gets for the Hope Florida Foundation and the Hope Florida program, I’m just kind of shocked at how incompetent she’s been in managing all of it.”

Casey DeSantis had been polling pretty well against declared candidate Byron Donalds, recipient of the presidential endorsement, a congressman who calls Donald Trump “Daddy.”

The Hope debacle could change that.

Hope Florida’s president Joshua Hay allowed as how “mistakes were made” and resigned, as did one of Hope’s attorneys.

Frustrated that people from the Chamber of Commerce and the various dark money committees involved in Hope refused to talk, Andrade has dropped the inquiry — for now.

The House could return to it later.

The Legislature may have backed off investigating Hope, but the “liberal media,” lawyers, political consultants, campaign managers, and maybe even some judges  will not.

More like this will come to light; more evidence of what Andrade calls the DeSantis “culture of neglect, incompetence and entitlement” will emerge, just as the 2026 gubernatorial campaign kicks off.

The Fall of the House of DeSantis is going to be quite the spectacle.

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DIANE ROBERTS

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee, which probably explains her unhealthy fascination with Florida politics. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

If this hare-brained proposal is not laughed out of the room by the Florida Acquisition and Restoration Council on May 21, it will go before the Governor and Cabinet on June 10, 2025.  The Governor and Cabinet are the Board of Trustees of the Florida Internal Improvements Trust, whose counsel was once Isaac Henry Dean, who worked for five Governors, ran two Water Management Districts, and served two terms as St. Johns County Commissioner (District 5).  From Action News Jax:

ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. — Neighbors and environmental groups are raising the alarm about a newly proposed land swap deal that could take a significant chunk of land out of the Guana Wildlife Management Area. 

Spanning nearly 10,000 acres, the Guana Wildlife Management Area is considered a gem by locals in St. Johns County.

“We have Maritime Hammocks, we’ve got gopher tortoises. There are over 80 bird species that Fish and Wildlife has said are species of greatest conservation need. It’s a wonderful ecological treasure,” said Chris Farrell, the Northeast Florida Policy Associate for Audubon Florida.

It’s why Farrell and other conservationists were floored when they caught wind of a proposed land trade that dropped late in the day Wednesday.

“Just like the state park proposal, this kind of came out last minute without a lot of public notice,” said Farrell.

The trade would swap a 600-acre piece of land in the heart of the management area for just over 3,000 acres of land scattered throughout the Florida wildlife corridor.

“We don’t want to have to trade conservation lands, one for the other. The idea is to build this portfolio over time,” said Farrell.

The other party in the proposed deal is The Upland LLC, which according to Sunbiz records seems to be associated with Contega Business Services, LLC.

We tried to reach the company to ask what its plans were for the Guana River land, but didn’t hear back.

Farrell said, based on previous attempts to acquire lands in the area by other entities, the suspicion is the company may want to develop it for residential use.

“The few details we have mention wetlands protection with some easements, but kind of says maybe the uplands are gonna be developed,” said Farrell.

And while 600 acres may only make up a relatively small portion of the total management area, Farrell argued efforts to develop the land in question could pose serious issues for the maintenance and preservation of the Guana River Management Area as a whole, especially when it comes to prescribed burns.

“I just hope they learn from what happened with the state parks and they see the commitment that the people of Florida have to conservation,” said Farrell.

The Acquisition and Restoration Council will make its recommendation next Wednesday. 

The proposal will then head for a final decision before the Governor and Cabinet on June 10th.

If this hare-brained proposal is not laughed out of the room by the Florida Acquisition and Restoration Council on May 21, it will go before the Governor and Cabinet on June 10, 2025.  The Governor and Cabinet are the Board of Trustees of the Florida Internal Improvements Trust, whose counsel was once Isaac Henry Dean, who worked for five Governors, ran two Water Management Districts, and served two terms as St. Johns County Commissioner (District 5).   From Jacksonville Today:

The Guana Wildlife Management Area is a state-owned conservation area north of St. Augustine where visitors can walk on paths and enjoy the great outdoors, but also hunt for waterfowl. | Flickr, Justin Ellenberger

A state committee next week is set to discuss swapping a 600-acre plot of conservation land in the state-owned Guana River Wildlife Management Area north of St. Augustine in exchange for non-contiguous parcels of land across the state, at the request of a developer. 

If the state Department of Environmental Protection’s Acquisition and Restoration Council approves the trade of those 600 acres for five times as many acres of conservation land elsewhere, the governor’s office will have to sign off on letting Upland LLC take over the currently protected land.

Public notice of the May 21 meeting shocked local environmentalists like Chris Farrell. He works as the Northeast Florida policy associate for the National Audubon Society, the bird conservation nonprofit. 

Ferrell says developing within the wildlife management area would be disastrous for animals that call it home as well as the ones who live on nearby sensitive lands and waterways. 

“This land in particular is part of connected pieces of public land along the coast that provide a very important bit of preserved coastal habitat here in Northeast Florida,” Ferrell says. “And this development would just cut a huge swath right through the middle, separating conservation land to the east and west, and would create many problems in the management.”

Some of that conservation land to the west is the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve. The reserve is made up of more than 75,000 acres of conservation land running from Ponte Vedra to Palm Coast and is where scientists research everything from water quality to native species. 

DaleAnn Viger is executive director of the Friends of GTM, the nonprofit that supports the research reserve. She says she and her board were blindsided by the news of the land swap and strongly oppose it.

“This proposal undermines more than three decades of investment, research and stewardship,” Viger says. “The lands in question are not surplus — they are integral to the health and function of one of Florida’s most ecologically significant estuarine systems.”

“Development adjacent to these protected lands would fragment habitats, increase pollution, threaten biodiversity and hinder the reserve’s ability to manage the ecosystems,” she says. 

The proposal 

The 600 acres that the state may give up are part of the Guana Wildlife Management Area near State Road A1A in St. Johns County.

Wildlife management areas are like state parks with fewer regulations. The state still oversees the land, but uses like hunting are allowed.

In exchange for the 600 acres of public land, applicant Upland LLC is offering 3,000 acres of land across Florida. That includes 220 acres elsewhere in St. Johns County, about 1,400 acres in the forests of Lafayette County and 250 acres adjacent to the Volusia County Conservation Corridor.

“Even though it might look enticing to get a larger number of acres in a few other places, it’s not really, considering the value of this specific property and the investment we’ve had over the years,” Ferrell says. 

As for who’s behind the proposal? 

In order for the state to deem the land in the wildlife management area no longer in need of conservation, an applicant must own land adjacent to the state’s land. Only one entity does: New Outpost LLC. 

New Outpost bought the parcel from a subsidiary of Jacksonville’s Gate Petroleum, Ponte Vedra Corp., which was at the center of a controversial development proposal for the property several years ago.

Gate President John Peyton tells Jacksonville Today they have since sold the land and are “absolutely not involved” in the currently proposed land swap. 

Gate founder Herbert Hill Peyton sold a chunk of the land that makes up Guana to the state in the 1980s. In a statement to Jacksonville Today, the elder Peyton said he opposes the plan.

“Guana State Park is the finest land in Northeast Florida and no portion should be sold, swapped or developed,” he said. “This land belongs to the people of Florida and should be preserved forever.”

What could be developed?

Very little information is available about what could potentially be built in the Guana Wildlife Management Area. The applicant’s paperwork says “a majority of the wetland habitats will be avoided to ensure they are under conservation in perpetuity.”

With so little information publicly available and a hearing announced with only a week’s notice, Audubon’s Ferrell says he’s reminded of last year when the Department of Environmental Protection, under the direction of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office, proposed to develop golf courses and lodges in state parks, including Anastasia State Park in St. Augustine. That proposal died amid loud public outcry. 

