Welcome to the WeirdFest -- Hunt sues while financial foul-ups and forged e-mails float in the background
You may not want to read The Weglein Report -- Sylvia Parish and I both did and now we're getting sued
-- John Patten, 04/05/06
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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"ALL RISE!"
Getting sued for not writing a story is just plain weird, and that is, I believe, what is really at the heart of former Venice City Manager George Hunt's recently filed lawsuit against myself and Sylvia Parish.

Parish is a 72-year-old resident of Barefoot Bay, a "Recreational District" / manufactured home community on the east coast of Florida. She's no fan of Hunt, but more on her later.

As a recreational district, the community has a formal legal government and a legal charter. The charter can be changed by a vote of the Board of Trustees and then by approval of the state legislature. A recreational district is a bizarre animal, it is both a community and a municipality with legal governmental functions and elected public officials; and yet it is neither a community or municipality but more of a strange legal hybrid of both. The board of trustees is a governmental board in the true sense of the word with the full legal power to enact and change enforceable ordinances. Hunt, as community manager, is an appointed governmental public official.

This isn't some private mobile home community or a corporation. Again, Hunt, as community manager, is a governmental appointed officer.

Got that? Good, cuz it sure confused the hell out of me when I first learned about it.

Fouled-up finances
I have followed the story of Hunt in Barefoot Bay rather loosely as a part of following the still-ongoing-when-will-it-ever-end EPA investigation, so here's what I know, then you can read The Weglein Report and judge for yourself.

When Hunt was first appointed as community manager in mid-2004, he brought Dan Morgan along with him. Morgan became the Bay's Financial Officer after previously serving here in Venice as a city hall intern.

There were major problems with the accounting right from the start and the accounting software, for good or ill, was blamed along with hurricane damage. OK, that's believable and understandable, even on second glance.

According to both Parish and Head Trustee Wilma Weglein (the community's legal equivalent of a mayor), automatic withdrawals from resident accounts for community fees stopped happening over a period of a few months and checks weren't being cashed.

Hunt and Morgan decided to scrap the existing software and contracted with NonProfit Technologies for new accounting software. According to both Parish and Weglein, that still didn't solve many of the problems. A report from NonProfit Technologies on training status (included within the Weglein Report) indicates that, well.... to put it succinctly, both Morgan and Hunt were relatively clueless when it came to running the program.

Morgan eventually departed and the blame seemed to be shifted to him, but the financial foul-ups continued. The community's annual financial reports were delayed.

Forged e-mails from a bank and the software provider
Bank foul ups and the software was again blamed and here's where things get really strange, even by George Hunt standards. According to Weglein's report, two e-mails surfaced, one purportedly from Bank of America and one from NonProfit Technologies' Project Manager, Karen Hoffman. The bank e-mail explains that the direct withdrawal funds were messed up due to a bank error. The Hoffman e-mail explained why NonProfit had not been visiting the community to help straighten out the mess as Hoffman was having a "family emergency."

So what's the problem with these e-mails? According to Weglein, the e-mails were forged -- never actually sent out by their purported authors.

I had a heck of an unsuccessful time trying to prove that the Bank of America e-mail was a forgery as I could never get through to anyone at the bank who could tell me who I could ask. That said, Weglein is correct when she notes that the phone number given in the e-mail is not that of Bank of America, but rather it is a toll-free number for Freedom Savings (see her hand-written notation on the bottom of the e-mail in her report).

Hoffman's e-mail is another story. When Hoffman found out that someone had forged an e-mail in her name as an explanation for her lack of oversight, Hoffman fired off this in an e-mail to Weglein: "This is the e-mail that was sent to look as if it came from me. I received a copy of this from Eddie.... I was never scheduled to be there. I was never there. I did not have a family emergency. I only found out about this email when I called to schedule a visit."

I called both Hoffman and Weglein in mid-March to verify. Hoffman did state to me that her e-mail explaining a family emergency was indeed a forgery, not an e-mail sent by her and she verified that she did send the second e-mail explaining the forgery.

This is no light matter -- forging someone else's e-mail address and sending it can be a form of Identity Theft. In fact, spammers have been nailed on criminal charges under statutes in some states that prohibit forging e-mails. One of the most notable cases was that of Jeremy Jaynes, who, according to his Wikipedia entry, "...was convicted in November 2004 of sending bulk, unsolicited e-mail with forged headers."

Here, according to Weglein, you have two forged e-mails and one of them is from a bank -- a Federally regulated institution. That's not good.

As to who actually forged the e-mails, only a look at the header source code will reveal that, and I'll probably request that info as a public record sometime in the near future. The question you have to ask is: who would gain anything from the forged e-mails should they be believed? The only answer I can come up with is George Hunt and Dan Morgan.

Weglein doesn't want to get sued, Venice Florida! dot com decides to back off of the story
When I talked to Weglein in mid-March, I asked her why hadn't she turned her report and the forged e-mails over to law enforcement. Her response: "I don't want Hunt to sue me."

