Got a comment? Make it here.

Related:
Names, dammit, we want names
-- Venice Florida! dot com
Names, dammit, we want names - Part 2
-- Venice Florida! dot com

A diet lacking fiber
The city council meeting of August 26th was, for me anyway, akin to a 12-round boxing bout. I've been trashed at a few council meetings and felt totally degraded in the process. I've gotten a thicker skin of late. While mentally and emotionally exhausted after this particular meeting, I actually felt pretty good coming out of it.

Utilities Administrator John Lane, his assistant Patricia (Pat) Wilson and City Manager George Hunt pulled no punches in their attack on allegations raised in a set of articles I had written (see above, "Related" links). Trouble was, they were standing on shaky ground. They knew it and I could smell it. I didn't know how shaky until I later fact-checked their statements.

The three launched an attack designed to duck and weave around a central issue: that at least 450 gallons of sewage had been spilled in a residential neighborhood on August 7 and 8, and that three supervisors had lied to residents about the sewage spills on August 9. Further, that one of the supervisors, Bill Quigley, had actually pitched a tantrum at the expense of the residents, demanding to know the names of the city workers that residents had previously talked to. Residents weren't as upset at the spills so much as they were outraged at being screamed at and subsequently lied to by municipal employees.

Knowing full well that the department had screwed up big-time, Lane, Hunt and Wilson had pitched a gallant story to Mayor Dean Calamaras for the mayor to try to blindly sell to the populace. The diversionary story went like this: the county had nearly had an ecological disaster at their Venice Gardens wastewater plant and the city had saved the county's collective butts by gallantly taking an incredible amount of sewage off of the county's hands, despite the fact that the city's wastewater plant was being deluged.

As will become clear, it was all one big fictional sideshow, totally designed to take the heat off of one of their supervisors who apparently hasn't been eating enough fiber, as well as two others who, according to residents in the Groveland neighborhood, lied about sewage spills that had already been reported to the county.

Calamaras, apparently believing what he was being told, dutifully relayed the tale of the gallant wastewater workers to Venice citizens at the council meeting of August 12.

That's about the time that fecal matter made contact with the rotary oscillator.

More info than you probably want
This is an admittedly convoluted and small story. That said, the way the utilities department and the city manager cover up infidelities by select supervisors and how they respond to criticism gives an interesting peek inside of the gears and meshwork of municipal spin-doctoring as practiced in Venice. Moreover, this whole series of articles gives a great amount of insight into why the EPA is currently criminally investigating the wastewater treatment plant for falsification of records and for unlawful and undocumented sewage spills.

So, an exhaustive look at one incident is perhaps not at all out of order.

Rather than just write about what everyone said, I've also included all of the unedited audio from the city council meeting that pertains to this story.

Opening shots
Patten - 1st public speaking portion (MP3 audio, 1.6MBs, 4:19)

This is my opening volley at the council meeting, and is fairly self-explanatory. Most of the information is from the previous two parts of Names, dammit, we want names!!! "This man" that I am referring to at the very end of the clip is George Hunt.

Jerry Dabrowski - 1st public speaking portion (MP3 audio, 0.6MBs, 1:40)

Groveland resident Jerry Dabrowski, who was quoted extensively in the first two parts of this series. Again, rather self-explanatory.

John Lane and Pat Wilson respond (MP3 audio, 4.0MBs, 10:46)

Now here's where things get interesting. First off, note what Lane and Wilson never address: wastewater supervisor Bill Quigley's outrageous behavior as reported in Part 1 and allegations by residents of Groveland area that they have seen sewage deliberately spilled into Mundy Park on numerous occasions by city workers. Lane and Wilson duck those issues with a hard dive to the floor.

Lane states that water "bubbling" out of the street is groundwater, and gives a reasonable sounding explanation. He's right, groundwater does exhibit the behavior he describes on occasion. Lane doesn't quite explain why water was jetting straight up into the air (as opposed to the bubbling that Lane describes) at a height of eight inches, as reported by the residents, nor does it explain Jerry Dabrowski's observation that the jetting occurs in synch with the cessation of pumping at the lift station. Lane also doesn't explain why a sinkhole has been forming at the same location, which, when combined with the jetting water, would be more indicative of a sewage leak than of bubbling groundwater. These are minor details that Lane chooses not to mention.