GTM’s Viger says, “We ask all those who care about Florida’s wild places to raise their voices. This is a critical moment to stand for science, transparency and the public good.” 

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The state’s Acquisition and Restoration Council meets at 9 a.m. on Wednesday, May 21 in Conference Room 137 of the Department of Environmental Protection’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas Building, 3900 Commonwealth Blvd., Tallahassee. 

More information about the meeting, including a sign-up for digital access.

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This story was updated on May 15, 2025, with a statement from Gate Petroleum founder Herbert Hill Peyton.

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Noah HertzReporter emailNoah Hertz is a Jacksonville Today reporter focusing on St. Johns County.

Mr. Timothy John Burton, 55, of Ponte Vedra has been named to the board of the Anastasia Mosquito Control District of St. Johns County by Florida Secretary of Agriculture and Consumer Services Wilton Simpson.  

Congratulations! 

From the Florida 7th Circuit Judicial Nominating Commission:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 16, 2025

CONTACT: Travis Mydock, Chair

Seventh Circuit Judicial Nominating Commission

Phone: (904) 864-3002

Email: tmydock@mydocklaw.com

SEVENTH CIRCUIT JUDICIAL NOMINATING COMMISSION

NOTICE OF VACANCY IN THE SEVENTH JUDICIAL CIRCUIT COURT

NOTICE OF VACANCY IN THE ST. JOHNS COUNTY COURT

AND REQUEST FOR APPLICATIONS

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. – Governor Ron DeSantis has requested that the Seventh Circuit

Judicial Nominating Commission convene for the purpose of selecting and submitting a list of

highly qualified lawyers for appointment to the Seventh Judicial Circuit Court and the St. Johns

County Court. The Seventh Judicial Circuit includes Flagler, Putnam, St. Johns and Volusia

counties. These appointments shall fill a vacancy created by the retirement of Judge Stasia

Warren and the elevation of Judge Lauren Blocker.

The deadline to apply is Monday, June 23, 2025 at 9:00 am EST. Applicants must meet the

qualifications described in Article V, Section 8 of the Florida Constitution. Incomplete or late

applications will not be considered. Applications must be delivered by email to the Chair, Travis

Mydock, at tmydock@mydocklaw.com.

The current version of the application (“Judicial Appointment Application 2022”) is available at:

https://www.flgov.com/eog/info/judicial/applications

To be considered, an applicant must deliver the following by email:

1. 2. A .pdf version of the complete application with all attachments; and

A .pdf redacted version of the complete application with all attachments, excluding all

exempt information under Chapter 119, Florida Statutes, or other applicable law.

A complete application shall include: a signed Certificate, Financial History, notarized Form 6,

Judicial Application Data Record, FDLE form, a writing sample, and a current color photograph.

All questions in the application must be answered fully and completely. Applicants must include

current contact information for all judges, co-counsel, opposing counsel, and references to

facilitate the background investigation. Each .pdf file should be titled so that the applicant’s full

name and “original” or “redacted” is readily apparent before opening the attachment. The

application and all attachments should be combined into a single .pdf file.

The Commission will interview applicants on Friday, July 11, 2025 in St. Augustine.

Page 1 of 2All proceedings of the Seventh Circuit Judicial Nominating Commission are open to the public,

except for deliberations. Applicants should expect that their application will not remain

confidential.

Members of the judiciary, bar, and public are encouraged to contact the Commission

regarding any applicant for judicial appointment. All written correspondence regarding an

applicant should be sent by email to the Chair, Travis Mydock, at tmydock@mydocklaw.com.

The Chair will disseminate all information to the Commission.

Applicants in need of guidance should direct inquires to the Chair by email. The list of current

members of the Seventh Circuit Judicial Nominating Commission for the follows:

Travis Mydock, B.C.S. (Chair)

Terrence White, Esq. (Vice Chair)

Casey Arnold, Esq.

Geremy Gregory, Esq.

Kelly Parsons Kwiatek, Esq.

Andrew Morgan, Esq.

John Reid, B.C.S.

Anna Shea, Esq.

Erica Tesh White, Esq.

Page 2 of 2

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As Bill Clinton says, "if you're driving down the road, and you see a turtle on a fencepost, you know that somebody put her there." Prediction: Former Congressional candidate BRANDON J. PATTY, former SJC REC Chair and current Clerk of Courts and Comptroller -- will run for Congress, and the St. Johns County political machine will push TRAVIS JAMES HUTSON to succeed PATTY as SJC Clerk of Courts and Comptroller.  

From Jacksonville Today:

St. Johns County hires former Sen. Travis Hutson

In response, I filed a records request on May 16, 2025:

Oak Ridge mercury declassification 42nd anniversary (4100+ words). 

(Copyright  (c) 1983-2025 Ed Slavin All Rights Reserved) 

"Joy cometh in the morning," the scripture says.  Forty years ago, on the morning of May 17, 1983, I got a phone call in our Appalachian Observer weekly newspaper office at 121 Leinart Street in Clinton, Tennessee, inviting us to send someone to the Federal Building in Oak Ridge, Tennessee to pick up some documents in response to our small weekly newspaper's Freedom of Information Act request.  The release of those documents helped transform the Oak Ridge Oligarchy of Atomic Blunderers, and all who would misuse classification stamps to hide the truth from the American people. 

I never took chemistry in college, though earning a B.S.F.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University (the same degree as President Clinton), sometimes called "bullshit for sure." The degree was once called "Safe from Science."

In 1982, reading government environmental documents in a windowless room the bowels of the Oak Ridge Federal Building, I read about the high levels of "Hg" in local waterways. Being unencumbered by a college chemistry education, I did not remember what "Hg" was, so I called and  asked District Attorney General James Nelson Ramsey, my friend and mentor, who lived in Oak Ridge since the age of one, and whose late father was a chemist and patentee who worked on the Manhattan Project.

"Mercury," General Ramsey said.   

I replied, "Boy, General, y'all sure have a lot of it in the creeks around here!"

Mercury is a neurotoxin, known to be poisonous since ancient Roman times. 

The biggest mercury pollution event in world history was a federally-directed, federally-concealed environmental crime, committed in secret by Union Carbide Corporation Nuclear Division in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. 

The pollution poisoned the land, creeks, groundwater and nuclear plant workers' lungs and brains and lives.

Oak Ridge mercury pollution was made possible by federal national security secrecy paranoia, federal funds, federal impunity, federal immunity, and lousy louche lax oversight by Congress and  federal agencies.  The Soviets used mercury in their nuclear weapons plants before Americans did -- our goverment and Union Carbide were protecting organizational and individual reputations, not protecting national security, by keeping use of mercury secret.

In 1983, members of Congress wanted answers, or at least then-Rep. Al Gore and some others acted like they did.   But they choked and did not complete the job.

In Clinton, Tennessee, the School Board's federal grants coordinator, Dr. W. Eugene Collins, Ph.D.  called me "the mercury kid" for ferreting out the fact of this pollution, forcing DOE to release information by requesting declassification, after somnambulistic reporters from three daily newspapers, and government employees with the State of Tennessee, took "classified" as if it were an immutable fact.  

From Georgetown courses, I knew there were declassification procedures, so I invoked them, without knowing the details -- I knew we wanted the documents, and we got 'em.

Newspapers around our Nation and all over the world reported the then newly "declassified" Oak Ridge Y-12 Nuclear Weapon Plant pollution, including the largest mercury pollution event in world history.  Elliott Marshall's July 8, 1983 article from SCIENCE Magazine, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) reported the crime, as did national newspapers.  