According to Parish, who watched the March trustee meeting on TV, when Weglein presented her report, Hunt snarled at Weglein, "Watch what you say!" Parish stated Weglein was visibly shaken.

That would appear to be backed up by Weglein's conversation with me in which she stated she was afraid to go to law enforcement out of fear of a lawsuit.

After doing all of this research, I finally decided  not to do a story at that time.  I needed further details and I wasn't all that sure it would really be of interest in Venice. Besides, it was all so weird that the local papers would have to break the news about the e-mails at some point in time.

The main decision not to run with the story, though, came from a discussion about the report with Venice Taxpayers League prez, Herb Levine: "Leave Hunt alone, he's in Barefoot Bay and not in Venice and that's fine. I don't want him showing up in my neighborhood."

The local papers around Barefoot Bay never picked up on the story, which I found very odd. Forged e-mails in the public record, used in defense of bungled finances -- you would think that it would get a casual mention, but TCPalm's beat reporter Lamaur Stancil never even blinked. Either he didn't know about the e-mails or he didn't care. Which is damned odd.

Besides Hoffman at NonProfit, at least two people in the community now knew I had a copy of the report and that I had made inquiries. It's a small community of 4,950 homes, so I'm betting that it didn't take Hunt long to find out that I had been sniffing around about the report. What Hunt didn't know was that I had already decided to take a pass on writing about it.

Lawsuits bring out the best in Barefoot Bay
And so, on March 31, the news broke that Hunt was suing both myself and Parish. Parish was the person who had sent the report to me, not so coincidentally.

Also on March 31, the same day the news broke about the lawsuit, Parish's husband died. Charles Parish, 83, had been suffering from Alzheimer's and Sylvia had been his full-time caregiver for a number of years. Parish spent the day fielding questions from friends about the lawsuit and spent the late part of the evening dealing with the news of her husband's death.

One of Hunt's allies on the Board of Trustees, Bob Carillion, was quick to come to Hunt's aid. In a posting on TCPalm.com's message board that accompanied the story of the lawsuit (and on the same day of Parish's husband's death), Carillion wrote the following:

I hope this action quiets things down in the Bay, removes some of the negative thinking, and will allow most of the Trustees and George to keep moving forward in keeping Barefoot Bay one in the finest places to live. We have all seen under Georges leadership, the Bay bounce back from 3 Hurricanes. Projects started & some finished that the Board was working on prior to George coming to the Bay. George is a doer so lets let him do. I, for one enjoy working with George. I am also one that was happy for the Bay he stayed, but then I'm greedy.
Bob Carillion, Trustee

A few other posts were even more vicious, like this one:

This litigation is needed. Some people, such as Sylvia Parish think that they can say whatever they want online. i see it all the time, even these comment sections. Lesson: you defame someone, you can be sued for it.
TOM ANDERSON

Meanwhile, Hunt has gone all-out on the offensive against both Parish and myself, but Hunt saved his best gleeful hand-wringing for me. In the Gondo, Hunt was quoted as stating that he wanted to take away this web site. The Herald-Trib quoted him as stating that he had me on the run: "That's a sign, says Hunt, that his case has legs," this in reference to my not publishing a promised story on the Venice Housing Authority.

As to Hunt's claims that I set out to sabotage his attempts at job seeking, that is simply not true. I did request a copy of Hunt's resume from Fernandina Beach when he was seeking a job there, that for a story that was originally intended to be on Colin Baenziger. That story was published several months ago. Baenziger is a governmental head hunter who had represented two candidates for Venice Finance Director position as well as Hunt in his bid for a job at Fernandina Beach. When I actually read Hunt's resume as submitted to Fernandina Beach, the story's main subject drastically shifted to the highly bizarre information that Hunt had in his resume.

As to the lawsuit: I'm not blinking, although I must admit it did take me aback -- what a stupid way to try to silence someone. Kind of reminds me of what Hunt did to Troy Evans here in Venice a few years back.

Come one, come all, it's a guaranteed WeirdFest
Parish is freaking out and I can only guess that Weglein is probably pretty nervous as well -- there's a loose cannon in their community and he's armed with attorneys, bent on shutting up anyone who stands in his way.

Parish is dealing with the same feelings I had in the days following the death of my mother after mom's bout with Alzheimer's -- relief that it's over compounded by heavy guilt for feeling that it's a relief. She's been dealing with grief, funeral arrangements and questions about the lawsuit.

It's Parish's belief that the trustees in Barefoot Bay are terrified of Hunt, afraid to do anything. His muscular stance in filing these lawsuits isn't bringing anyone out in the open to challenge him.

Weglein's comments to me in my mid-March conversation with her tends to back up this assertion: "I'm the only one out there, everyone else is against me."

As for me, I'm still scratching my head. This is the dumbest thing yet that I've seen out of Hunt, and I've seen some incredibly dumb things from him.

Stay tuned -- it'll only get weirder from here -- after all, George and I are involved in it. That's a guaranteed WeirdFest right there.
 

Venice Florida! dot com sends it's thoughts and prayers out to Sylvia Parish at this time of her great loss.

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.