Lane acknowledges that the department wanted to know who was disclosing to the residents that the city "wasn't going to do anything about it," meaning the problems at Groveland, apparently forgetting that it was actually Bill Quigley who was quoted by the residents as making that particular statement. Quigley is quoted in the first article by area resident Susan Bravo has having stated about broken sewer pipes, "...the city will not give me sufficient resources to fix the problem, so I'm doing the best I can."

Lane curiously denies that wastewater workers admitted to deliberately spilling sewage, an allegation that was never made. Residents stated that they themselves had seen deliberate spills with their own eyes on numerous occasions, not that city employees had told them about such incidents.

Half-truths, no-truths and lies
Lane denies that two men in suits were present when Shane Saputo was questioning the residents. This was part of Susan Bravo's account to Venice Florida! dot com. I have tentatively identified the two men in suits as two wastewater engineers. Their names are being withheld until I can receive independent confirmation. Still, this is a silly denial on Lane's part. Why Bravo would invent such a detail is incomprehensible, and the fact that they were reportedly from engineering removes anything sinister sounding and readily explains why they were hovering in the background: dealing with angry residents doesn't fall under their normal day-to-day functions. The only explanation I can come up with for Lane to deny that they were there is because maybe the two men saw something that they weren't supposed to see and it's easier to tell them that they were never there.

Lane then huffs and puffs a bit for my benefit, stating that he intends to talk to the city attorney about the lies that appear on this web site, referring to the site as "e-mail information" and as being filled with "half-truths, no-truths and lies."

Pat Wilson then takes the microphone. She starts out by explaining that the 450 gallons of raw sewage that were reported spilled on August 8 and 9 were actually three gallons here and four gallons there from filling up the tankers (photo at right). Follow the math on this carefully. If we go with, say, 3.5 gallons of spillage per tanker fill with a total spillage of 450 gallons, that means that over a 48 hour period, they filled the tanker 128 times just at the Groveland station. This means they were filling up 2.6 tankers per hour with a three to four gallon spill at each tanker fill. I was actually out there over that weekend observing from a distance. It took the city's work crew over a half an hour just to fill one tanker.

Additionally, they were filling the tankers on Saturday and Sunday using the same procedures, yet no spills were reported for those days. From Wilson's account, there were regular slop-over spills on each tanker fill on Thursday and Friday. Starting on Saturday, the workers had suddenly figured out how to do it without spilling a teaspoon (referring to the teaspoon reporting rule from DEP that Wilson cites in her presentation).

Clearly, something doesn't quite add up.

A child handling toxic materials?
While I'm talking about the tankers being filled at Groveland, I have to ask: what was a child doing handling toxic materials? This is an aspect that hadn't been brought up before, but it is worth addressing.

Bear in mind, Wilson and Lane painted out this dire scenario of near-impending crisis at council. In the middle of all of this mess is an 8-year-old boy. The boy was photographed on August 10th helping Bill Quigley prep a tanker truck before hooking up sewage hoses (photos at right).

In the second photo, the boy is seen playing with the tire in the front passenger wheel well of the Mack tanker, a tire that has just rolled through an area where an admitted 450 gallons of raw sewage had been spilled over the previous two days.

I'm all in favor of exposing kids to the workplace, but I'm pretty darned sure that letting an 8-year-old handle or get anywhere near toxic waste equipment violates a set of city rules somewhere. OSHA rules, insurance guidelines, something.

There's an odd and stupid story behind how the kid ended up there, and I'm not even going to get into it right now as this article is lengthy enough. While Bill Quigley showed a remarkable lack of common sense on Friday the 9th in his confrontation with residents, his decision to allow a child onto a hazardous work site that had already racked up two sewage spills has got to be the dumbest act of all.

On an ironic upside, the day the kid showed up is also the same day that the city stopped reporting spills at the same location from the slop-over spills that Wilson had recounted before council. Maybe the kid should be hired.

Or maybe they just stopped reporting the slop-over spills because the kid was there.

Playing the race card
Lane mentions the Missionary Baptist Church spill that I had recounted to council a few weeks before and that I had talked about in my audio clip above. Lane plays the race card, stating that I had accused the city, either obliquely or overtly, of racism in their dealings with the predominantly black congregation. It's a curious accusation, as I went back and listened to the audio of my statements that Lane is referring to. Not only did I not ever make such an accusation, I never even hinted that the congregants of that church were black. I did state that the congregants had told me that they believed that the city wanted them out of there, a statement that is justified simply by the fact that the city has made offers to buy the church in the past.

