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Freakout at the CQG
Bennies, cocaine and vodka are the only friends that
council and the development PAC that supports them has, as the citizens of
Venice have picked a new song for the city's official anthem: "Burn
Down The Mission"
-- John Patten, 09/18/07
--
jpatten@veniceflorida.com
Got a comment?
Make
it here.
Taylor seems sane, the rest of council are donning flak
jackets
After skimming through the city council email bins from the last few days, it
has become readily apparent: it is freakout time at the CQG. So far, I have seen
one -- ONE -- email from a council member that did not reflect fear and
paranoia. That came from Vicki Taylor in response to a citizen who wrote to
complain about Jim Clinch's articles in the Venice Gondolier and in the Chamber
of Commerce's monthly magazine.
Clinch seemed hell-bent on offending just about
everyone, including the "so-called Greatest Generation" which he viewed as
lazy, selfish, and stupid (his actual words) for their views about airport
development as they are too poor to play golf at any reasonably priced golf
course -- this in his Chamber of Commerce article (see sidebar at right).
Taylor's response to Clinch and the complaining citizen:
Thank you
very much for the link and I do find it offensive, non sensitive, and type
casting of an age group. Negativity can come from any age group, at any time,
and over any controversial issue.
Having been a Chamber Board
member I am surprised that this was allowed to be published as an outgoing
Chamber President message or at any time.
-- Vicki Taylor, 09/17/07
The peasants are revolting
Meanwhile, other citizens have been inundating city hall's email servers with
hate mail. There's just far too many to print or even mention, but the impact is
clear: city hall is under siege as it attempts to pass Mike Miller's six-storied
Tra Ponti project before the November elections as a last gasp of building
boomery before the rabble takes over council and burns the entire city to the
ground.
There's been a few positive emails to city hall, but they
have been very few. VASI's Brett Stephens, whose wife, Kim, is on the Airport
Advisory Board, sent an email to council that practically nominated Clinch for
sainthood. Councilman John Simmonds responded, asking Stephens to voice this
opinion to the newspaper. One can only sit and wait with popcorn and hope that
the Gondo will allow more entertaining coverage of this train wreck.
However, it was Venice resident Cheryl Dell's emailed
dialog with John Simmonds that caught my eye and sucked me into the
conversation, and Dell's email is a fair sample of the level of dialog between
the current council and its citizenry. This is one angry as hell town dealing
with one angry as hell council. Dell complained about Tra Ponti:
I am a ten year resident of Venice... I
can't tell you how upset it makes me to hear about Mike Miller projects. I am
not a stupid person. Most homeowners in Venice are
not! I can recognize the power Mr. Miller has with the council. I see the city's
new commercial mixed-use zone district, created for Mike Miller. This was not
allowed under the old commercial intensive zoning. You are not able to create
this "Good ole Boys" system with those of us who really care about our
hometown. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this all out and I am
outraged at your attempt.
A recent quote from Mr.
Miller, "A condominium hotel is much less occupied," Miller said. "Half of the
units may not be available." HELLO, because the owners are in residence!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-- Cheryl Dell, 09/14/07
Ever the bumbler at diplomacy, Simmonds fired back:
I am a life time resident of the West Coast of Fla and a 30 year
tax payer to the City of Venice. Please read your
e-mail again and see if you still agree with the tone of it. Sounds abusive
doesn't it?
-- John Simmonds, 09/17/07
Wow: Nice tire tracks there, John
To me, Simmonds just laid down in the middle of oncoming traffic. I've
been having problems with my brakes lately, so Simmonds found this in his email
inbox:
Speaking of
abusive, see pages 2 & 3 of this:
http://venicechamber.com/WebNewsletter.pdf. About the only people he didn't
go out of his way to offend were Jews, blacks, and Hispanics, and I'm sure it
was merely an oversight.
My response:
http://www.veniceflorida.com/features/clinch.htm
Of course you come off as a southern
gentleman on video -- South Bronx, that is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhFe0v6N2P8
Abusive? Yo,
dude: pot > kettle > black
-- John Patten, 09/18/07
Simmonds tried to bring the dialog back up to a civil
level in his response to me, but by then I was in no mood:
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The Gospel According to Jim Clinch
Quotes from Chairman Clinch's article in the
September, 2007 edition of the Venice Area Chamber of Commerce newsletter
On opposition to
airport development: "The
cut-rate golf crowd, most of whom don't actually
live inside the city limits... Even though the
Venice Golf Association is a privately held company
they apparently have no right to try and make a profit like any other
company. No, they don't exist to make money, and
shame on them for trying. They exist to provide
cheap golf for poor people. Maybe they can make it
up in volume? Stupid and selfish."
On retirees in Venice: "In
Venice, the truly sad thing is that it's our senior citizens, the so-called
"Greatest Generation," that are most at fault. A
disproportionately large number of them
continue to exhibit a stubborn unwillingness to accept
facts and an overarching, single-minded devotion to their own self
interest at the expense of everyone else."
On slow-growth
advocates (who Clinch deliberately mislabels as no-growth advocates):
"The storm is about to let loose.
The stupidocracy is upon us, but I have hope that can't last forever.
My belief - because I am an optimist at heart - is
that it will be like a child touching a hot stove.
Sometimes you just have to let them do it so they
learn."
On raising children:
"...a child touching a hot stove.
