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Venice on the web
Blacklash -
Venice Florida! dot com finds itself in the
awkward position of actually defending a public official Got a comment? Make it here. Related:
I don't think any of this was in the
original Frank
Capra script Anonymous packets of information were received by the Herald-Trib and Venice Florida! dot com (the Gondo states that they did not receive any packets or tips, but that they found the same information as part of a routine background check into Black's past). The packet I received was hand-delivered to me the day before City Manager George Hunt announced his resignation. The packet contained a cover letter that mixed truth with fiction. The rest of the packet was made up of two reprints downloaded and printed from Tallahassee.com (we are unable to directly link to the pages as they require paid access) and a third article, this story from the Longboat Key Observer. All three articles, if taken only in the context provided, tend to paint Marty Black with an extremely unattractive color. After doing some preliminary background checking on the information, I talked with Earle Kimel of the Herald-Trib. Kimel told me he had had the same allegations surreptitiously dumped on him about a year ago and he had checked them out at that time. His conclusion then was that it was all much ado about very little. Kimel didn't seem too surprised that somebody was trying to raise the same issues again now that Hunt was fading from the picture and Black's star was rising.
The smear job During the afternoon of this particular Monday, I happened to be standing on my front porch watching Amos and some neighborhood children engaging in the ever-ongoing and scoreless game of chase-me-chase-you in the parking lot. Due to speed and agility issues, Amos was predictably winning. A white car pulled up, notable for the fact that blue medical tape was covering up the rear license plate. A rather plump but not unattractive woman in her mid-40's got out of the car and called up to me, asking if I was John Patten. I replied that I was and she stated that she had something for me. She was wearing white cotton medical garb, like that of a medical receptionist or a nurse's aide, and she had on a pair of huge (I mean obscenely huge) round sunglasses that obscured much of her face and made it appear that she had at sometime been part of a raid on Elton John's wardrobe room. Hot damn. I couldn't recall the last time a strange woman had sought me out with "something for me." In fact, I don't think it's ever happened. Finally, someone had crawled out of the woodwork, innately sensing my sexual prowess through the geeky charade of this web site. She handed me an envelope, sealed with the same blue medical tape and stated that she was delivering this for a friend. I asked her who the friend was, and she silently climbed back in her vehicle and drove off. I didn't even get the kiss-of-death "I'll call you" line. Fine, leave. You're just like all the others. The children, who had been watching this transaction, gathered around quickly with questions: "Who was that?" "I don't know." "What's in the envelope?" "Anthrax." I offered the envelope to the children. "Here, you open it." The children quickly ran away. Works for me. The envelope contained the aforementioned articles from the Tallahassee Democrat, plus a very strange cover letter that I have addressed on the message board on 01/16/04. Here's the complete text of that cover letter, with all of the original spelling and punctuation intact:
What is your major malfunction? So I did my homework and came up with, thankfully, nothing worth writing about. That's how it was going to stay until someone forced my hand. On January 16, someone posted a message on the message board of this site. The post referenced this same material. So now I had a choice: delete the post or address the issue. I chose to address the issue, but I deeply resented being forced to address what I felt was a created controversy and I didn't want to give credence to this bogus piece of propaganda. In one part of my post, I referenced the last bulleted section of the cover letter. This was about so-called bogus complaints against Hunt, and in response I wrote:
I was really on a roll that day, this whole thing was seriously angering me. If I thought that Black was dirty, I'd be hounding him mercilessly over these issues. Don't think for a second that I didn't take a seriously skeptical look at Black after reading the two Tallahassee Democrat articles that had been provided to me, in spite of the obviously usurious cover letter that came with the articles.
Scandal #1: Tallahassee -- the vaporware purchase The scandal was basically a much larger version of what happened here in Venice with PuterGate. That Marty Black had just left the City of Tallahassee's employ to take a job in Longboat Key seemed particularly suspicious to the Tallahassee Democrat. In an early hack-job written before they knew all of the facts in the case, the Democrat dragged Black's name into the fray as though he was the only official who had approved the deal. The first two articles that the Democrat published gave the distinct impression that Black was in on the scam. Later, as more details unfolded, the Democrat dropped mentions of Black and focused in on Wayne Horner, a city employee who had been a roommate of the owner of the bogus company. While the Democrat stopped just short of apologizing to Black, it is clear from their later accounts that the paper majorly screwed up in dragging Black's name into the story early on. Horner was subsequently dragged through the media mud, and the city eventually received its money back. The one dark hole in the whole story was that no prosecutions were ever initiated, although Horner was fired. By all accounts, Black and a number of other Tallahassee officials had been conned. Since Black had just exited the Tallahassee scene when the scandal first broke, he was initially a safe target for media wrath. As the Herald-Trib pointed out in their recent article, city officials in Tallahassee still praise Black. Thus, the first scandal, while juicy sounding at first, isn't a scandal at all as far as Black's involvement. Score so far:
