A rose by any other name … is a Coolidge!

Do you love growing roses? I have absolutely no green thumb whatsoever … but my brother, Geoff does. (more…)

SNN LOCAL News … another thing I like about Sarasota news lately

Since I’m in a complimenting frame of mind …

I woke up today and wanted to find out what was going on with Governor Charlie Crist — is he going to the big house or not? (That’s the big Senate house, um, not the other kind of big house.) (more…)

Sarasota Herald Tribune gets a nip and tuck …

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune may have had a nip and tuck in its recent page trimming, but it gained an intangible avoirdupois. (more…)

Smoke and mirrors in the land of sunshine and stadiums

The Creative Loafing newspaper is running a piece I wrote about last year’s efforts by the County and City to pull together a local land deal in the hopes of landing Red Sox spring training here in sunny Sarasota. The story has enough monkey business in it to read like comedy — and it’d be wicked funny … if only it weren’t for those little things we all hope to see in our local government and elected officials — pesky things like decent, above-board behavior, transparency, and intelligent decision-making. (more…)

Smoke and mirrors where there should be sunshine

Creative Loafing Best Blogger and/or Columnist 2007, 2008, 2009 & 2010

Last August, operating on nothing more substantial than a hot and heavy “I wanna be your girlfriend” flutter of talks and emails and gossip and copious amounts of newsprint, Sarasota City and County Commissioners joined forces to lay the groundwork for acquiring sufficient land to accommodate a new stadium for the Sox, despite the fact that taxpayers had voted resoundingly against spending public monies for a new stadium.

Taxpayer voting be damned, our elected officials went ahead at puppy-love speed in spending money to attract the Red Sox to our fair city.

One of the main sticking points, though, was that the proposed site considered most viable for a stadium — the newly created Payne Park — was not sufficient in size to meet the ballpark and training needs of the Sox. Then somebody had the idea to expand the site available by acquiring additional parcels of land adjacent to the park.
To pull all this off, late last summer, our local government engaged in a little game of smoke and mirrors. Let’s recap.

Smoke & Mirrors, Round 1:
The city needed and wanted the additional parcels which were not on the market at the time. But, according to County Land Acquisition Manager John Herrli during an Aug. 26, 2008 County Commissioners meeting, the county is the one that had the contacts necessary to negotiate with the parcel owners. So, a plan was developed for the county to obtain the parcels for the city and then the city would reimburse the county at a later date.

The county did not want to approach the owners of the desired properties directly because they were afraid they’d get taken to the cleaners if the owners knew parcels were being bought to facilitate a big-money Red Sox stadium deal.
Commissioner Joe Barbetta explained the county’s back-door approach during the August meeting: “It’s tough to try to buy a property when you’re a county and not let the sellers, you know, know what the purposes are for because otherwise you feel that your value is going to be inflated when you try to buy it.” In other words, the county needed a front man.

Smoke & Mirrors, Round 2:
In an attempt to pull a bit of wool over the parcel owners’ eyes, the county accepted the aid of two of its contacts — two private citizens willing to help the county acquire what it wanted without tipping its hand to the prospective sellers. The plan was for these private citizens — referred to many times by county officials but never named — to enter into contracts with the parcel sellers and then assign those contracts to the county.

Which is exactly what happened. The private citizens successfully negotiated with the parcel owners and at the Aug. 26 meeting, the county commissioners did indeed vote to accept the assignment of those contracts. County Administrator Jim Ley had high praise for the two intermediaries who had worked on behalf of facilitating what was hoped to be a deal with the Red Sox: “We had the assistance of two private-sector individuals that did this without compensation or any other consideration only in purely public interest and I’m not necessarily naming them, [but] they should be thanked.”

So who were the front men for the county?

Private Citizen #1: The front man buyer of the additional parcels was a Florida Partnership named D & R Properties. Signing on behalf of D & R was John F. Dowd, listed as general manager of the partnership. The address for D & R Properties is the same as that of John F. Dowd, CPA, of the firm Dowd, Whittaker & Association of Venice, Florida. Dowd and D&R put down $150,000 earnest money that was later refunded by the county.

Private Citizen #2: The “transaction broker” listed on all the contracts for the parcels — operating as a go-between for Dowd, the County, and the in-the-dark sellers — was John F. Ask, of Florida Home Team, LLC, a real estate company doing business at 2100 Constitution Blvd. in Sarasota. According to the Florida Home Team website (www.floridahometeam.org), it appears that Ley’s wife, Tamara, works with Ask at Florida Home Team.