Anderson County District Attorney General James Nelson Ramsey recommended me for a Pulitzer Prize for our Appalachian Observer's investigative reporting winning the mercury declassification.  

++++

I was a beardless youth of 26, and I was then (as I am now) unencumbered by ever taking journalism course.  But I had a nose for news, and worked to expose the corrupt political culture of Clinton and Oak Ridge.  Our targets included powerful, undertaxed coal and land companies and a corpulent School Superintendent whose reign of error ended after voters approved a referendum for electing the Superintendent. 

We also exposed Sheriff Dennis Owen Trotter, twice the Tennessee Sheriff of the Year, a putative Democrat, who was investigated for drug conspiracy and bribery and went to federal prison for it.  

Sheriff Trotter told me that I was "the most dangerous reporter" he "ever met" in his entire life, once offering $100 for one of his deputies to beat me up (an offer none accepted). 

The  morning of my first law school exam in Memphis (Torts), Sheriff Trotter had me served with a $1 million libel lawsuit.   The bail bondsmen in cahoots with Trotter claimed I defamed them.

But it it was Sheriff Trotter and his co-felons who ended paying me, with the bail bondsman I investigated admitting they paid Sheriff Dennis Owen Trotter $10,633.50 in bribes (10% of the income they got from having 87% of the bail bonding business in Anderson County Jail in January to May, 1983. 

Trotter went to federal prison for four years, one of nine Tennessee Sheriffs convicted of federal drug conspiracy crimes ). When he got out, we met in federal court in Memphis, where we settled the civil case (I agreed never to contact Trotter again, insisting through learned counsel, lawyer Hayden Lait, that the no-contact agreement be mutual, and "include bullets.")

++++

42 years ago, on July 11. 1983, shortly after lunch, I was testifying under oath about Y-12 nuclear weapons plant mercury pollution before an historic Congressional hearing, co-chaired by two (2) Tennessee members of the U.S. Congress, in the packed Oak Ridge Museum of Atomic Energy auditorium, on stage, before Tennessee Democratic Congress members Albert Gore, Jr., and Marilyn Lloyd, who were co-chairing meetings of their two House of Representatives Science and Technology subcommittees, one on Oversight and Investigations, chaired by Gore and the one on Energy Research and Development, chaired by, Marilyn Lloyd (D-Chattanooga).   

For decades, Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant workers were forbidden to talk about health problems, poisons including mercury were promiscuously consumed and recklessly emitted, a scientist was fired for taking "unauthorized soil samples" and asking questions about mercury.  The 1977 Elwood mercury inventory report was stamped "Business Confidential" by Union Carbide.  Feckless federal managers honored Union Carbide's demand for secrecy.

That's the way it was, until our tiny tabloid Appalachian Observer weekly newspaper's November 1982 FOIA and declassification request was granted by DOE on May 17, 1983, some 182 days after we asked for it.  (After its massive illegal pollution was exposed by DoE document releases to us, Union Carbide did not rebid for the Oak Ridge contracts and was later perpetrator of tens of thousands of poisoning deaths and injuries in Bhopal, India).

Six days after the declassification, DOE did a dog-and-pony show before the Oak Ridge City Council.  

At the Oak Ridge City Council, I happily cross-examined DOE and Union Carbide managers for some twenty minutes, hammering at their deception.  I asked whether it would be considered "an act of war" if the Soviet Union dumped millions of pounds of mercury over Oak Ridge.  

I asked if DOE planned to apologize, and DOE said no; I responded, borrowing a line from the book and movie, Love Story: "Does being DOE mean never having to say you're sorry?" 

Chairman Gore, later Vice President, honored our request to his superlative staffer, Steve Owens to require sworn testimony on Oak Ridge pollution.   Then-Rep. Gore swore in all the witnesses, conducting an investigative hearing -- first time ever in the entire history of U.S. nuclear weapons, where secret meetings were held on a small secure room in the fourth floor of the Capitol .before the Joint Commission on Atomic Energy, which protected DOE and the Atomic Energy Commission from public scrutiny.

During a recess in the July 11, 1983 Gore hearing, I conferred on the steps of the Museum with both of the two local DAs and both of the two local County Attorneys, whose respective territories embraced Oak Ridge.  They humbly called themselves "the Gang of Four" and they contemplated filing a sworn, certified public nuisance lawsuit in a Tennessee state court.  State law nuisance over a nuclear weapons plant -- that was heady stuff, but they were angry at the duplicity and arrogance of what I called "the Oak Ridge Oligarchy of Atomic Blunderers."

But the State Attorney General's office later assured them that the State AG would filing be a federal pollution lawsuit.  Thus, the State AG thereby discouraged and halted filing of powerful state court nuisance litigation by our four local elected government lawyers in Anderson and Roane Counties.  

The July 11, 1983 hearing began federal investigations of the feculent federal nuclear weapons complex, source or great misery.  Years of investigative reporting and activism. nationwide, ultimately resulted in adoption of federal workers compensation legislation in 2000 (the defective Energy Employees Occupational Injuries Compensation Act or EEOICA, which I opposed in detailed written testimony as consisting the toxic, hostile working environment, as lacking in Due Process, with no hearings, no appeals, no discovery or depositions).  

More than $12 billion has been disbursed in EEOICA payments to the workers whom Rep. Gore's and Rep. Lloyd's July 11, 1983 hearing all but ignored.  (During my testimony, I drew two heated questions from Rep. Lloyd, asking me about my "scientific background," and then asking me to name anyone hurt by the mercury.  I replied, "J.C. Wilson Jr.," who suffered from mercury pollution, including constant vomiting and Technicolor hallucinations, as the Knoxville newspapers and Appalachian Observer documented.  Rep. Lloyd's rude reply was that Mr. Wilson was "inside the area," as if that were exculpatory.  

At my request, the DOE Oak Ridge Operations Manager, Mr. Joe Ben LaGrone graciously expedited release of 30,000 pages of documents on mercury levels in the air at Y-12 buildings 9201-4 and 9201-5, ordering Union Carbide to incur overtime. 

Mr. LaGrone began DOE's environmental, safety and health program ex nihilo as a result of the mercury pollution, personally walking the length of East Fork Poplar Creek, observing more than 100 discharge pipes without permits, flowing into what the government and its contractor long called "the industrial ditch."

Thanks to Shirley Harkins with Save Our Cumberland Mountains, who helped me wrestle with six full Xerox boxes of documents, we learned that the mercury levels in air were some 30-60 times the then-prevailing health standard for mercury, with NO respirators, the standard of care identified by the British Journal of Industrial Medicine in 1953 -- the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) subscribed)..

After louche DOE lapdog Marilyn Lloyd left Congress:

• DOE named Marilyn Lloyd to the Energy Advisory Board 
• DOE named ORNL's 80 acre environmental and lie sciences complex for Mariyn Lloyd.  
• Lockheed Martin Corporation CEO Norman R. Augustine appointed Marilyn Lloyd to its Lockheed Martin Energy Research Corporation board, at a time when Lockheed was still the contractor for five DOE plants in three states with 20,000 employees.  

ORNL said in a press release, :"Lloyd served 20 years as U.S. Congress representative of people in Tennessee's Third Congressional District. She was chairman of the Energy Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee and moved many landmark bills that helped shape the U.S. energy policy. Lloyd, a Democrat, retired in January 1995."

Lockheed was later cancelled as Oak Ridge Operations contractor due to its environmental ineptitude, as demonstrated to its harsh response to workers concerned about the poisoned workplace.  