This racism thing is a very touchy issue, especially now with the HUD problems at Grove Terrace, which is right around the corner from the Missionary Baptist Church. Grove Terrace resident Gwen Mitchell (photo, from Venice Gondolier Sun's web site) has jettisoned to the top of the news pile locally as a resident advocate over allegations of serious neglect of the residents by a city-appointed Venice Housing Authority board.

I wasn't about to broach the racial issue, but as long as Lane wants to play the part of an outraged and falsely-accused liberal-minded kind of guy, OK homey -- let's go there.

First off, Lane's grand plans for stopping the backups into the church were never presented to the church until after I started making records requests from the city about the spills. Up until that point in time, the church was getting a stiff arm from the city in a horribly frustrating series of experiences. Again, bear in mind that these spills have been going on for two years or more inside the church. I made a records request a few weeks ago and suddenly the city was bending over backwards trying to solve the problem.

As of this writing, the church is still unusable from a small 500 gallon spill that took place on June 23, some two months ago. A 500 gallon spill that both I and the congregants of the church strongly believe was way underreported (their baptismal fount was reportedly filled with sewage along with the rest of the church -- the fount alone holds more than 500 gallons).

Yeah, this can smell a bit like racist practices. A charge of racism might not be entirely unwarranted -- after all, how many white churches in Venice have had repeated sewage backups over a two-year period? How many white churches have been fenced in and closed off by the city under the guise of fighting terrorism following 9/11? The answer to both questions is zero.

However, playing the race card is too easy and is way too simplistic. It's a cheap trick, which is why I stayed away from the issue until now and why Lane stooped to it under the guise of accusing me of playing the race game.

While I tend to agree with the congregants in their own stated belief that the city does want them out of there (and I have received confirmation of that belief from one highly placed former city official recently), I suspect that the issue has less to do with hate and race and more to do with greed. I really don't believe that It's an overtly anti-black issue, rather it's a land use and land value issue. Race and poverty just makes it convenient.

(Note: The Grove Terrace and the Groveland areas discussed in this article are two distinctly different parts of the city, although they are located less than a mile apart; Grove Terrace is a community of HUD low income apartments, Groveland is a suburban-style neighborhood made up largely of restored historic homes that date back to the 1920s)

Sludge, lies and audiotape
Lane and Wilson respond again (MP3 audio, 1.5MBs, 3:57)

Hunt gets a few licks in at the beginning and at the end of this clip, referring to my previous articles as "erroneous," "absolutely false," and the like. Yada, yada, yada.

Here, Hunt gives Lane and Wilson another shot at shooting down my articles. While things were a little out of kilter already in their previous statements, so far all I could accuse them of is dodging a few issues and exaggerating the facts to their own benefit. The pair hadn't yet gone on a limb and actually stated any outright falsehoods.

That changes with this, their second trip to the microphone.

Wilson states she received a call from Craig Bliss of Sarasota County's Wastewater Management on Friday, August 8. Wilson states that Bliss told her "I can't give you an hour, this is moving up quicker than I thought." According to Wilson, Bliss was desperately needing to move sewage out of the Venice Gardens plant in a hurry in order to keep the plant from overflowing. Wilson states that her staff moved quickly to accept the overflow from Venice Gardens.

Once the city started accepting wastewater overflow from the county's Venice Gardens plant, Wilson states that "We spiked our plant, pegged the meter at where I've never seen it pegged before; we're talking about 7, 8 million gallons of flow coming into that facility for a few days."

Which is really odd. As you'll see just a little later, the county actually didn't start shipping wastewater from Venice Gardens until Saturday the 9th, not Friday the 8th as reported by Wilson. The county continued the flow from Venice Gardens through Tuesday the 12th. According to the city plant's own wastewater flow reports, things didn't really start rocking for the plant itself until Saturday when the county added Venice Gardens into the mix.

The sky is falling?
So how bad was it at the county's end? According to both Hunt and Wilson, we ultimately saved their bumcakes from an ecological disaster. Wilson quotes Bliss as stating that Venice Gardens was less than an hour from overflowing their tanks when the city's plant came to the rescue.

I called up Craig Bliss and asked him.

According to Bliss, the Venice Gardens plant was never in any real danger of overflowing. Bliss stated that he never let the plant come even close to that ledge.

Bliss told me that he called the city on Thursday the 7th in anticipation of the heavy rains that would be coming and arranged an emergency test flow just in case. The test between the city and county went off flawlessly, according to Bliss. Bliss states it wasn't until Saturday that he made the request to send sewage over from Venice Gardens, and that even then they weren't close to an emergency situation, the county was sending the additional sewage over in order to avoid getting close to an emergency situation. There was no panic, no sense of immediate urgency.

