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Same post today at goodmorningfloridakeys.com.
Yesterday, I gave Rose Dell a listing on my place on Little Torch Key. When she asked asked where I am going to live next?, I said I am not for sure, but I imagine Key West.
Larry Murray replied to yesterday’s school district musings at goodmorningfloridakeys.com:
Date: Sun, 26 May 2013 10:27:53 -0700
From: citizenlarry007@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: Today’s Keynoter
To: keysmyhome@hotmail.com
Interesting observations by both you and Nashville J. I would like to know how Porter concluded that “the gap was so clear in distinction” considering that Lefere has no experience whatsoever in running a school district. The whole thing strikes me as a PR initiative, designed for the front page of the Citizen to give the illusion that the School District has finally done something right.
Larry
Excerpt from front page article The Key West Citizen today - www.keysnews.com, my interjected thoughts in italics. I provided photos.
Lefere hiring, HOB money on school agenda
BY TERRY SCHMIDA Citizen Staff
tschmida@keysnews.com
The official hiring of Pat Lefere as executive director of planning and operations, as well as an update on the examination of Horace O’Bryant construction finances, are on the agenda for the School Board meeting, taking place at 5 p.m. Tuesday in Marathon.
Lefere, the retiring commanding officer at Naval Air Station Key West, was recommended to Superintendent of Schools Mark Porter last week by an interview panel. Porter, in turn, presented Lefere with a two-year contract, worth $116,381 per annum, which he signed.
Should the board vote to confirm Lefere, as is expected, the former naval aviator will begin work July 1, leaving Porter with two more full-time hires to make, that of director of human resources, and director of finance and planning.
Griffiths
“I really don’t expect a debate” on Lefere’s hiring, School Board Chairman Andy Griffiths said. “Superintendent Porter is probably right that the board will embrace this hire. I think it’s going to be smooth sailing for the sailor.”
I gather what I reported on Saturday, reproduced next below, does not concern Andy:
“To which I add, someone who does civilian contract work at Naval Air Station Key West told me just now that Lefere really does not like whistle blowers and unions. My contact said the Navy base nearly lost its safety award because Lefere would not cooperate with the AFGE (American Federation of Government Employees), Lefere fired the president of AFGE. Also, for the past three years, Lefere did all he could to sabotage the county, Key West and the schools from getting any land taxes from Balfour-Beatty. Maybe someone should make sure all of that is passed along to the school board members, who have final say so on the hiring of Lefere, who seems to be turning out to be a great human resource head.”
Griffiths went on, “The School Board creates positions and sets criteria and qualifications, and approves the job description. The super fills the position. So the only example where the board has any say over the super’s appointments is if they can prove he does not meet those board-approved qualifications.”
Ed Davidson
So far, I don’t see that Lefere has any qualifications for the job. So far, this looks like a backroom deal to me, and, darn, I can’t help but wonder if school board member Ed Davidson, retired Navy carrier combat pilot, has a hand in it.
Meanwhile, down Key Weird way …
wild queen conch
“Sloan: Illuminating insightful exchange’
Jerry”
wrote Jerry Weinstock, M.D. (psychiatry), avid Keys fisherman and environmentalist, about yesterday’s musings at goodmorningkeywest.com.
Jerry has this letter to the editor in The Key West Citizen today, most, maybe all, of which I published previously. I supplied the familiar photo:
Cruise ship pollution is well-documented
Flying to Chicago, my seat companion was a departmental CEO of Subaru. Her visit to Key West was highlighted by swimming with the fish off Fort Zachary Taylor beach. She and her coworkers would return just for that delight.
That’s gone, as the harbor, including the water off that beach has zero visibility when silted. Loaded, the cruise ships have a displacement of 30 feet and scrape the bottom, stirring up clouds of silty debris. Normal sedimentation doesn’t occur — it’s too shallow — thus many square miles are affected. Giant cruise liners, some 1,100 feet long, are inappropriate here, decimating the natural environment.