Was Lockheed's noncompliance largely due to DOE's forcing its predecessor, Martin Marietta, to retain all but twelve (12) of 4000 maladroit secretive Union Carbide managers at five plants in three states employing 20,000 people?

  

No one ever went to prison or jail for even a day for putting 4.2 million pounds of mercury into local creeks and groundwater, and into workers’ lungs and brains, without signs, fences, respirators, warnings or basic protections. Half the free world’s mercury was in Oak Ridge: Union Carbide and the Atomic Energy Commission and successor agencies “LOST” 10% OF IT.   

Years after the hearings and billions were spent on cleanup, mercury levels are rising.

Thanks to activists and former U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), DOE is spending another $125 million to keep mercury from entering East Fork Poplar Creek, which is still being contaminated daily by mercury that is still leaching out from the Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Plant.

"It is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error." Those are the words of United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Houghwot Jackson, America's prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials. 

As I wrote in the St. Augustine Record on November 8, 2014:

On Nov. 21, 1974, our United States Senate enacted the Freedom of Information Act, joining the House in voting to override a veto by President Gerald Ford (whose veto was pushed on him by then-DOJ lawyer, Antonin Scalia, and White House aides Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who wanted government to remain secretive).

I was 17, a “hick from the sticks” — first-semester Georgetown University freshman, an intern known for my walking/working speed in Senator Ted Kennedy’s office as “Fast Eddie.” I carried three stacks of Senator Kennedy’s legal-sized, stapled, freshly-mimeographed press release to three Senate press galleries, cheering the veto override and enactment of the Freedom of Information Act.

I read it on the Senate/Capitol subway, promising transparency. I walked up a marble staircase, past a gigantic painting of Lincoln with his cabinet, signing the Emancipation Proclamation. My heart leaped with joy.

Eight years later, as the fledgling Appalachian Observer tabloid's first editor, I used FOIA to ask for government data on mercury pollution; a long kept secret by Union Carbide’s Y-12 nuclear bomb builders in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We won, and on May 17, 1983, the largest mercury pollution event in world history was declassified — 4.2 million pounds of mercury emitted into the environment and workers’ lungs and brains, which continues leaking into creeks and groundwater today (subject of a new $125 million mercury cleanup plant advocated by Senator Lamar Alexander).

Nuclear weapons plants cleanup may be achieved by circa 2057, by my 100th birthday, at a cost that may top $300 billion.

Nearly 49 years after FOIA, Americans work to hold our governments accountable, seeking to breathe life into open records laws.

As Ben Franklin said in Philadelphia after our Constitutional Convention in 1787, we have “a republic, if [we] can keep it.” Will we?

We Americans ended slavery, but can we ever stop being slaves to secrecy?

We Americans eradicated smallpox and polio, but can we ever eradicate political corruption?

Enough flummery.

We must make our governments more transparent.

… Let us have a government truly “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” as Lincoln promised at Gettysburg.

Let us have what [Mayor] Nancy Shaver calls a “no surprises” government. Now.

In 1977, I was a 20 year old staffer for Senator Jim Sasser, assigned to cover as a legislative research assistant the creation of the Department of Energy under President Carter, among other issues. We had no idea at that time what DOE had done to Tennesseans and other Americans. No one but DOE knew that.

Six years after that, and less than nine years after carrying Ted Kennedy's FOIA press release to the Senate press galleries, the mercury losses in Oak Ridge were declassified on May 17, 1983, at request of Appalachian Observer Publisher Ernest F. Phillips and me, the editor. 

The Al Gore hearing followed, like a bird on a wagon. People were outraged.  

But at the hearing, I was the only witness to call for criminal prosecution.  

No one was ever prosecuted. 

But Oak Ridge would never be the same again. 

The DOE complex began a slow-walked "culture change," and was finally forced to focus on whistleblower protection, environment, safety and health. The multi-billion dollar cleanup of DOE sites continues, nationwide. 

Thanks to the persistence of former Senator and Governor Lamar Alexander (R), the mercury in Oak Ridge is still being cleaned up, with a new processing building to remove mercury from water before it flows downstream, into the East Fork Poplar Creek and the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers. Contaminated building buildings are being demolished.

All witnesses were sworn in at the request of our elected Anderson County Attorney David A. Stuart and me (Mr. Stuart, then 27, was years later my co-counsel in several landmark whistleblower cases.  With DA Jim Ramsey, Mr,. Stuart was a member of the group who humorously referred to themselves as "the Gang of Four" -- two District Attorneys General and two County Attorneys acting as government watchdogs, contemplating jointly filing a sworn public nuisance complaint against DOE and Union Carbide under Tennessee nuisance law. Alas, the State Attorney General and the Legal Environmental Assistance Counsel filed first, and the "Gang of Four" did not go ahead with their inchoate plans).

Other disclosures about DOE sites around the country, sought by activists from all walks of life, have shown the Nation a picture of sublime ugliness: the Cold War took tens of thousands of Americans as unwilling victims, without informed consent. 

Now we know all too well that our Nation faces a moral crisis involving DOE, truly the “moral equivalent of war,” one that will test who we are as a people. 

As Dr. Susan Arnold Kaplan, Ph.D. wrote in 2005:

The public first learned of DOE environmental releases in 1983 when the agency announced the release of mercury from the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The announcement, which was prompted by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Ed Slavin,1 marked the beginning of DOE’s Environmental, Safety, and Health (ES&H) projects nationwide.2 

Former Department of Energy Oak Ridge Operations Manager Joe Ben LaGrone told me in a 2012 telephone conversation after I read his oral history interview that I was indeed "the crowbar" who got the mercury pollution declassified and forced action. Mr. LaGrone stated that Department of Energy officials sent him to Oak Ridge the new Manager without telling them of the expected declassification.  

Not only that, but the Presidential libraries of President Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan show that two Presidents were never briefed on the scandal.

In 2014, former Department of Energy Deputy Assistant Secretaryb Robert Alvarez wrote of Y-12:

The mercury threat. Activities at Y-12 have produced multiple environmental challenges; perhaps the largest is mercury pollution.

During the crash program to build thermonuclear weapons in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, Y-12 purchased about 24 million pounds of mercury to purify lithium. Of that amount, about 10 percent (2.4 million pounds) was released into the environment or could not be accounted for inside buildings. To put the problem in perspective, Y-12 mercury losses are about eight times the annual mercury emissions estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency for the entire United States during the years 1994 and 1995. 

Despite the well-recognized hazards of mercury, a neurological poison, workers were not provided with adequate protection from it. People living nearby, including hundreds of school children, were exposed for years to an estimated 73,000 pounds of mercury released to the air. In 2012, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry concluded that “elemental mercury carried from the Y-12 plant by workers into their homes could potentially have harmed their families (especially young children).” A rough measure of harm to workers can be found in compensation statistics maintained by the Department of Labor. Nearly 9,000 Y-12 workers have received some $417 million for exposure to non-radioactive substances. 

The Upper East Fork Poplar Creek and Bear Creek continuously transport about 500 pounds of mercury from heavily contaminated soil on the site to downstream areas. The contaminated creeks then feed into the lower Watts Bar reservoir of the Tennessee River and the Clinch River, where tens of tons of mercury have accumulated in sediments. In 2002, nearly 40 percent of the anglers using the Watts Bar Reservoir continued to eat mercury-contaminated fish, despite a public ban on consumption. African-Americans were the least aware of the ban and were the most vulnerable to potential harm. 

After recognizing the magnitude of the mercury problem at least 35 years ago, the Energy Department is just beginning to construct a water treatment plant to remove mercury from the contaminated creeks and to reduce offsite mercury run-off. The total cost of mercury cleanup at Y-12 has not been determined. However, it may rival the cleanup costs of profoundly contaminated areas such as the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington state. 

