|
 |
||
| Home | ||
| Venice Florida! dot com stories archive | ||
| ||||||||||||||||
|
RELATED: The fifth paragraph refers to a negative email that the City of Fernandina Beach received: "[Commissioner Bill] Leeper said a Sarasota Herald-Tribune article about Hunt received via e-mail caused him concern and he had been 'rethinking the issue about readvertising.'" The News Ledger article does not mention who sent the email to FB's city hall. Up until last week, nobody, not even myself, thought to ask about it. It has apparently been assumed by both Hunt and his attorney (and folks in both Barefoot Bay and in Venice) that either I or Barefoot Bay resident Sylvia Parish wrote that email. Hunt's lawsuit, as filed in circuit court, accuses the pair of us of doing just that -- sending emails to cities where Hunt was applying for jobs and filling those emails with negative information about Hunt. The lawsuit complaint, as filed in circuit court, fails to specify which cities and fails to mention even one specific instance of this happening. As documented in an article posted earlier this month on Venice Florida! dot com, it is an allegation based on fantasy. According to Fernandina Beach City Clerk Mary Mercer, the city has no record of receiving any emails from Parish, while I sent a few regarding a public records request. Those requests were pertinent to an article that I was working on about Venice's then-ongoing search for a finance director and how the process had become a circus thanks to governmental headhunter Colin Baenziger. Baenziger was simultaneously promoting candidates for Venice's open finance director job and city manager candidates for Fernandina Beach. Since one of Baenziger's candidates was Hunt, and since I knew Hunt's history fairly well, I thought that taking a look at how Baenziger was promoting Hunt might give some insight into what to look for in his candidate promotions here in Venice. Due to the flat out surreal and bizarre nature of the documents that I received from Fernandina Beach, the article took a sharp left turn from the original intent and ended up being highly critical of both Baenziger and Hunt over huge misstatements in Hunt's resume. The finished article, entitled Hunt was a great city manager, Venice is just a bad town with "psychotic" citizens, was published on January 29, 2006, two days before the above mentioned News Ledger article came out but some five days after Fernandina Beach officials had received the negative email referenced in the News Ledger article. Hunt and The Executive Group My article on Hunt and Baenziger did speculate that Hunt was highly likely to be included in the so-called Executive Group federal indictments that were then-purportedly forthcoming against individuals in Venice as a result of the city's criminal conviction of environmental crimes, and this is arguably Hunt's biggest sore point. The reason that I believed that was because of statements made by City Attorney Bob Anderson in the EPA shade meeting transcripts. Anderson is quoted as stating that Hunt had given federal prosecutors the one thing that the feds needed to bring the case together: motive. According to Anderson, federal prosecutors were able to make the leap from just a few individuals criminally acting alone to a city-wide conspiracy level when Hunt told federal prosecutors that Venice violated EPA laws, and paid the subsequent fines when caught, as a pragmatic matter of the cost of doing business. In my mind, and in the minds of many others (including a few lawyer and law enforcement types that I talked with), it would be highly unlikely for Hunt to scrape out of this unindicted, as he would have to be central to the fed cases. Looking back at the case from what I knew then, the only way I could see Hunt getting out of this was if he had flipped and was giving evidence to the feds against others here in Venice. Venice Florida! dot com wasn't alone in speculating in print that Hunt might be getting a federal look-see for possible criminal criminal charges. On January 21, 2006, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported the following: "It remains unclear whether Hunt is considered a member of the Executive Group under investigation, though he said he has not been contacted by investigators since resigning as city manager. But the transcript released Friday suggests that Hunt may have had knowledge of the dumping at the time that it was occurring." That same Herald-Tribune article noted that Hunt had already narrowly missed federal criminal charges, this in regard to a prior whistle-blower investigation: "Federal investigators wired a source who secretly tape-recorded conversations with Hunt. Hunt resigned in January 2004, as federal investigators considered whether to charge him with obstruction of justice. They chose not to, because of both his decision to resign and because he 'got to the edge of the cliff and then backed off' in the recorded conversations, the 38-page transcript said." That separate (but related) federal investigation was reported by Venice Florida! dot com in July of 2004 in an article entitled Former city manager Hunt investigated, secretly taped by the FBI. As a matter of practical history, Hunt's incriminating statement to fed prosecutors, as recounted by Anderson in the shade meeting transcripts, had the eventual net effect of taking individual employees off of the criminal hook and putting the city itself squarely on that same criminal hook in their place. In the criminal process subsequent to the city copping a guilty plea, the feds, either intentionally or not, ended up pulling a huge fraud on the citizens of Venice by dropping the cases against any and all individuals responsible for the city's criminal conviction. The taxpayers were hit with fines and legal fees that went into the millions, all on the strength of Hunt's ill-thought statement to prosecutors, while the individuals responsible for the city's corporate conviction ended up getting a Get Out Of Jail Free card. The feds got a conviction, justifying a four-year federal investigation, then they got bored and moved on. Or maybe it was all dropped out of favors due to hidden interested parties. We'll never know, but I'll always wonder. Still to this day we don't know who the actual members of The Executive Group were. Shortly after Hunt filed his lawsuit (within days, in fact), the city announced publicly for the first time that Hunt was not one of the individuals that the feds had been seeking indictments against. Up until that point in time, Hunt's membership in The Executive Group was a matter of federal secrecy and public speculation. So in the end, Hunt was right about one thing -- he wasn't a member of The Executive Group. It turns out that nobody was. Didn't I see this on Perry Mason? Getting back to the events in Fernandina Beach -- There was one question that Hunt, his attorney, and Venice Florida! dot com all apparently failed to ask: Who was it that sent the email that caused Fernandina Beach's future mayor, Bill Leeper, such distress and arguably cost Hunt his shot at becoming FB's city manager? It would appear that the mentioned email was the triggering event that caused Hunt to fall out of favor with Fernandina Beach's officials. While being able to truthfully write "I have never actually been indicted" as a bulleted item in a resume is always a guaranteed winning strategy in job hunting, at the core of this lawsuit is Hunt's inability to find work similar to the position he held here in Venice and his contention that this is all very clearly my fault. Thus, it is crucial to know who sent the poison-pen email that tarnished an otherwise spotless career in civil service. So who did send it? As I wrote before on this site's message board, it was not I. Nor was it Sylvia Parish. Nor was it anyone that we could have influenced to do such a dirty deed. The email that apparently inspired Hunt to file a lawsuit against the pair of us, the email that FB City Clerk Mary Mercer told me that Commissioner Leeper and the rest of FB's city commission were referring to in the News Ledger article, was sent by Hunt's own hired gun: Colin Baenziger! And now, finally, here it is -- the email that launched a paranoiac lawsuit based on bad legal guesswork and nutcase logic: Click here to read Baenziger's email and attached memo to Fernandina Beach, dated January 24, 2006 (Adobe Acrobat PDF file). My head asplodes.
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. |
|