This quote of Wilson's, that Bliss supposedly stated "I can't give you an hour, this is moving faster than I thought;" -- according to Bliss, it never happened. As to the bump in sewage from Venice Gardens that started on Saturday (not Friday as Wilson stated): it was, according to Bliss, all very routine and went according to the same practiced procedures that they had gone through in a drill just a few days before. "They [the city] were very helpful and we were in constant contact throughout," Bliss said.

The county funded a good portion of the city's wastewater treatment plant's construction costs. In exchange for that, the city agreed to accept up to 3 million gallons of sewage per day from the county.

Guess what? According to Bliss, the county never even came close to filling their allotted quota.

According to Bliss and the city's wastewater flow reports, here's what the county shipped, IN TOTAL for the four days that the county states it was shipping sewage from Venice Gardens. The chart also includes city's flow to the Eastside plant:

Again, those numbers in the first column reflect the TOTAL amount of sewage that the county shipped over during the mentioned time frames. I had to ask that of Bliss repeatedly just to make sure that we were speaking the same language, as what Bliss was telling me was wildly different from the account Wilson had given to city council. The amounts that the county shipped on 08/08 and 08/13 indicate the routine amounts that the county ships on a regular daily basis, and are included to show that the increase from Venice Gardens amounted in a total increase from the county of about 1.25 million gallons per day for the four days in question.

Remember: The county is allowed by contract to ship up to 3 million gallons in total daily to the city's Eastside plant, which has a stated capacity of 6 million gallons. That means the city's portion of usage is set at 3 million gallons per day plus whatever the county doesn't send over.

Also remember: Wilson had stated in her presentation that after the city started accepting the additional flow from Venice Gardens, "We spiked our plant, pegged the meter at where I've never seen it pegged before; we're talking about 7, 8 million gallons of flow coming into that facility for a few days."

Really?

Funny you should mention half-truths, no-truths and lies
But wait. I haven't even gotten to the really warped part yet, the part that makes me scratch my head, look at my notes and say "What the.......is really going on here?"

All through those dates, the city's wastewater treatment plant was running at two-thirds capacity max!

That's right, campers. During the mentioned time frame in this article, the whole plant was not online; only portions of the plant were online. The city was indeed handling a voluminous amount of sewage while running at partial capacity, staying under 6 million gallons for the most part and actually breaking over the 6 million gallon mark just once -- 6.69 million gallons on Sunday the 10th.

That is a far cry from the 7-plus million and 8 million gallons that Wilson authoritatively stated happened for several days. She wasn't guessing either, listen carefully to her as she tells her story: she is quite definite about the numbers she is giving out to council.

Or put another way and far more bluntly: Wilson lied. Lied like the dickens. It wasn't even a half-truth (maybe I should call the city attorney? No, wait, lemme get Johnny Cochran).

Wilson stated that the plant was running at full capacity and that they could barely handle the load. It is absolutely not true. If it were true, the city would be in some real deep doo-doo. Think about it for a minute. There is still the wastewater plant on the island, which handles some 1 to 2 million gallons per day. That plant is scheduled to be decommissioned and all of the flow it is currently handling is to be sent to the Eastside plant.

Accept for a moment that Wilson is telling the truth. Now imagine that the island plant has already been closed. The city is having another identical rain event which means you are looking at some of the same numbers in excess sewage due to infiltration as the city dealt with during this chronicled rain event. For a day or two, the island is pushing 2 million, the off-island area is pushing 3+ million and the county is adding another 2 million.

You are now right up into the same numbers that Pat Wilson stated had caused this last major crisis: 7 million gallons. If the county chooses to use its full allotted portion of 3 million gallons, now we're at 8 million.

Following that logic, and assuming for the moment that Wilson is telling the truth, why would we even consider decommissioning the island plant?

Quick note to Pat Wilson and John Lane:
Sorry, but you can't have it both ways. Either you have the capacity to handle such a rain event at the Eastside plant without bursting at the seams or you have no business even considering closing down the wastewater treatment plant on the island.

So why the song and dance?
Now it's a bit easier to understand why the Eastside plant was only running at two-thirds -- it wasn't getting the full brunt of the whole city. Even if it was, it should have been able to take it. Sure, we still would probably have had to do the treated spills into Curry Creek as John Lane stated, but the plant is a bit heartier than Pat Wilson would like council to believe. If it's not, we have some serious problems coming down the pipes at us in a few years.