John E. Wells, who has a financial interest in cruise ships, wrote a guest column with so many distortions and outright untruths that he should write children’s fantasy books.
The fact is, cruise ships dump indiscriminately. One cruise ship dumps 30,000 gallons of sewage daily, oily bilge water, hazardous waste, sewage sludge and incinerator ash. They burn bottom-of-the-barrel bunker diesel, with resulting emissions carrying harmful pollutants — factors in children’s asthma, autism, cancer and cardiovascular disease.
When I made much the same point at a candidate forum in 2007, incumbent mayor Morgan McPherson said it wasn’t so, he had been onto cruise ships, seen their wastewater treatment plants, and had been told the treated wastewater was okay to drink, but he, chuckled, he had not partaken. I sat there shaking my head.
When I asked school board member Ed Davidson recently if Navy ships or cruise ships were the worst polluters of the seas?, Ed did not respond. Ed is a decorated retired Vietnam carrier combat pilot, who, moved to the Keys, taught in the Navy’s Top Gun program at Naval Air Station Key West, and became a fierce environmental activist, except, apparently, where the Navy is concerned. Ed also declined my request that he look into allegations that the Navy is seeding clouds over the Keys with an aluminum compound, in an effort to try to control the weather.
The gray water discharged close to shore contains pathogens, viruses, pharmaceuticals, metals and hosts of other sickening materials. Indiscriminate dumping includes organic garbage and feces. All fish are reduced, including tarpon. In the May 21, 2012, edition of Newsweek, an article shows graphically our diabolic losses of fish.
Leeds University London did an assessment that placed Key West at the bottom of 115 travel sites for the discerning tourists, who once were customers of Fast Bucks but who are vanishing with the tarpon. National Geographic placed us on their getting ugly list.
I researched a 16-page, two-month analysis of the ungodly mess that cruise ships excrete, [stories in] major newspapers including those in Boston, Chicago, Miami, New York, Los Angeles, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Business Week, plus 42 books citing the damage cruise ships generate. They are phenomenal polluters. (I’ll provide references on request.)
Ahead is either a healthy future and ensured tourism, versus disease and environmental devastation linked to economic decline?
Jerrold Weinstock
Key West
I remain of the view that Key West should ban cruise ships altogether, and also ban the cruise ships’ loud air-and-street-clogging remora, conch trains and trolleys. Clean up cruise ship land, air and sea pollution in Key West.
Meanwhile, just across the Key West channel, another major naval battle continues.
Man-made Wisteria Island in foreground, man-made Sunset Key in background. When I circled Sunset Key in a boat, circa 2009, I saw not one shred of natural vegetation on it. The island and the structures looked like expensive plastic surgery. The Wisteria owners, some of whom own Sunset Key, hope to terraform Wisteria into Sunset Key Deux.
Arnaud Girard’s cartoon in the April 5 issue of Key West the Newspaper - www.thebluepaper.com. Roger Bernstein, far left, sitting next to his hired gun
WHO OWNS THE LAST DESERT ISLAND IN KEY WEST HARBOR? Wisteria Island Motion To Dismiss To Be Heard This Week In Miami
BY ARNAUD AND NAJA GIRARD
Click on that link to see Naja and Arnaud’s article.
Here is The Citizen’s Wisteria article today. I supplied pics and interjected thoughts in italics.
Judge seeks more info in Wisteria case
Feds point to 1819 treaty with Spain to support their ownership claim
BY TIMOTHY O’HARA Citizen Staff
tohara@keysnews.com
Pearl Harbor lookout
The U.S. government originally obtained ownership of Wisteria Island “under an 1819 treaty with Spain” and Florida becoming a state did not change ownership or allow the state to sell the island.
The claim is part of the federal government’s most recent argument in its lawsuit against F.E.B. Corp. in the battle over ownership of the roughly 22-acre island that lies just offshore of Key West.
