RELATED:
The Looting of FEMA and Homeland Security
-- Rolling Stone, December 2005
Pam Johnson: VCC was never touted as potential shelter
-- Venice Gondolier Sun, 12/18/05
Did the mayor and Jim Myers lie about turning the VCC into
a hurricane shelter just to get their hands on $10 million?
-- Venice Florida! dot com, 12/19/05
New storm shelter in Venice (text and full video of aired story)
-- WWSB-TV, 12/20/05
Myers: VCC 110% to be a shelter
-- Venice Gondolier Sun, 12/21/05
Voters OK'd turning center into shelter, but doors bolted
-- Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 01/05/06
FEMA should investigate City of Venice
-- letters, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 01/06/06
Public should be told why promised storm shelter never came to be
-- editorial, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 01/06/06

The Jim Myers Long Island Tea and Rumpus Room
I don't think it has dawned on our elected officials how angry -- and scared -- some of our residents are about the lack of a hurricane shelter. And people are very angry. Herb Levine, president of the Venice Taxpayers League, told me that he was stopped five times while he was shopping in Publix by folks who recognized him and wanted to vent about the Venice Community Center. Levine states it is a new personal best record.

The renovation of the Venice Community Center may very well turn out to be the most lavish and outrageous pork barrel that ever came out of city hall. At $4.8 million -- some $2.3 million over the originally proposed budget as it was sold to voters back in 2003 -- it was as though Jim Myers thought he was Francis Ford Coppola directing Apocalypse Now.

It was a hugely obscene pork barrel project. It was, also, anything but an unprecedented one.

There were four projects in total that were funded by a $10 million bond that voters narrowly (by a 231 vote margin) approved in 2003. The renovation of the Venice Community Center was one. The other three, the purchase of park land from the FAA, beach renourishment and reconstruction of the pier, all came in under budget.

The city had promised that if any projects came in under budget, the extra money would be used to pay off the bond. They promised that they would be good stewards.

They lied.

It was as though they were being as miserly as possible in the first three projects all for the purpose of allowing former councilman Jim Myers and any contractor that came his way to get stinking drunk with money and power.

The majority of the current council apparently figured some of this all out by themselves. Last year, Councilman John Simmonds suggested naming one of the rooms in the center after Myers. The motion was met with silent stares as nobody seconded the proposal.

Venice Community Center --  a porcine masterpiece
So now we get to the renovation of the Venice Community Center, a project that was originally sold to the voters as around a $2.5 million job but that ended up ballooning out to some $4.8 million. Talk about cost overruns. That's a biggie.

Along the way, some functionality was trimmed. Originally desired to be acoustically fantastic for musical performances, a lot of the acoustics were reportedly sacrificed in the name of hurricane protection.

Now we're finding out that the hurricane protection was wasted money as the center will likely never be used as a hurricane shelter, which is how it was sold to voters when then-councilman Jim Myers, then-city manager George Hunt and Mayor Dean Calamaras made their feverish world tour-styled pitches to voters in 2003, this in a successful effort to get a $10 million bond referendum passed.

We now have a community center that won't protect us and will sound like crap as well? You can't get more Venice than that. Good work there, Jim!

On the upside, in the event of a major storm, we'll still have a community center. We may not have a community, but you can't have everything.

Ever eloquent, Myers is now a source of great quotes that sum up this municipal meltdown. He's been a source of great quotes for a long time. While on council, he could regularly be heard muttering obscenities into his microphone, particularly whenever he spotted Venice Taxpayers Leaguer Herb Levine heading for the dais. "Oh sh*t" and "I hate this man" were two loud whispers that I remember vividly coming out of the council loudspeakers.

Another great quote that was on the record at a city council meeting was his description of some difficult task: "That's about as hard as pulling nails out of the ass of a chicken," a metaphor that is utterly mystifying in its origin and meaning: how would nails get into the ass of a chicken and when, if ever, did anyone pull nails from such a location?

While stumping for passage of the $10 million bond, Myers answered questions from the audience at the pre-renovated community center. When Herb Levine raised his hand, Myers threw down the microphone in disgust, telling the crowd, "I can't talk to that man."

Now, as a public official who is supposed to know the public will as a part of public service, Myers' latest quote, as reported in the Herald-Trib, is an acknowledgement of his absolute cluelessness on the matter of the Venice Community Center: "I don't know what the public thinks, I really can't say... There's been a hell of a lot of confusion."

No kidding. Wonder how that happened?

A FUBAR'd legacy
Myers was the titular head of operations for the community center's renovation. This was to be his great legacy, a redemption of sorts after years of controversial, lackluster and sometimes downright ugly performances while on council. This community center would ultimately be what Myers would be remembered for.

True to form, Myers, with a lot of help from a wide cast of supporting characters, has FUBAR'd his legacy. He wanted to be a hero for bringing this baby home, a hero both to the builders and to the community. The builders may still love him, but Venice itself is beginning to look at him like he's the town's biggest villain.

