DOH!
Dan Boone gets a smackdown from Hizzoner; Venice Florida! dot com takes Boone's side
Wait... what?
-- John Patten, 03/28/08
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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Martin does it again, this time to Dan Boone
I've written plenty about local attorney E.G. "Dan" Boone over the years. He's the lead attorney in the Boone, Boone, Boone, Dewey, Cheatham, & Howe law firm that represents quite a few land developers before city council. He's one of the founding members of the Citizens for Quality Government, a PAC that has successfully owned city council since its inception right up until last November's election.  He is almost singularly responsible for the FAA's hard line stance against the city and the FAA's suspension of federal grants for a few years because of his legal brinksmanship in defending a Venice Golf Association lease that the FAA determined was a case of unlawful diversion of revenue. He's a power hungry control freak that epitomizes everything that is bad about greed that influences government at the expense of the greater good of the community. I could go on, as it feels like I'm just getting warmed up, but you get the idea.

In short, I don't like Dan Boone very much.

In turn, I suspect that he doesn't like me very much. I know that he doesn't like Mayor Ed Martin very much -- Boone donated heavily to the CQG and to former Mayor Fred Hammett's doomed reelection campaign.

All of which makes it very odd that I would take Dan Boone's side against the mayor, whom I consider to be a friend, in Boone's attack against someone else that I consider to be a friend, Councilwoman Sue Lang.

During yesterday's continuation of a long gasbag of a council meeting that started last Tuesday, Dan Boone got his now-usual panties into a now-usual twist. He was unhappy. He was downright cranky and anti-social. He wanted to give a smackdown. Rather than silently fume about it, he decided to share the moment with council and the public. So he did just that.

In the public speaking portion of council, where citizens, like Boone, are allowed to spout their five minutes of whatever random stream-of-consciousness thoughts that they care to utter, Boone got up before the microphone and gave his usual award winning impersonation of Gollum.

Stating that he represented the Venice Jet Center as their attorney, Boone launched into a diatribe against the Venice Neighborhoods Coalition and Councilwoman Sue Lang. In particular, Boone pointed out what he felt was a glaring hypocrisy on the part of Lang -- that as then- leader of the VNC, Lang had repeatedly hammered the airport over the years in an attempt to get a noise study. Now as Councilwoman, Lang has done an about face and no longer wants a noise study at the airport.

Boone's short diatribe, for all of the venom in his voice, didn't appear to be all that vindictive in its content: "[For] at least three years, there's been an unending barrage from the Venice Neighborhoods Coalition and from Sue Lang for a noise study, noise study, gotta have a noise study, gotta have a noise study. Now what's happening is we hear -- in fact I started to bring a newspaper article with me, the one that has Sue Lang's picture in it, and now she doesn't want a noise study. What I'm up here to say..."

That's when Martin cut Boone off: "Can I ask you not to make references to individual council members?"

"I apologize for that, Mr. Mayor."

"Thank you."

"But he did apologize..."
During the council break, I asked the mayor if he wanted me to lambast him privately or publicly. He asked what was on my mind. I described back to him what I had observed of the brief exchange between Dan Boone and Hizzoner. I compared the confrontation to the mayor's slamdown of me several weeks before.

"Well, I was fair, I told him he couldn't do that, either."

"And that was wrong of you to cut him off -- he had a right to make vocal opposition to a council member's stated stance."

"But he did apologize."

"And that was wrong on his part -- he had done nothing to apologize for. If you ever do that to me again, I'm plowing right over you and I won't apologize -- you can't edit the public's complaints just because you feel they are not being polite. It's wrong and it's unenforceable."

Grammarian hacks
For the longest time, city council has had this ridiculous and legally unenforceable rule that individual council members could not be addressed directly if someone opposed their stated views or voting actions. This led to a silly semantic workaround of speaking to the council as a whole and talking about the council member in the third person as though the council member was not present. It was, and is, a silly and stupid rule, one that is easily circumvented if you have the ability to juggle nouns and pronouns in mid-stream with a bit of grammarian trickery. Even though the rule was laughable and unenforceable in its fake intent for a uniquely Venice version of political correctness, the rule could be hacked easily enough without losing any force in content, so nobody objected very much.

Then came Ed Martin, with his unique Quaker mindset about how a polite body politic can and should function. Which is all very laudable in its intent... at least on the surface. The problem is that this new imposed editing from the head of the city's body politic retards political dissent.

It is also quite illegal.

Aw crap, here comes another argument about that stupid U.S. Constitution
This all goes back to the First Amendment. While this issue has to do with the concept of guaranteed free speech, of more importance is the part of the First Amendment that Martin keeps forgetting: the fundamental right "to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Even I had forgotten that part of the First Amendment in this particular argument with Martin, but when I asked my attorney for his opinion on the matter, I found out how wrong Martin is and on what dangerous legal ground he is standing.