The DOE Nuclear Weapons complex, to paraphrase Lincoln, is guilty of “idolatry that practices human sacrifice.” 

DOE’s American victims must be compensated fully, fairly and swiftly. It may be cleaned up by the year 2047, at which time I will be 90 years young. 

Cleanup of the entire nuclear weapons complex may eventually be achieved for as little as $400 billion. In the immortal words of the late Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen (R-Ill.), "A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money."

I was honored to testify before then-Rep. Al Gore at his July 11, 1983 hearing on the Oak Ridge mercury pollution crisis, which was said to have been a classified secret (kept even from President Jimmy Carter and President Reagan according to their Presidential libraries).  In reality, the only "classification" was Union Carbide's "business confidential" stamp, but so cowed and cowardly was our nuclear weapons industrial technostructure that Union Carbide was giving our government orders.

Secretary of Energy Donald Paul Hodel hornswoggled Joe Ben LaGrone into leaving DoE San Francisco Operations and moving his family to Oak Ridge by stating there were mere "management problems," never disclosing my pending mercury FOIA declassification request.  Mr. La Grone personally walked East Fork Poplar Creek and personally counted some 100 pollution discharge pipes, none with federal permits.  

Born in 1899, scion of an old Tennessee political family, appointed to the U.S. District Court by President Harry Truman, Eastern District Chief Judge Robert Love Taylor ruled against DOE in the case of Legal Environentsl Associations Foundation v. Hodel, holding that there was no "national security" exemption from anti-pollution laws. DOE was gobsmacked.  Nuclear weapons contractors seethed.

Gore's hearing helped give the government a spinal implant.  

The hearing and Judge Taylor's ruling were victories, thanks to fine work by Gary Davis and Natural Resources Defense Council lawyers on, the landmark case applying environmental laws applying to lawbreaking feculent federal bomb factories in Oak Ridge. 

But to this day, 41 years later, I wish that Al Gore had done his job better and smarter.  

Al Gore needed to do more than hold one (1) hearing -- no further hearings ever investigated the Environmental Justice issues I raised (moving an entire segregated African-American community next to the creek). 

Al Gore lost interest in Oak Ridge mercury and environmental health issues after he was elected to the U.S. Senate.  We urged Gore to meet with some of the workers sickened by Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant poisons, to no avail.  Meanwhile, Gore's 2000 presidential campaign was run by Lockheed Martin Washington lobbyist PETER KNIGHT.

Al Gore was seemingly raised to be President, the son of courageous Democratic. populist U.S. Senator Albert Gore, Sr. (He and then-Senator Kefauver joined with Kentucky Senator Alben Barkley and Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson) as refusing to sign the Southern Manifesto. Good man, son of a statesman. 

Al Gore, Jr., held some 1200 town hall meetings in Tennessee as Congressman (1977-1985) and Senator (1985-1992).  Sadly, Al Gore seemed distant to Tennesseans as Vice President (1993-2001).   There were to be no more town meetings.

If Gore had carried his home state of Tennessee, he could have been President. My reckoning is that Al Gore lost Tennessee in 2000 largely because he lost interest in Tennessee issues like the Oak Ridge worker illnesses exhaustively covered by the Nashville Tennessean.  It did not help Gore's Presidential candidacy that his long Secrect Service caravan was obstructing I-40 traffic every Friday afternoon, as Air Force Two landed and he and his entourage drove some 42 miles from the Nashville airport to Carthage, his ancestral home, a joke for Nashville DJs that hurt his support in Democratic Middle Tennessee).  (Gore failed to carry either Tennessee or Arkansas in 2000, and was found to have lost to Texas Governor George W. Bush by 537 votes in Florida.

The month after Gore's July 11, 1983 mercury hearing, I went on to start Memphis State University Law School, clerked for Memphis labor attorney, and then went on to clerkships with Judges Charles P. Rippey and Chief Judge Nahum Litt at the U.S. Department of Labor Office of Administrative Law Judges, work at the AFL-CIO Occupational Health Legal Rights Foundation and Government Accountability Project and private practice, including Oak Ridge matters. 

So today, older, grayer (and disbarred after zealous representation of workers in whistleblower cases), I'm contemplating Al Gore's well-meaning but flawed stab at Congressional oversight, with little or no followup after initial headlines, and doing a wonderful job for a proud shining hearing 41 years ago July 11, touching on what Pope Francis wrote in his encyclical, Laudato Si, about humankind turning this frail planet into "a pile of filth." 

On balance, Gore's hearing on July 11, 1983 was a great day in American history. If Hollywood made a film and asked about music, I would suggest, "The times they are a-changin," or else "the world stood upside down" (played at Yorktown by our fledgling U.S. Army when Lord Cornwallis surrendered to General George Washington).

We have a Right to Know. 

• MATTHEW G. BREUER

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  PARTNER
• STEPHANIE L. BURCH

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  OF COUNSEL / VP, OPERATIONS
• STEVEN DIEBENOW

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  PARTNER
• G. RAY DRIVER, JR.

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  PARTNER
• CHARLES L. GIBBS II

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  PARTNER
• J. PHILLIP GIBBS

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  PARTNER
• LAWRENCE C. GIERUM

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  PARTNER
• LEAH W. GORYL

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  OF COUNSEL
• WILLIAM M. HAMMILL II

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  PARTNER 
• RICHARD W. HAWTHORNE

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  PARTNER
• ALEXANDRIA V. HILL

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  PARTNER
• MICHAEL F. KILLEA

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  PARTNER
• ZACHRY C. LEVER

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  PARTNER
• MATTHEW S. MCAFEE

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  PARTNER
• JEFFREY M. MCFARLAND

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  OF COUNSEL
• CHARLES (TREY) F. MILLS III

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  PARTNER
• G. JAMES MOORE III

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  PARTNER
• STACI M. REWIS

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  PARTNER
• PATRICIA H. TODD

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  OF COUNSEL
• CYNDY K. TRIMMER

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  PARTNER
• RICHARD S. VERMUT

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  PARTNER
• BRAD WESTER

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  VP, LAND USE AND PLANNING
• THOMAS (TREY) G. WILSON III

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  PARTNER
• KRISTIN R. DRIVER

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  ASSOCIATE
• CARLEY SELF MENYHART

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  ASSOCIATE
• MICHAEL (MIKE) SITTNER

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  ASSOCIATE
• MAGGIE HOWELL TRAVIS

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  ASSOCIATE
• TASHA D. WALLACE

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  ASSOCIATE
• RYAN P. WIELE

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  ASSOCIATE
• ASHLEY LISK

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  PARALEGAL
• MICHELLE L. MARKS

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  PARALEGAL
• SUZANNE MCGOWAN

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  PARALEGAL
• JENNY L. PENNINGTON

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  PARALEGAL
• KELLYN M. WHITSON

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  PARALEGAL

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, "Secrecy is for losers -- for people who don't understand the value of the information". Thanks to bipartisan Florida legislative opposition by Reps. Kim Kendall and Allison Tant. Yes, my friends, we need a federal and state investigation of this land swap.  More here: https://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2025/05/guana-landswap-proposal-driver-law-firm.html

By 

• Emily L. MahoneyTimes staff
• Max ChesnesTimes staff

Published Yesterday|Updated Yesterday

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ST. JOHNS COUNTY — As news spread Saturday of a proposal for the state of Florida to trade 600 acres of preserved land to a private company, so too did the outrage.