The island was mostly built from fill from the dredging of the Key West shipping channel, but it was built on an existing shoal, the government has maintained. That shoal was deeded to the government under the 1819 treaty with Spain.
The government filed its legal arguments as part of a response to federal Judge Jose Martinez’s request for more information and clarification of each side’s legal arguments. Martinez made the request last month, as the case is extremely complex and the issues date back to 1819.
Naja Girard
As far as I know, the government’s entire case was handed to them on a proverbial silver platter by Naja Girard, who, with her husband Arnaud, did all the factual and legal research. Naja and Arnaud now own and publish the new version, online, of Key West the Newspaper, which comes out each Friday - www.thebluepaper.com, which covers Wisteria developments closely.
The government has maintained the state of Florida never had title to the island so it could not have sold the land to F.E.B. Corp.’s predecessor, Bernie Papy.
Papy and his agent Paul Sawyer were aware that the military was still claiming ownership of the island when Papy bought it from the state.
The government has continually cited a Sept. 27, 1951 letter from then-Florida Attorney General Richard Ervin.
When Papy was attempting to purchase the island from the state of Florida, Ervin questioned whether the Navy or any other federal agency had deeded the land to the state, or whether the state was selling something it didn’t actually own. At the time, the Navy was still claiming ownership, but the state sold the property anyway.
Papy was never given a warranty deed, which guarantees that he holds clear title to the island and has a right to sell it, government attorney Anthony Erickson-Pogorzelski wrote.
Papy received the equivalent of a quitclaim deed, which contains no title covenant and offers no warranty as to the status of the property title.
Meaning whoever bought the island from Papy received no better title rights than Papy received from the state.
“Plaintiff’s claim is totally foreclosed, and this case must be dismissed with prejudice,” Erickson-Pogorzelski wrote. “It is incongruous to argue (as plaintiff is nonetheless attempting to do) that the United States’ 1951 claim of interest is somehow moot when it is the same claim made today.”
F.E.B. Corp. will next make its arguments as to why it owns the island.
The federal Bureau of Land Management ruled in 2011 that it owned the island in Key West Harbor, not the privately owned F.E.B. Corp., which then sued the government over ownership.
F.E.B. contends the government has never acquired title to the island and that F.E.B.’s ownership was confirmed by the Submerged Lands Act in 1953. F.E.B. has continually paid taxes on the island and even had a signed agreement with the military to allow the government agency to conduct training on the island, F.E.B. has argued.
If I had to make a wager on the the judge’s ruling, I would toss a coin, not because I think it’s a coin toss based on the fact and the law, but because of the various political undercurrents surely in play.
That said, after Naja had dug up a good bit, the angels pushed me in dreams to push Naja to keep digging into the history of who owned Wisteria Island, and the more she dug, the more she found, all of which ended up on the proverbial silver platter now in front of the judge.
After writing that, I googled and found:
Submerged Lands Act
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Submerged Lands Act of 1953 (codified at 43 U.S.C. § 1301 et seq.) is a U.S. federal law that grants states title to all submerged navigable lands within their boundaries. This includes navigable waterways, such as rivers, as well as marine waters within the state’s boundaries—generally three geographical miles (almost exactly 3 nautical miles or 5.6 kilometres) from the coastline.[1]
I called Naja, who said it’s evident in the transcript that Bernstein’s lawyer and the judge go back a ways, and the judge asks naive (dumb like a fox?) questions. Naja said the Submerged Land Act was held by the US Supreme Court to convey US submerged and offshore land out to 3 miles to the states, to clear up past confusion that such conveyance had already happened.
If that is true, then I have to ask: Did the State of Florida receive title to Wisteria Island when the Submerged Lands Act was passed? If so, has dumb like a fox tax lawyer Roger Bernstein asked the state to give him a “quit claim” deed for Wisteria Island, to confirm the state’s 1951 “quit claim” deed to Papy? If not, what does that say about Bernstein’s view of the intent and the effect of the Submerged Lands Act?
Sloan Bashinsky
keysmyhome@hotmail.com
