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And now you know... the rest of the story
City Attorney Bob Anderson perpetrated a huge scam in the end of the shade meetings last year, but the question is: who was he scamming? Dan Boone and the VGA or the public?
-- John Patten, 06/16/04
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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Related:
The FAA shade meeting transcripts
-- Venice Florida! dot co, 06/14/04

Unbelievable... simply unbelievable
This can't be Bob Anderson. This doesn't make sense. This is so incredibly out of character that it's not funny. And Tacy chimes right in, and that sounds wacky as hell, too.

That was  my initial reaction to the final few pages of the transcripts of last year's city council shade meetings that have just been released.

I was stunned. Not in the metaphorical sense, I was stunned in quite a literal way.

Anderson, as the city's attorney, has never had an easy job. His client, the city, has proven to be thorny and unreliable over the years, often hiding information from him, information that he vitally needed in order to perform his duties as a Charter Officer properly.

Even among the city's harshest critics, Anderson was considered above board, an ethical and honorable man living and working in unethical and dishonorable times, employed by a client who often was untrustworthy.

Which is why the ending of the transcripts make absolutely no sense.

All through the proceedings leading up to the shade meetings and through the first four transcripts, Anderson comes across as the model attorney, a standard-bearer for the concepts of integrity and due process.

Then comes those final few pages. Ethics, honor, integrity, honesty -- it all flies right out of the window as Anderson advocates pulling a fast one on the public, the press and the FAA.

If you've read the transcripts or their summaries, you know exactly what I am writing about. The FAA, unhappy with what the Federal agency viewed as a sweetheart land lease deal between the city and the Venice Golf Association, had forced the city to collect higher rents from the VGA than what was previously contractually agreed. "Diversion of revenue" is the phrase that the FAA used to describe the deal in a formal Notice of Investigation.

After a long series of meetings and negotiations between the city and the FAA, a deal was struck: the city would collect an additional $20,000 a year in rent, a seemingly token amount after all of the legal hairpulling that had dragged on for almost four years.

Anderson and the city desperately needed to sell the idea to the Venice Golf Association, to somehow convince the VGA that paying more money was in its own best interests. They needed to sell the idea because that was their only option -- going to court was out of the question as Anderson felt that the city had no case, thanks to a lease that was written by the VGA's own attorney, E.G. 'Dan' Boone, and had been accepted by then-City Manager George Hunt. That lease gave numerous protections to the VGA and almost none to the city. "Maybe it's just that the City of Venice made a bad deal and we have to live with the results, if the rent is $160,000, the rent is $160,000. ...there's nothing in the lease which specifically says this lease is subject to FAA confirmance," Anderson is quoted as saying in the shade meeting transcripts.

In other words, the city was screwed.

Setting up the scam
But then Anderson comes up with a way to sell the idea to the VGA, a very underhanded way at that. A way in which the VGA will, at least on paper, agree to pay the mandatory increase while leaving the door open for the city to secretly funnel it right back to them at a later date under an unwritten "gentleman's agreement:"

"If I had a magic wand, the way to resolve this is for the VGA to say, 'fine, we'll agree to an amendment to the lease that provides the rent goes from $160,000 to $180,000, okay, first phase.'

"And then what we do is we consummate that because that will make FAA happy, that will make us happy [and the] VGA. We modify the lease accordingly, it's $180,000, done deal. We put that to rest. But then there can be a gentleman's understanding that as soon as that dog goes to sleep we then have this deal where we're going to start metering South Brohard, the dog park, and take that expense away from the VGA and we're going to rent a certain portion of their leasehold for parking at the paw park for this amount. But what I'm saying is you want to close the first one really clean.

"To tell you the truth, that's in the VGA's best interest, too. They could get a lot of play by stepping up to the plate and saying, fine, you got a good settlement with the FAA, it requires an additional $20,000 a year, we'll amend our lease and we will pay it. They'll get a lot of atta boy's for it, they ought to get some good publicity out of it, the deal goes down and it's resolved. Then once the dust settles and we get through the headlines then we implement the metering and a new lease with them just on some land for the paw park parking."
-- Anderson, transcript of shade meeting of 05/27/03, pp. 17-18

Unspoken in the transcript is the amount that the city would pay back to the VGA for use of a small swatch of land for additional parking at the city's dog park, but even a political neophyte can figure that one out: $20,000 per year.

Which means the main reason we'd be renting the land is not that we need it (which we may for a short time, but that's another issue). The main reason for leasing land back from the VGA is because we need some kind of legal mechanism to give them back $20,000 a year, otherwise they are going to stick it to the city and the city has to eat both the loss and the public embarrassment.