Locals and lawmakers of both parties expressed disbelief that another secretive attempt to develop beloved public land would crop up so soon. Less than a year ago, the public revolted when the DeSantis administration planed to add golf courses and hotels to state parks.

State Rep. Kim Kendall, a Republican from St. Augustine, sent an email blast to every member of the Florida House around 4:30 a.m. asking for help building opposition. She also emailed the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, asking them to reveal the identity of the person or company behind the proposal, she told the Tampa Bay Times. She said Saturday afternoon that the agency had not yet replied.

A committee within the state environmental department is scheduled to convene Wednesday to vote on the land deal. In the public agenda for that meeting, the company desiring the land is only listed as The Upland LLC. That entity was created in February and does not list any leaders — only a general business services company — on its paperwork filed with the state, making its origins unclear.

“Somebody needs to tell me something other than ‘Upland LLC,’' Kendall said Saturday. ”I’d like to have a conversation with whoever it is." 

She is calling on her fellow lawmakers to speak out against what she said “goes directly against the spirit of the legislation we just passed” to prohibit development on state parks. 

The 600 acres at stake in the latest deal is part of the Guana River Wildlife Management Area in northeast Florida. It’s owned by the state but isn’t a state park.

RELATED: Just as Florida state park scandal fades, new land deal stirs anxiety

In return for that land, the company would trade the state about 3,066 acres from a constellation of other parcels in four counties. The agenda for Wednesday’s meeting says that state staff recommends the committee, called the Acquisition and Restoration Council, approve the deal. That would send the decision to Gov. Ron DeSantis, Attorney General James Uthmeier and Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson for a final vote.

Rep. Allison Tant, a Democrat from Tallahassee, agrees that losing the preserved land to development would be “an atrocity.”

“That land is the most gorgeous, most authentic, undisturbed beach land I may have seen,” she said. “It would be a disaster to see it mowed over and see multimillion-dollar properties built on top of it.”

Both Kendall and Tant, along with many of the protestors, had heard the same name rumored to be behind the proposal: Dream Finders Homes, a home-building company whose chief executive, Patrick Zalupski, lives in the area. Zalupski formerly donated to DeSantis’ presidential campaign and was named by the governor to the University of Florida board of trustees. 

But neither Kendall nor Tant had been able to independently verify the speculation. Dream Finders Homes previously built a community in Colorado called Uplands, and so Zalupski’s name is listed on multiple Florida companies with names that include that word, though none exactly match the LLC listed on this proposal.

Rob Riva, a general counsel for Dream Finders Homes, sent the Times an emailed statement Saturday denying the connection.

“Dream Finders has no involvement in this swap,” he said.

Hundreds of residents protested in St. Johns County, a deeply Republican area, with homemade signs Saturday. Many of them had taken to the streets less than one year ago to push back against the state park proposals.

“I’m getting whiplash out here. Once again, our land is under attack,” said Sarah Arnold, a St. Johns County Commissioner who joined the demonstration. “I’m disgusted, angry and frustrated that we’re out here doing this again.” 

RELATED: The behind-the-scenes story of the Florida state park scandal

She held a sign depicting a gopher tortoise with an accompanying slogan: “I may be slow, but I know this deal is wrong!” 

Ronald Goldfarb was a courageous lawyer who worked for the late U.S. Attorney General Robert Francis Kennedy who said, "If we do not, on a national scale, attack organized criminals with weapons and techniques as sophisticated as their own, they will destroy us." From The Washington Post: 

By Brian Murphy

Ronald Goldfarb, a lawyer and author who prosecuted organized crime cases during the Kennedy administration and whose books probed issues such as prison reforms and privacy protections — as well as keeping alive conspiracy suspicions of mob links to the JFK assassination — died May 4 at his home in Atlanta. He was 91.

The death was confirmed by his son Nick Goldfarb, but no cause was given.

Mr. Goldfarb’s more than six-decade career had multiple layers, including as a documentary producer and literary agent whose clients included Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). A common thread was often Mr. Goldfarb’s dual perspectives — a onetime insider who carried an activist’s zeal to identify flaws in the system and make arguments for change.

Many of his nearly a dozen books stemmed from work done by his Washington law firm, which specialized in public interest cases, taking on subjects such as farm laborer rights in “Migrant Farm Workers: A Caste of Despair” (1981) and the penal system in “After Conviction: A Review of the American Correction System” (1973), written with law partner Linda Singer.

Following the leaks of National Security Agency files by contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, Mr. Goldfarb edited essays from policy experts and ethicists for the 2015 book “After Snowden: Privacy, Secrecy and Security in the Information Age.”

“National security and constitutional liberty are not an either-or proposition,” Mr. Goldfarb said at the Miami Book Fair that year, “but we have to strike an exquisite balance.”

His time in the Justice Department under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy also came to represent competing priorities, he contended. Mr. Goldfarb was recruited in 1961 and assigned to the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section — a once tiny unit that grew to more than 70 members under RFK.

Meanwhile, President John F. Kennedy had ordered an all-out effort to depose Cuban leader Fidel Castro after the calamitous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The anti-Castro plans, overseen by Robert Kennedy, included the CIA seeking possible hit men among mobsters, who were eager to bring back their gambling operations in Cuba, according to later disclosures by congressional investigations and leaked documents.

“They thought they could burn their candle at both ends, and both work with the mafia at the same time that we were harassing them, and prosecuting them, and investigating them and making their lives miserable,” Mr. Goldfarb told an audience in Alexandria, Virginia, in 2002.

This double standard became one of subplots in Mr. Goldfarb’s “Perfect Villains, Imperfect Heroes: Robert F. Kennedy’s War Against Organized Crime” (1995), a part memoir and part analysis of RFK’s single-minded drive to mobilize federal law enforcement agencies against the Cosa Nostra and others.

Mr. Goldfarb’s path to the Justice Department began with a chance meeting. He had come to Washington to pay a social visit to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. On the way, Mr. Goldfarb stopped to see a law school friend, who introduced him to a recruiter for RFK’s team.

His pitch to Mr. Goldfarb was direct: Toss out your plans to go into academia and stay in the courtroom. Mr. Goldfarb had served in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, or JAG Corps, in the Air Force defending airmen in court-martial hearings and other cases. “And I ended up in the ‘New Frontier,’” he said, using a term coined to describe the youthful President Kennedy and his policies.

Mr. Goldfarb, however, was initially wary of RFK over his past work. In the early 1950s, Robert Kennedy was assistant counsel for the “Red Scare” subcommittee led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) that waged career-crushing inquests into suspected communist sympathizers.

“I just thought, like other people, that he was brash, and a bully, and that it was strictly nepotism that he was made attorney general,” Mr. Goldfarb told the Washington City Paper. But he soon began to admire Robert Kennedy’s uncompromising style, he said.

Mr. Goldfarb was sent to Newport, Kentucky, a Cincinnati suburb he described as a “classic sin city” that at the time was notorious for its political corruption and mob-run vice. Mr. Goldfarb aided in investigations that led to the conviction of nearly the entire Newport city government and dozens of others.

He also worked closely with the county’s reform-minded sheriff, George Ratterman, a former professional football player who had been drugged and photographed in bed with a stripper in a blackmail attempt during the campaign for sheriff in 1961. The caper was exposed and Ratterman surged to victory.

The crime syndicates in northern Kentucky eventually moved out. In his book, Mr. Goldfarb adopted much of RFK’s views that organized crime was a direct threat to the rule of law and confidence in the political system.

“These were predators, often totally asocial animals, who preyed on society, had no socially redeeming ends, who used the vilest means to get their way, and whose actions, if unchecked, would lead to anarchy,” he wrote. “They were perfect villains.”