Sometimes you just have to let them do it so they
learn."
On the Sarasota
Herald-Tribune and the Venice Gondolier: "The
news and editorial pages, however, are owned by
the recreational malcontents and the vocal,
habitual dimwits."
On the Sarasota County school system: "Kids
and teachers at Venice High, Booker and Riverview enjoy another year
of rat and cockroach infested classrooms..."
On the Sarasota County Commission: "Management
by crisis, putting off any spending decisions, especially
in South County, until the situation is absolutely horrible, at which
point they will spend the least amount possible and most likely not
fix whatever it was that needed fixing."
On the Hometown
Democracy movement: "If
passed it will result in so many local referenda
on land use that development will be brought to a
standstill which is, of course, the objective.
Considering the level of selfishness among Floridians,
in spite of the fact that almost all of us moved here from someplace
else, I think there is a good chance this will pass. The prevailing
attitude of 'I've got mine, screw everybody else!'
will dominate."
On himself: "I am an optimist
at heart"
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Nice to hear from you! I miss your cheery
messages. You try so hard to be (what is it you say "rude"). You're just having
fun when you could be making millions. What a waste of such a gift you have in
very high off the chart IQ.
-- John Simmonds, 09/17/07
And so, this led to one of the most focused and
on-target rants that I've written in a long time
My response to John Simmonds:
These aren't
cheery times, John. You folks seem hell-bent on political suicide and
self-destruction, which is fine by me -- the entertainment value more than
compensates for the ticket price of attendance at council meetings. I do miss
the popcorn vendor. But while you guys are busy trying to discover the most
spectacular show-stopping methods of self-immolation, you are dragging the rest
of us into the fire zone, a visible danger not lost on a goodly portion of the
attentive citizenry.
Of course, all of this panicked foolishness on your
parts is all our fault for pointing it out. Clinch's paranoiac shotgun-blast
article, Wilmore's physical attack on me, your verbal attack on Rita Sakowicz,
these are all symptoms of internal cannibalism within the CQG tribe. You guys
are in panic mode that this is your last tango in Venice, so it's a rush to pass
Miller's stucco-and-red-tile monolithic legacy into existence before the
elections, as it sure as spit wouldn't pass with six stories if the CQG loses a
couple of seats on council (a minimum of two by my count).
It's actually pretty damned funny -- if you live
outside of the Venice city limits. Within the city limits, it is a class war,
one that council has been blindly marching towards for a number of years.
Unchecked growth produced exactly what you have argued growth would never cause:
higher spiraling home prices and a total lack of affordability for basic
housing. I remember well our verbal off-the-record arguments and the articles
that you provided to prove your case that growth would prevent the very
situation that we have found ourselves presently in.
So that economic model doesn't work.
In AA, I can remember a definition of dysfunction --
repeating the same self destructive patterns of behavior in an attempt to
achieve a result other than self-destruction. A round of behavior that leads to
a negative result, which in turn leads to a repeat of the same experiment to try
to see if things can't end differently -- of course they don't, so it's back to
the drawing board and -- hey, why not try this one more time? It's gotta end
differently. But it doesn't.
That's what happens with gamblers, drug addicts,
alcoholics, spouse beaters, and, now, land developers (Jim Clinch, eat your
heart out -- you could never have made that set work).
As a state and as a community, we have already bitten
off far more than we can chew. It's gonna take a decade of serious mastication
to undue the devastating economic damage that unchecked growth has caused.
Clinch is right -- it is time to hunker down economically, even if his analysis
of how we got here seems fueled by a weekend blitz of bennies, cocaine, and
vodka combined with paranoiac glances through the curtains to see if Hell's
Grannies have shown up on his front lawn to burn a cross and treat him to a good
old fashioned southern-style lynching.
Clinch faults the slow-growth movement for getting us
into our present economic slump, as though we had any ability to stop it. We
didn't. We tried lying down in front of the bulldozers. We were flattened. Herb
Levine and I both predicted the present situation and we were vilified and
ignored. Now that this has come to pass, we are vilified again as though our
ignored predictions and warnings were the actual causes.
So what's the answer? More toot up the snoot, one more
shot of Jack Daniels -- make that three -- and then let's build our way out of
this mess. Ignore the laws of supply and demand, only pussies, liberals, and
grey-haired pensioners pay any attention to that faggy, Jewish economics crap --
if we increase the supply, it'll naturally increase the demand, and suddenly all
will be well again.
What's really sad is that I am betting that you are
setting Mike Miller up to fail. This Tra Ponti seems to be an act of
desperation, a last Solomonic appeal to the gods by building a temple big enough
to house them all in. If you remember anything of Sunday school, you might
recall that Solomon's architectural nightmare based on a dodgy multi-god theory
did not end well. Here, Miller is building on a somewhat smaller scale than
Solomon in an attempt to house all of the economic gods at a time when those
very gods have already expressed their anger at us puny humans.
Hey, I have an idea. How about more condos, only we'll
call them condo-hotels. They'll be different than condos, which aren't selling, cuz they'll be condo hotels.
I dunno. Maybe the view is better on the other side of
the bennies, cocaine, and vodka fog. Pour me a tall one and hand me the straw.
Hopefully this'll numb me up until November.
-- John Patten, 09/18/07
John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He
can also be incredibly rude at times.
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