It works like this: When a government opens up the door for public comment, it has to open up the door all the way. You can make some limitations based on context -- for instance, if there is a part of a council meeting on, say, passing an ordinance to outlaw smoking on the beach, council can limit the discussion to exclude such obviously off-topic things as a rant about the conditions of sidewalks or police pay rates. Council can get away with this limitation because it affords the opportunity for random topics elsewhere within the same meeting.

But when council opens up the floodgates for a topic free-for-all, as it does at the beginning and end of each council meeting, the ONLY limitations that it can make that are legally enforceable is on constitutionally unprotected speech, such as threats of violence and hate speech. And that's it -- that's all the mayor has the legal right to limit.

Even profanity is a grey area based on conflicting U.S. Supreme Court rulings.

Here's what my attorney wrote to me in response to the video I sent to him -- this was the video of me complaining about not getting honest answers from Building Director Hans Behrens where Martin handed down a ruling that city officials could not be mentioned or quoted at city council meetings:

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution protects the right to freedom of religion and freedom of expression from government interference (“government interference” = interference by the mayor); and to petition the government for a redress of grievances (“redress of grievance” = complaining about the Chief Building Officer not doing his job); and the most basic component of freedom of expression is the right of freedom of speech. The right to freedom of speech allows individuals to express themselves without interference or constraint by the government ("interference or constraint” = by the mayor). The Supreme Court requires the government to provide substantial justification for the interference with the right of free speech where it attempts to regulate the content of the speech. In order to “restrain” your speech, the mayor has the huge constitutional burden to “provide substantial justification” ---> it will be virtually impossible for him to provide same.

Here are some random quotes on the same subject that my attorney pulled from writings at the Cornell University School of Law (I couldn't quite follow all of the citations):

----- "The Supreme Court has consistently held that statutes punishing speech or conduct solely on the grounds that they are unseemly or offensive are unconstitutionally overbroad : “This commitment to free expression must be unwavering…the suppression of speech, even where the speech’s content appears to have little value and great costs, amounts to governmental thought control."
----- "The First Amendment does not permit [local governments] to impose special prohibitions on those speakers who express views on disfavored subjects."
----- "The maintenance of the opportunity for free political discussion to the end that government may be responsive to the will of the people and that changes may be obtained by lawful means, an opportunity essential to the security of the Republic, is a fundamental principle of our constitutional system."
----- "[I]t is a prized American privilege to speak one's mind, although not always with perfect good taste, on all public institutions."
----- “This opportunity is to be afforded for ‘vigorous advocacy’ no less than "abstract discussion."

 

A constitutionally protected right to be an asshole
Is Dan Boone an asshole? Many people think so. I happen to be one of them.

Am I an asshole? Many people think so, most likely Dan Boone included (he's never said it to me, but some truths we can hold to be self-evident).

Is Ed Martin an asshole? Usually not, but on this subject,...

In trying to prevent others from becoming assholes, the mayor has become particularly thorny and sphinctericious.

And thus comes the crunch: Within the context of this argument, both Dan Boone and I, as citizens under a government, have a constitutionally protected right to take individual council members and city hall bureaucrats to task for things that we think are wrong. We have the right to use proper nouns in naming them. We have the right to quote them. We have the right to look them in the eye and directly address them.

So do you. There are many who will think you are an asshole for stepping on their toes when you exercise this  right, but that's OK. You have a constitutionally protected right, especially in an open forum that is sponsored by the government, to be an asshole (and here I am reminded of the hilarious legal argument posed by Judd Nelson in the film From the Hip on the admissibility of that word in sworn testimony).

Where this can become particularly ugly is when the government or one of its employees has done something really egregiously wrong or even (gasp) crooked -- like the tale of the city's computer department a few years back. Such controversies are not pretty, and one can readily see why Martin, looking back at history, would like to avoid repeating it. But to limit public dialog to pretty speech strips the citizenry of one of its most powerful tools of confronting government with its own foibles face to face, eyeball to eyeball. It negates the right to address the issues and to redress the government. That is soooooooooooo wrong that it ought to be against the law.

And waddaya know? It is.

Bottom line: If the city is allowing an open forum, which it is, it cannot put what it believes to be anti-anal speech restraints into place. In fact, it cannot place any restraints beyond the concerns of public safety. None. Not even those quaint little rules that it has been imposing all along. As proof,  Ed Martin might do well to be reminded that there's a lawsuit still pending against the city, stemming from a 2002 incident in council chambers, on this very same principle.

To try to take such control is unlawful, unenforceable, and retards the political process by a form of elitist protectionism.

It's something only a certain type of person would do. I keep hoping that Mayor Martin is not that type of person.

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.