While the Eastside plant is rated at 6 million gallons per day, there is a safety buffer built in. In a pinch, the plant is capable of handling up to 9 million per day, maybe even a bit more, although only for a day or two.

Doing 6 million at two-thirds capacity was no picnic according to workers at the plant, but even then there was never a sense of emergency, at least at the plant. At any point in time, the remaining capacity could have been brought online with relatively little trouble, which is actually pretty comforting.

So why the song and dance? Why the created crisis?

Because Bill Quigley freaked out and scared the local populace. Because Quigley went on a tirade at the expense of area residents and started to play the part of Spanish Inquisitor. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition in public view, not the residents at Groveland, not Pat Wilson and John Lane, and certainly not council. Wastewater workers expect it routinely from their supervisors, but that kind of behavior is only supposed to be done at the expense of the workers, and it should never be seen in public. When Quigley put on the red robes in front of civilians, when his performance was witnessed by a handful of people that couldn't be made to shut up, it needed a BIG LIE to make a BIG DISTRACTION.

To that extent, Hunt, Lane and Wilson were entirely successful. Quigley has managed to emerge from this fiasco totally unscathed.

Was there a real crisis? Yes, there was. That of busted lift stations at Groveland and at Cherry Street. There was a heck of a lot of infiltration into the sewage pipes from broken pipes, something that Lane stated to council. That, and that alone, caused an undue amount of stress-filled hours to be logged by soggy and weary wastewater workers. The job wasn't pretty, it wasn't easy and it was anything but fun.

It was, however, preventable. The utilities department has known for years about the problems at Groveland and have never addressed the issue properly. It's been patch job after patch job all along.

As far as the county falling apart at the seams and the city bravely riding a white horse to the rescue? It never happened. Sounds great and all, but it's totally untrue.

This crisis was limited to the lift stations and was caused solely by the city not maintaining its own infrastructure over the years.

That too needed to be covered by a BIG LIE.

So, the BIG LIE was hastily formulated. Hunt put it into a memo. Apparently not knowing any better, the mayor passed it on to the general public, authoritatively praising the wastewater department for saving the town and the county from an invented pending ecological disaster at the county's Venice Gardens plant.

Everybody loves to knock down straw men
Patten rebuts (MP3 audio, 0.5MBs, 1:28)

It's really irritating to spend a lot of time researching and double-checking facts, facts that should be brought to council's attention, only to be undermined by outright deception at the hands of or at the behest of George Hunt. That anger can be heard loud and clear in my voice in this clip as I attack Hunt, Lane and Wilson for putting up yet another straw man argument.

Both George Hunt and I get one fact wrong here. I goof big time by stating that the city has an agreement with the county to accept 300 million gallons of sewage from the county daily. I knew the correct number was 3 million, I have no idea why I said 300 million. But I did.

Hunt then corrects me with another wrong number: 300,000. Realizing I had the number wrong and not clearly hearing the number Hunt stated (Hunt waited until I was walking away to correct me), I turned around and returned to the mic to agree with Hunt's wrong number.

I didn't realize my second error until I listened to the audio and heard what Hunt actually said. For the record, it's 3 million. The city has to accept up to 3 million gallons of the county's sewage per day, per the agreement, if the county so chooses. I stand by the rest of what I said in this clip, especially my criticism of Hunt's straw man argument tactics.

A final note on the straw man tactics that Hunt continually relies on when he's cornered:

In my younger days, I was a big fan of Mark Heard (biography -- discography). If you've never heard of him (no pun intended), you can be excused for it; his work has become increasingly obscure and hard to find over the last 10 years or so. Heard was a folk-rocker and social essayist. He was sort of a cross between John Hartford and Bruce Springsteen musically, akin to U2 and Bruce Cockburn lyrically. I had the pleasure of meeting him briefly and of seeing him perform in 1990, two years before his untimely death. Heard's work had a profound effect on me as a young man.

Every time Hunt pulls this straw man argument trick, I hear Mark's voice singing the simple refrain from his not-so simple song Straw Men:

Straw men, straw men
Set them up for a fall when you can
Straw men, straw men
Everybody loves to knock down straw men

 

Photos on this page: John Lane and Pat Wilson speak at the city council meeting of 08/26/03; tanker being filled with sewage at the Groveland lift station during the storm of August 8 through August 12, 2003; an 8-year-old boy is shown at the Groveland lift station on August 10 while wastewater supervisor Bill Quigley looks on; street signs located at the Eastside wastewater treatment plant (story). All photos by Venice Florida! dot com.