Why? Why would Anderson advocate such an underhanded and dishonest sounding ploy? He has always been the city's conscience. Sometimes it seemed that he was the only one who sat on the council dais who had any integrity and common sense.

I went back and read and reread those pages at the end of the shade meetings, trying to read between the lines to discern meaning and context. Maybe I was missing something, because it made absolutely no sense that Anderson would be saying these things. Mayor Dean Calamaras? Possibly. Hunt? Definitely. This had Hunt written all over it. But Anderson? Anderson was behaving so wildly out of character here that it defied belief. But Anderson's name was clearly identified in the transcription as the person saying these things, and if you follow the natural flow of the conversation in the shade meeting, it could only be Anderson who was saying these things.

Epiphany ain't just a cathedral in Venice
This makes no sense. None whatsoever. To me, it was as though Anderson had just provided irrefutable proof that the world was, in fact, flat. It was all maddeningly incomprehensible.

Unless... unless...

Nah, that's just too devious.

But it's the only thing that makes  sense.

I suddenly had a theory, a good one, that fit the facts and that fit my interpretation of the character of those that were involved. If I was correct, Anderson was pulling a fast one on Hunt, Boone and the VGA. Get the VGA to sign the new lease, there'll be a gentleman's agreement to refund the difference back to the VGA, and then after the dust settles, say to the VGA "What gentleman's agreement? What the hell are you talking about?" Anything to get the VGA to sign on the dotted line.

But why pose it this way, in a shade meeting that the VGA wasn't attending?

If I was correct, it was because the VGA was attending. They'd been in every meeting in the form of George Hunt. They knew every detail.

If all that was true, then Anderson's behavior suddenly makes absolute sense. After having his legs pulled out from beneath him by leak after leak, it would have been the only play he had left, a dangerous gambit that would have had devastating effects if it had gone wrong.

After making numerous phone calls, I was finally able to confirm my suspicions.

One of the players involved in the shade meetings admitted (under promise of anonymity, the old "highly placed unnamed source" routine) that there was a real scam hidden behind a fake one, and the real scam was aimed through Hunt at Boone and the VGA.

It was beautiful. Plans within plans -- it was straight out of a Frank Herbert novel.

The scam within a scam -- and now you know...
"Everything that was being said in those meetings was going straight back to Boone and the VGA. When we were talking with George [Hunt], we were talking to the VGA. Our whole legal strategy, everything -- they had our strategy time after time before we could use it against them."

According to the source, throughout the first four meetings, Anderson was not only holding a terrible poker hand, but he was sitting with his back to a mirror.

Anderson had been publicly bluffing the VGA and privately crying the blues. The bluffing was useless, the VGA had found out that he was crying the blues. By the fifth meeting, Anderson's only play left was to run a bluff privately and count on the leak getting back to the VGA. The only way the VGA was going to accept a deal that involved paying more money was if they thought that they would get it back in return, and the only way they could get it back was through some underhanded refund scheme. The only way Anderson could convince the VGA that it would happen is if he falsely posed it as an actual official city strategy. The leak had to believe that it was going to happen.

That was Anderson's thinking according to my theory. As it turns out, Anderson was indeed thinking just that, according to the source.

In this new context, the final transcript reads like an engineered sales pitch aimed at just one or two people in the room. Rick Tacy chimed in with his gleeful comment about how it can all be kept out of the press, knowing full well that this would be read by the press at a later date and that the press doesn't like comments like that. Calamaras stated that he'd already had some talks with the VGA about leasing the dog park land. John Moore, himself a former judge and still an attorney in good standing, kept deadly silent until the very end, after the pitch had been made.

So, Anderson, with a little help from the supporting cast, had to lie his ass off and he had to do it on the record. This is dangerous stuff. Anderson was risking his career, his integrity, everything, on one final bluff.

And it worked.

Word apparently got back to the VGA and they agreed to pay the $180,000 annually.

And now?

This is where it gets funny.

According to my source, Dan Boone is furious. For the first time, Boone got duped by his own game, and he was duped publicly. "He keeps walking around town, trying to work a deal with council to rent out parking for the paw park at $20,000 a year, long term, and he ain't gonna get it. We need parking down there for a year or two, and after that we'll have the park next door with loads of parking. We might rent parking from the VGA for a thousand or two a year for a couple of years, but that's it."

For a number of years, I've admired Bob Anderson. Respected him. All of that faith that I had placed in him was shattered some four or five days ago when I read the final few pages of the shade meetings.

Now that I know the whole story, the final ending to this tale, my faith in him is fully restored. In fact, my respect for him has grown intensely.

Although I am knowingly plagiarizing Paul Harvey, all I can say is, "And now you know... the rest of the story."

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.