Yet Mr. Goldfarb also recounted RFK’s shortcomings, which included an obsessive pursuit of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa was convicted in 1964 of jury tampering and other charges and began serving a 13-year sentence in 1967. (The sentence was commuted in 1971 by President Richard M. Nixon and Hoffa was last seen in 1975, but details of his presumed slaying remained unsolved.)

On Nov. 22, 1963, Mr. Goldfarb was part of a meeting with Robert Kennedy that ended shortly before lunch. About an hour later, news broke that President Kennedy had been shot while his motorcade drove through Dallas.

For decades, Mr. Goldfarb staked out a position at odds with the Warren Commission’s conclusion that the gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone in a self-hatched plot. In his book and later articles, Mr. Goldfarb left open the possibility that organized crime bosses — angered by RFK’s crusading fervor — had a hand in planning the JFK assassination.

“The most compelling evidence concerns conversations among leading organized crime figures in 1962 and 1963 who were outraged by [Robert] Kennedy’s crusade against them,” Mr. Goldfarb wrote in a 1995 opinion piece in The Washington Post. “There was a conspiracy to kill the attorney general; there is ominous evidence that they switched their wrath to the president.”

His stance brought some derision from book reviewers even as his profile was raised among JFK conspiracy theorists. Mr. Goldfarb remained unmoved but conceded that too much time had passed to either validate or debunk his speculation.

“There is a haunting credibility to the theory that our organized crime drive prompted a plan to strike back at the Kennedy brothers,” he wrote, “and that Robert Kennedy went to his grave at least wondering whether — and perhaps believing — there was a real connection between the plan and his brother’s assassination.”

RFK speechwriter

Ronald Lawrence Goldfarb was born in Jersey City, on Oct. 16, 1933, and was raised in North Bergen. His father was a building manager, and his mother cared for their home.

At Syracuse University, Mr. Goldfarb was part of a law-school-track program, finishing his undergraduate studies in 1954 and receiving a law degree in 1956. After serving in the Air Force JAG Corps for three years, he enrolled at Yale Law School for advanced legal degrees.

Robert Kennedy resigned as attorney general in September 1964, and Mr. Goldfarb joined him as speechwriter in a long-shot — but ultimately successful — run for U.S. Senate, defeating the incumbent Republican, Kenneth Keating, that November.

“My personal contacts with him, especially after his brother was killed, showed him to be a very tortured human being feeling very human things and not at all the machinelike person that he was depicted as,” Mr. Goldfarb said in a 1981 oral history for the John F. Kennedy Library.

Mr. Goldfarb formed his law practice, Goldfarb & Associates, in 1966. Two years later, as Kennedy campaigned in the Democratic presidential primaries, Mr. Goldfarb planned to seek a seat as a New Jersey delegate for Kennedy at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “And before I could do anything,” Mr. Goldfarb recalled, “he was killed.”

Kennedy was shot on June 5, 1968, as he was leaving the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, shortly after winning California’s Democratic presidential primary. He died the next day. The gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, remains in prison.

Mr. Goldfarb’s other books include “The Contempt Power” (1963) about use of contempt of court provisions; “Ransom: A Critique of the American Bail System” (1966) and “TV or Not TV: Television, Justice, and the Courts” (1998).

As a documentary producer, he helped develop “Desperate Hours”(2001), an account of Turkey’s role in rescuing Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, directed by Victoria Barrett.

Survivors include his wife of 68 years, Joanne Jacob Goldfarb; sons Nick and Max; daughter Jody; and seven grandchildren.

In 1963, the Mississippi governor, Ross R. Barnett, was charged with federal criminal contempt for obstructing court orders to desegregate the University of Mississippi. Barnett’s supporters in Congress cited passages from Mr. Goldfarb’s book “The Contempt Power” to claim judicial overreach.

Mr. Goldfarb was so troubled that he asked for a meeting with Robert Kennedy to apologize. Kennedy listened and then asked Mr. Goldfarb to sign a copy of his book. (The charges against Barnett were dropped years later.)

“Instead of it being a heavy moment where conceivably he was going to ask for my resignation,” he recalled in the 1981 oral history, “it converted into an act of friendship.”

10 Comments

By Brian Murphy

Brian Murphy joined The Washington Post after more than 20 years as a foreign correspondent and bureau chief for the Associated Press in Europe and the Middle East. Murphy has reported from more than 50 countries and has written four books.follow on X@BrianFMurphy

United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Houghwot Jackson, our prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials,  said it best, "it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error."  American Communications Association v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382, 442-43 (1950)

On Sunday, May 18, 2025 at 05:48:30 PM EDT, Ed Slavin <easlavin@aol.com> wrote:

To Anastasia Mosquito Control District of St. Johns County:

Dear AMCD Chair Becker, Commissioners Mazzotta, LeBlanc, Gardner, Commissioner-designate-Burton and Ms. Hodges:

1. Please e-mail Board book and agendas for 4 PM Monday 5/19 special meetings.

2. Please place them on the website instanter, tonight.

3. I find nothing on the website abiut the May 19, 2025 meetings.. 

4. Once again, it strongly appears that our AMCD is violating Florida Sunshine and Open Rewcords law. 

5. I object to the lack of adequate notice of the Audit Committee and RFP meetings.

6. Only by watching the end of the YouTube video of the May 8 meeting did I learn of this inadequate notice.

AMCD Board Meeting May 08 2025 

AMCD Board Meeting May 08 2025

7. Please call me to discuss.

Thank you.

With kindest regards, I am,

Sincerely yours,

Ed Slavin

Box 3084

St. Augustine, Florida 32085-3084

www.edslavin.com

http://www.cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com

http://www.staugustgreen.com

(904) 377-4998

Thanks to former Anastasia Mosquito Control Commission of Stl Johns County for responding May 18, 2025 to AMCD's spinning like mad in response to the cost overruns on the Mosquito Museum.  I've been scrutinizing AMCD's waste, fraud and abuse since 2006, when it voted to spend $1.8 million on.a no-bid $1.8 million Bell Jet Helicopter incapable of killing a single mosquito,  The vote was reversed unanimously in 2007 and we got a full refund of our $180,000 deposit.  From Facebook:

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AMCD Commssioner Martha Gleason

Yesterday at 2:33 PM  · 

Dear St. Johns County Citizens,

I am compelled to address you in light of recent developments, providing my perspective on the attached JaxToday article. While I will not comment on Commissioner Becker’s resignation, I must speak out regarding the Mosquito Museum’s budget overruns. It is imperative that you, the citizens, are aware that you are being misinformed regarding the reason provided by the AMCD administration for the cost overruns. As I previously stated in my prior postings, the $1 million allocation, which will likely exceed that amount upon completion, was a clear example of a vanity project. The administration exploited a February 2022 Board vote, which terminated the prior General Contractor contract, and subsequently issued new scopes of work using multiple purchase orders instead of requests for proposals, effectively bypassing the Board. Notably, one vendor, who has done work for Disney World and Universal Studios, has charged nearly $600,000 without a contract or Board approval. There are many other vendors in similar situations lacking a contract, and whose charges to date exceed the administration's spending limits.

In December 2024, I requested a forensic audit because I not only suspected financial mismanagement, but also fraud, waste, and abuse. That motion was not even seconded by the Board. Because the Board has either willingly or unwillingly turned a blind eye to this abuse, I felt compelled to resign instead of continuing to be part of this unending spending spree at the expense of St. Johns County taxpayers.

Furthermore, the illegal Board bonuses and what I now have come to learn were improperly approved employee bonuses, and the questionable accounting practices used to account for Board expenses were among the additional reasons for my resignation.