If the community center is never used as a hurricane shelter, Myers, Calamaras and Hunt will be known as the men who swindled an entire community and sold them down the river, all for the benefit of the contractors who profited on the job.

So what? It's not like this is the first time that the city government has wasted vast amounts of money on pork projects. Under Calamaras' reign alone, a number of hammy projects went through the check printing machine at city hall. The Fourth of July fireworks purchases, where Calamaras admits he negotiated bad deals -- we paid more and got very little in increase. Computer purchases where the city was paying over $1,100 per tower, not including monitors and full software licensing. The computer department director contracting with and paying himself over $12,000 for virtually nothing in return and only getting a handslap initially.

And then there's the black hole of utilities, where money disappeared as though a Star Trek wormhole entry access was located in one wall of former utils director John Lane's office.

So the bumping of the community center budget from $2.5 million to $4.8 should come as no surprise to anyone. Ya just knew a few favorite sons were going to be able to buy a lot of bling off of this deal, that was a given going in.

Much of this went on without the benefit of an appointed finance director, which has led me to speculate that the biggest disaster this city faces is if we actually get someone honest and competent to fill the slot and he or she starts issuing reports on where the money went.

Pam Johnson never saw the truck that hit her
After organizing a Bond Oversight Committee, a major selling point to the voters in getting the bond passed at the election polls, the city wouldn't convene a meeting for almost two years. By the time they met for the first time, one member, Geri Weinberg, had passed away. Late last year, after some public outcry, the committee, which is made up of the mayor's worst nightmare cast of characters, met for the first time. It's already been ugly.

The Bond Oversight Committee is made up of the exact same list of names that appear on the 1-Cent Sales Tax Oversight Committee. That, too, has also met for the first time late last year (that was a 1997 referendum-passed tax within the city with money to be designated for infrastructure needs).

For one thing, the committee is now leaning into looking at how the community center money was spent, something that members claim they are already encountering resistance about. Their mandate, they are reportedly being told, is to see that the money was spent on the original four projects only, not how it was spent on those projects. Committee members are crying foul.

Then there is the hurricane shelter controversy, heated up to a nuclear blast by City Liaison Pam Johnson's comments, "for the record," at a recent meeting. Johnson was quoted correctly in recent press accounts as saying that the public was wrong and that there had been a lot of misinformation, that nobody within the city government had ever touted the center as any type of emergency shelter, ever.

Which is flat out not true.

Johnson was working from an old George Hunt playbook -- when in trouble, tell the biggest lie possible. Tell a huge-assed fantasy-filled flat-earth style whopper. Council and administration will back you and any detractors will be humiliated and squashed. That's been the history, anyway.

It didn't work for a very plain reason. Johnson forgot what meeting she was in. This wasn't the Planning Commission or Code Enforcement boards that are stocked with Calamaras cronies. Jim Myers wasn't up on the dais to nod idiotically at any fantasy floated out. Maxine Barritt is on this board, the gal who fought hard to keep development off of the beach when the city was planning on tearing down the wastewater plant on the island. Other members include Jim Leis who once ran for council as a VTL-endorsed candidate and attorney Jon Preiksat, the former head of The Venice Foundation.

Johnson apparently had no clue that this board would break ranks and actually demand the truth instead of the standard municipal board practice of publicly accepting the current official city hall story. They ate her for lunch and spit out the bones.

Don't be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Venice Party
Now Johnson's fictional denials are in dispute. The current unofficial draft of the minutes of the meeting in which Johnson dived headfirst into a woodchipper strangely omits Johnson's comments. Committee head Jon Preiksat has inquired to city hall as to why the draft of the minutes that he received makes no mention of Johnson's credibility suicide. It looks like the city is taking the stance that since it was a 1-Cent Sales Tax Oversight Committee meeting (and not a $10 Million Bond Oversight Committee meeting) at which Johnson spoke, her comments were off-topic and hence must be kept from the official record. This omission is in spite of the fact that Johnson opened her remarks by saying that her comments were, and I quote, "for the record."

Which in the end is just making things worse but hilariously comedic nevertheless. As it stands now, Pam Johnson never officially said that public officials never officially said that the community center would never be a shelter of any official designation.

Johnson did manage to achieve one thing -- she took the heat off of where it belongs: Myers, Calamaras and Hunt, the trio that sold this community down the river.

Calamaras and Myers: It sucks to be you (at least Hunt ran out of town)
If and when a major hurricane ever heads our way, we are screwed. There is no place to go. No place really, really safe, anyway. Calamaras, Myers and Hunt -- these three told us otherwise, smiled, and then took our money. They sold us, our safety, our friends' safety, our families' safety, right down the river, all in the name of acquiring one hell of a fabulous cash flow.

I'm convinced that they would have sold their mothers just to get their hands on that bond money. I was convinced of that when they were making their pitch. I've never seen the mayor work so hard at achieving anything else. I smelled trouble, and as a result this web site strongly urged voters not to approve the bond referendum (see Venice Florida! dot com's 2003 election endorsements).