Scandal #2: Longboat Key -- moonlighting in Venice There were no allegations of wrongdoing or of conflict of interest, but... Here the problem is that Black was doing part-time side work and had apparently not properly informed his full-time employer. According to the Longboat Key Observer, Black did 97.5 hours worth of work reviewing a comprehensive plan amendment during the infamous Henry Ranch annexation. A pretty clear violation of the rules. There's no squeaking around this one, although it is important to note that Black was not accused of using Longboat Key's time or resources to do his work for the City of Venice. According to news accounts, Black was given a talk by the Long Boat Key town manager, Bruce St. Denis. Black was not given a reprimand, he was just told to finish his business with Venice and to get out of the situation. Other online news accounts state that Black had at some point received permission from some town commissioners to do the side work for Venice:
Bottom line: we're never going to know the whole story on this one, but it doesn't appear to be any kind of substantive ethical or legal violation, the whole thing just smells kind of odd. Begrudgingly, half of a point goes to Scandalmonger. Score so far:
Scandal #3: Longboat Key -- the web page Black was accused of using Longboat Key computer resources to set up a web page (not a web site) to promote his side business. It doesn't look like the page ever went past the experimental stage. I can't find a single reference to it or a single link to it anywhere on the web, not through Google or through Web Archive's back-filed copy of the Longboat Key site or through any other search method I tried. If Black had been using the page to market himself, there would be links to it somewhere, there would be an internet trail still to this day. There isn't one. It's like it fell into a black hole or that it never existed on the Internet. Based on that, I'm inclined to give Black the benefit of the doubt. That may sound like a pretty big benefit at first, but I have some pretty strong geek reasons for leaning that way. Black maintains he doesn't remember putting the web page together. As ludicrous as it may sound, that's not entirely impossible and I'm inclined to believe him, mainly because I can't seem to find a trace of it elsewhere on the Internet. Based on what I can't find (and boy howdy, I was looking), it is entirely likely that this was a quick experiment that failed and was just as quickly forgotten about. As an anecdotal example, I can't count the times I have found personal files on business owners' computers while doing routine searches for other lost files, only to watch the client get genuinely and honestly perplexed, wondering how the heck those files ended up on their business computer -- this kind of stuff happens all the time, as any computer owner can attest. Longboat Key's town manager, Bruce St. Denis, was reported in the Longboat Key Observer as stating that the use of Marty Black's normal password was a "smoking gun" that proved Black did this knowingly and that Black's subsequent denials of knowledge about the page were a breach of honesty. I will submit that I can probably find at a bare minimum at least a dozen password protected files in the Longboat Key system that are file-attributed to Bruce St. Denis that St. Denis doesn't have a clue are there. In fact, I'll bet I can find similar files on just about every computer that the City of Venice owns -- that's just the nature of computers and the people who use them. Bottom line: if Black was actively using the page and repeatedly accessing it for modifications, I'd have found a trace of it somewhere. That I can't lends a strong credence to Black's otherwise unbelievable denials. Also, note what St. Denis didn't allege: he never mentioned any logged web traffic going to the page, something the server would have automatically tracked in the server logs. Take the old 'If a tree falls in the forest' and all that, but word it somewhat differently: if a web file exists but nobody ever looks at it... ? That's no small matter, that question cuts right to the heart of St. Denis' allegations and I am quite surprised that it is an issue that nobody raised at the time. Even so, the resources used for housing one web page would have cost the town of Longboat Key $0 (zero), as the page was residing on unused space and would likely have taken up much less space than exists on a normal 1.4MB floppy disk. Bandwidth wouldn't be an issue, as any additional bandwidth the page used would have been minimal and would not have incurred an additional charge. Thus, the whole web page "scandal" is the monetary equivalent of taking a sheet of scrap paper home for personal use. One other thing that is interesting. Recent news reports hint at a personality conflict between St. Denis and Black while Black was at Longboat Key.
The Longboat Key Observer article that was provided to me, dated 12/06/00, showed that Black was being forced to resign from Longboat Key over the web page incident. It is rather strange that St. Denis would state in December of 2000 that he had forced Black to resign when, only a week earlier, Black had already announced that he would be moving on to accept a position in Venice. So strange that such an occurrence in government is nearly unheard of. It's like sticking a dagger in a corpse that has been dead for a week already. Reading between the lines on this, St. Denis had to be one really pissed-off puppy. Black didn't want to comment on much of this, and I can see why. It's a lot of old wounds and he-said she-said stuff, and it all begins to look angry and very ugly. With regards to all of this, better to put on a happy face and move on. I'm not seeing a big scandal here, just hints of a lot of bad feelings and a single .html computer file that appeared where it shouldn't have been. Final score:
So where did this come from? The only other likely source would be Hunt himself. After all, Hunt was quoted in the papers as stating that he hoped whoever took over his position would look to the future and would not delve too deeply into the past. Black already knows the past. Hunt is cocky, Hunt is brazen, and Hunt is, I think, sneaky enough to try something like this. Hunt didn't do this. How do I know? Because Hunt can spell and he knows how to use punctuation properly. I've read enough of his stuff to know. This cover letter was definitely not Hunt's handiwork -- note the improper use of the contraction "Lets" in the opening of the letter and the proper use of "let's" in the final phrase. Hunt would never do that. Then there's the incorrect usage of an ampersand in the third bulleted item, an apostrophe in "P.O.'s" and a couple of other items. Definitely not Hunt. No way. Again, stay tuned. This show only gets more interesting with each passing day.
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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