Smoke & Mirrors, Round 3:
The County, which normally requires two appraisals for any property purchase over $500,000, only had one appraisal performed for this high-profile, nearly $5 million purchase. According to Herrli, there just wasn’t enough time – this, despite the fact that as far as the public is aware, no Red Sox deal was ever so imminent that it would have precluded the adherence to standard County operating procedures.
On the day the commissioners voted to approve the purchase/assignment of the additional parcels, they weren’t even provided an appraisal for what they were buying. All the commissioners had was Herrli’s word (later confirmed in writing) that the property had been appraised at $4,470,000 and that the acquisition price of $4,785,080 seemed “fair and appropriate” according to the appraiser. The missing written appraisal report was a subject of considerable conversation during the Aug. 26 meeting.

In that same meeting, Commissioner Nora Patterson described the contracts that the county was acquiring from Dowd/D & R as “completely unreadable.” It was generally acknowledged in the meeting that the contracts were indeed illegible in several sections due to repeated fax transmission, but the commissioners nevertheless voted unanimously to accept the assigned contracts and proceed with the purchase.
Despite the fact that she voted to accept the unreadable contracts, Patterson still admonished the rest of her fellow commissioners after the vote, saying: “You just voted on a package on a property with an appraisal you didn’t see to support a contract that you’re taking over that you can’t read.”

Sloppy documentation and smoke and mirrors aside, the city now has to come up with somewhere around $4.8 million to pay off its debt to the county by June 30.
In an interview last week, City Manager Robert Bartolotta stated that the city hopes to make a land swap deal with the county and is reviewing several possible scenarios. If they can’t come to an agreement with the county, and if the city has to pay in cash, Bartolotta says they’ll simply borrow the money — serviced by sales tax surtax revenue — at a rate of about 4 percent over 15 years, ballooning the cost of the parcels acquisition to somewhere between $6 and $7 million over the life of the loan.

In the end, the parcel sellers probably got a very decent deal, despite the use of front men. The city now has extra land to expand Payne Park, and the county is going to get its money back. No harm, no foul, right?

Not in my book. Look, if I sent a private citizen in to ferret out information from a government official just because that official might disclose more information to Joe Blow Citizen than to a reporter, would that make it right? Not on any day and I’d burn any reputation for integrity that I might have.

Bottom line: If you’re doing the right thing, there’s never a reason to rush a deal without adequate documentation; if you’re doing the right thing, there’s never a need to have a front man, and if you’re doing the right thing, there’s never a need for smoke and mirrors.

Lean, green, mowing machine!

I woke up early this morning to get a jump on the day. I had an article to finish and a lawn to mow. But the lawn, really just a yawning, sandy stretch of various and sundry weeds, came first. It was early enough to mow without the heat beating down too hard (630 am).

Only one problem: I don’t have a mower. (more…)

Sarasota Magazine The Best of 2009 Readers’ Poll — MC voted finalist in Blogging category!

Yikes! Yippee! and Yowza!

Sarasota Magazine puts on an annual Best Of issue … and guess what?! Yours truly was voted a finalist in the blogging category in the Best of 2009 issue that just came out this week!

I just found out yesterday and honestly, am kind of stunned and more than a little honored. (more…)

Swan song … or why I no longer appear in the Pelican Press newspaper

Newspapers are our nation’s first line of defense to freedom. When publications become susceptible to pressure from advertisers, which I believe happened in this case, our freedom — our ability to express and exchange differing, sometimes dissenting opinions, and our ability to learn and understand and make decisions and choices about how we want to practice democracy as individuals and as a nation, is dangerously compromised.

I’ve been hearing from some online readers that they are wondering why I left the Pelican Press newspaper. So, it seems appropriate — especially since tomorrow, Friday, May 1, is the one-year anniversary of the last time my Reality Chick column appeared in the Pelican Press newspaper — to run the final column I wrote for that paper, which I think, pretty much explains why I left. (more…)

What the heck is this?

Alright. I try to be fairly independent, self-sufficient, but I’m stymied. And I need help! Can anyone help me identify any of the following? (more…)

In Sarasota, the gap widens between the haves and the have-nots

(This piece appeared in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune on April 27, 2009.)

In 2004, when I returned to my hometown roots of Sarasota, real estate was the hot, hot, hot “topic du jour.” And, while not exactly big league, Sarasota had certainly become big bucks in the years I’d been living in Boston.

Familiar landmarks — like the Simple Sam’s market that used to be a standard stop on the way to Siesta Key — had disappeared, and countless small, knock-the-sand-off-your-feet-style Florida homes had been leveled in a buy-and-bulldoze frenzy. And everywhere I went that first year back, the art of conversation was lost to loud talk of deals in the making, dollars for the taking, and which side of the Trail you lived on. (more…)