At least 25 Floridians were reported dead by CNN in first few days after Hurricane Charley hit Charlotte County and traveled through the state. Charley was a Category 3.

If a hurricane of that force hits here, people will die. Real people, real death.

We can't hold Hunt solely accountable for this. I'm sure it will be tried but it would be untrue. Hunt is now community manager of Barefoot Bay, the state's largest community of manufactured homes. While Hunt was around to promote the bond, he resigned two months after voters approved the referendum in November of 2003. Hunt's last day as city manager was January 31, 2004. How the bond was promoted was the fault of Hunt, Calamaras and Myers but Hunt had little to no impact on how the money was eventually spent.

We want a shelter. We need a shelter. We paid for a shelter. We didn't get a shelter.

Those who are responsible for selling us this mess had two options in explaining it to us: They could either admit that they took us for a ride or they could say that they screwed up royally.

Not so strangely, Myers and Calamaras have chosen a third, weaseling option: they claim they don't know what happened. Myers referred to the whole mess as "confusion," but refused to accept responsibility for causing that confusion.

Calamaras shrugged and gave the Herald-Trib the same routine that he always pulls when backed into a corner, his classic "I dunno" sketch: "Did everybody think that it [the Venice Community Center] would be a shelter of first resort? Probably. I did." Calamaras also did not accept responsibility.

The wrath of FEMA?
The Herald-Trib, in an editorial and in a letter from a reader, have speculated that we squandered FEMA money and that there may be a come-uppance. While stating that the city government's credibility is at stake in this fiasco, the Herald-Trib gave city hall a very hard hit:

Some City Council members urged a "yes" vote [to the voters on the $10 million bond referendum] and said the center would be hardened and equipped to serve as a hurricane shelter. Did those officials mislead or lie to the public, or did they make promises without making sure they could keep them?

City officials say the building is unlikely to serve as a hurricane shelter because county emergency management officials probably won't send people to a building that's only a few blocks from the Gulf of Mexico, on an island that can only be reached by bridge. At what point -- before or after the 2003 vote -- did Venice officials discuss this with emergency management officials?

The Federal Emergency Management Agency gave Venice a $250,000 grant to harden the Community Center. Has FEMA been told that the building isn't likely to become a hurricane shelter? FEMA should be asking questions, too.
-- editorial, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 01/06/06

The Herald-Trib is right, FEMA should be asking questions. If FEMA does, it'll be just another Federal alphabet agency investigating Venice, a straggler at the end of a long and ragged parade. The FAA, the EPA, HUD and the FBI have all been here before and yet we still have many of the same class clowns calling more bad shots.

I kind of doubt that FEMA, out of all of the Federal agencies, would be likely to give a major hit to Venice (no matter how deserved that hit might be) for the reason that FEMA is a majorly FUBAR'd agency itself. Having been tossed into the Department of Homeland Security as a two-level down agency by the Bush Administration (instead of the separate stand-alone Cabinet level status it enjoyed under Clinton), it has, according to a recent investigative piece published by Rolling Stone Magazine, become good at only one thing: handing out money to private corporate cronies in massive quantities. Any pork-barreling done in Venice with FEMA money only furthered the FEMA agenda.

Moreover, Venice wouldn't be the first community to squander FEMA and Homeland Security funds:

The bizarre episodes of bad planning and wasteful spending might be funny if they didn't involve squandering taxpayer dollars intended for securing the nation. Awash in homeland-security funds, small counties in Iowa splurged on traffic cones and wall clocks with built-in hidden cameras. Columbus, Ohio, bought bulletproof vests for dogs in the city's fire department. The District of Columbia paid kids in a summer jobs program to come up with a rap song about emergency preparedness. "Nationally, we just kind of threw money against the wall," said Tim Daniel, former director of homeland security for Missouri, which received $7.2 million to buy 13,000 hazmat suits -- one for every law-enforcement officer in the state.
-- Rolling Stone, Looting Homeland Security, December 2005

As the nation goes, so goes Venice, but we do like to fark things up in as grand a way as possible: We took $4.8 million from taxpayers and hurricane proofed a terrible sounding empty theater.

Since every taxpayer committed a couple hundred dollars to this promise, there appears to be some serious culpability on the city's part now that it is saying the facility can't be used as a shelter. Perhaps the Federal Emergency Management Agency should take a look to see if it also was sucker-punched for a quarter-million dollars for what the city called structural reinforcement to allow the designation of the center as a disaster shelter.
-- Richard Weigler, letter to the editor, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 01/06/06

I have no doubt that citizens will notify FEMA anyway and that's OK (and if you are looking for contact information, you can start here). As mad as I am about this whole mess, maybe the sleeping giant will wake up and swat at us -- God knows, we deserve it.

I'm not gonna hold my breath, though.

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.