I hope that when the Commissioner of Agriculture appoints the replacements to the seats left vacant by me and Commissioner Becker, that that he appoints people with strong financial background, integrity and back bone. It is time to rethink the model of how these services are delivered. For too long these relatively small independent districts have operated with little oversight.

Please pay attention to the 2026 election, as these two seats will be up for grabs. Take the time to educate yourself about all the candidates and the district. Better yet, reach out to Wilton Simpson and request a truly independent and thorough financial and operational audit!

Best Regards,

FORMER Commissioner Gleason

JAXTODAY.ORG

Another mosquito board member resigns in St. Johns | Jacksonville Today

Trish Becker is the latest commissioner to resign from the Anastasia Mosquito Control District in

Trish Becker is the latest elected member of the Anastasia Mosquito Control District board in St. Johns County to resign in just three months. 

However, unlike former Commissioner Martha Gleason, who resigned due to personal reasons and concerns about the board’s mismanaging its finances, Becker says she is leaving because her husband got a job in another state. 

“I love the board. I love the people and my job,” Becker told Jacksonville Today. “My husband got promoted, so we’re getting transferred out.” 

The Mosquito Control board levies taxpayer dollars to spray pesticides and control the local mosquito population, but also to educate people about mosquito-borne diseases.

Becker was first elected to the board in 2018. She says she’s proud of increasing the wages for the district’s employees and helping get the Disease Vector Education Center — or the mosquito museum, depending on whom you ask — up and running. 

Since it opened last March, the Mosquito Control District says more than 11,000 people have visited the center. According to data from the district, more than half of those people were local residents, and many heard about the education center through word of mouth. 

The education center was even featured recently by The Washington Post.

The development of the education center wasn’t free of controversy, though. Members of the public, and former Commissioner Gleason too, have been critical of the cost of the center. 

District officials say high construction costs led to a final cost of more than $4.5 million — more than $1 million higher than the district initially projected. 

Becker has been the education center’s biggest cheerleader on the Anastasia Mosquito Control District board, and she hopes to see it around for a long time. 

“I’m hoping that will prevent at least one person from getting a mosquito disease,” Becker said. “Then it will have all been worth it.”

After Becker’s final meeting in June, the board will be left with two vacancies that she says are unlikely to be filled until sometime this summer. 

An interest form is available on the district’s website for people to put their name in the running for one of those seats. The appointment of those seats is ultimately up to Florida Agricultural Commissioner Wilton Simpson, and the extension of this year’s legislative session is having a trickle-down effect on the mosquito control board.

“We’ve heard a couple people have applied, but what we’ve heard from the Department of Agriculture is that they’re waiting for the session to be over, and they think they’re going to be able to appoint someone for (Gleason’s seat) in July,” Becker said. “There’s no timeline. It’s just on Tallahassee — what they can do.”

The board’s next meeting is scheduled for 5 p.m. June 12 at the district’s headquarters, 120 EOC Drive in St. Augustine.

---

Noah HertzReporter emailNoah Hertz is a Jacksonville Today reporter focusing on St. Johns County. 

Thanks and kudos to SUSAN SUMMERALL WILES for denouncing dodgy Guana land swap.  It's our public land and it's off-limits to overdevelopment. Longtime Northeast Florida resident, former BALLLARD PARTNERS lobbyist and President Donald John Trump's second term White House Chief of Staff, SUSAN SUMMERALL WILES has denounced the proposed Guana land swap.  It is toast.  Thank you, ma'am!  We did not always see eye to eye, as when she lobbied for Commissioners to support and illegal referendum casinos in St. Johns County and she wrote the St. Augustine Record denouncing people who opposed a development she supported.  SUSAN SUMMERALL WILES' opposition to the proposed Guana land grab is greatly appreciated. It is ausipicatory.  Thus, I look forward to her encouragement of efforts to preserve and protect our nature and history here in "God's country," (St. Johns County) and to future White House support for the St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore to preserve and protect what we know and love forever, inviolate.  Here's my January 10, 2025 Statement to our St. Johns County Legislative Delegation supporting legislation protecting state parks from development -- it passed unanimously, with bicameral and bipartisan support. From The Tributary: 

Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, 

slams controversial Northeast Florida land deal

by Nate Monroe10 hours ago

Susie Wiles, President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff, blasted a controversial and fast-tracked proposal backed by Florida regulators that would trade 600 acres of sensitive and prized public land in St. Johns County to a private developer, calling the proposed swap “outrageous” and a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” in a statement to The Tributary on Sunday.

Wiles, who has decades-long ties to Northeast Florida, called for members of the Acquisition and Restoration Council — an obscure body of bureaucrats and political appointees thrust into the headlines over the contested land deal — to vote down the “land grab.”

Wiles’ intervention, given her proximity to national power, is remarkable, but it’s in line with many prominent figures in the region who have either publicly or quietly mobilized to defeat the potential land transaction. 

The prospect of ceding hundreds of acres of land within the Guana River Wildlife Management Area to a neighboring private developer — identified only as a generic LLC with undisclosed development plans for the site — ignited protests over the weekend and harkened back to other ill-fated proposals DeSantis administration officials greenlit last year to drill in a sensitive river basin and build hotels and pickleball courts on state parks.

“Guana Preserve and its beauty, familiarity and serenity is woven into the fabric of our communities and is, indeed, a treasure in northeast Florida. To allow — even enable — this land grab to occur is outrageous and completely contrary to what our community desires,” Wiles said in a statement to The Tributary.

“Elected and appointed leaders should vote against this development wolf in sheep’s clothing and preserve this extraordinary natural bounty.”

The developer, identified in documents only as The Upland LLC (and widely rumored to be affiliated with Dream Finders Homes, which the company denied in a statement to The Tampa Bay Times), has offered up in exchange a patchwork of about 3,000 acres of land in St. Johns, Lafayette, Osceola and Volusia counties. DEP staffers concluded the trade would offer a “net positive conservation benefit” because it would add more than 2,000 acres to the state’s Wildlife Corridor, a network of millions of acres of parks, wildlife management areas and forests. 

The Acquisition and Restoration Council is set to take up the Guana land swap Wednesday, a notably quick turnaround for a major land deal first disclosed in a meeting agenda last week. The speed and lack of details have helped fuel distrust and fury over the proposal.

“Florida’s conservation lands are not held in trust for the public simply until a developer wants them,” Audubon Florida said of the proposal, noting also that while the swap, on paper, provided five acres for every one the state would trade, it was all “light on details.”

Wiles’ national reputation centers on her indispensability to Trump, but long before that relationship she was known throughout Northeast Florida as a moderate Republican with a particular interest in the environment. In the late ’90s, working as the chief of staff to former Jacksonville Mayor John Delaney, Wiles helped spearhead the Preservation Project, a major city land-acquisition program designed to protect environmentally sensitive areas. She and her family have lived in both Jacksonville and in St. Johns County.

Over the years, Wiles became a confidant to multiple Jacksonville mayors, political donors and two Florida governors. One of those governors — Ron DeSantis — ultimately ousted Wiles from his inner circle, opening a widely known rift between the two that, given her closeness to Trump, continues to color the relationship between the president and the governor of one of the nation’s most populous states.

Wiles’ opposition to the land swap puts her in a chorus of bipartisan leaders concerned about the proposal. 

The governor and cabinet would have to sign off on the land swap. That it has stirred such outrage in St. Johns is no small irony: DeSantis once represented the region in Congress.

Nate Monroe is the executive editor of The Tributary. He can be reached at nate.monroe@jaxtrib.org.

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