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During a nap dream yesterday, a post I was working on an article at goodmoorningkeywest.com crashed and disappeared, and I said, “Goddammit!”, and woke up wondering what in the hell that was about, and had I done something to cause it?
I wondered if it had to do with something I had just submitted to bigpinekey.com’s popular Telegraph Coconut blog before I lay down for the nap, responding to the latest 9/11 conspiracy rant there? (reported later in this post today) But on learning at last night’s city commission meeting that the Charles Eimers settlement was not on the agenda, and it would be taken up at the next city commission meeting, I wondered if that was what had crashed?
Here’s what the Key West Citizen reported about last night’s commission meeting. My interjected thoughts in bold italics. I’m not feeling good and my mood matches, and my participation today might not be my best effort.
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
‘Yes’ for shelter on Easter Seals lot
BY GWEN FILOSA Citizen Staff
gfilosa@keysnews.com
City commissioners Tuesday chose the old Easter Seals lot on College Road as the next location for Key West’s overnight homeless shelter.
“This is beds on a concrete slab with a roof over their heads,” Commissioner Teri Johnston said, before the fractured 4-3 vote meant to end a three-year debate drew several boos from a crowd of about 65 people at Old City Hall.
“No air conditioning,” said Johnston, who alone sponsored the agenda item. There’s toilets and showers that are made of repurposed containers, she said. “I don’t think we could get any more basic and still provide life-sustaining services.”
During citizen comments, before Johnston made her remarks, I said they knew I had lived off and on the street in Key West for several years, and it was my opinion that they didn’t need more than they they had now at KOTS, an overnight shelter. They could spend a lot more money on a shelter and get short returns.
City officials haven’t made any big decisions on design and construction, but planning consultant Don Craig has pegged the cost of building the shelter at $1 million.
A few dozen people showed up at the meeting donning bright teal baseball caps with “Say NO to city property” embroidered on the fronts. The statement opposes putting the homeless shelter on city-owned land.
Several members of the Key West Golf Course Homeowners Association took to the microphone, arguing that the city was unfairly moving the shelter into a residential neighborhood that includes a school, senior center and community college.
It’s not a proper site for a homeless shelter, they said, dismissing the idea that they simply did not want it in their backyard.
“Homeless folks are getting younger and more aggressive over the past few years,” said Russ Vickers, president of the homeowners’ group. “Homeless people are squatting under our back porches, using our bathroom facilities, loitering on our private streets and properties. Many of our residents can’t even enjoy the use of College Road” because of the congestion of homeless people.
During my citizen comments, I said I liked Margaret Romero’s suggestion, which she had made before I spoke, which was to put the new shelter on Trumbo Road, on which I expanded by saying, next to Ed Swift’s multi-million dollar Steam Plant condominium high rise. What a great way for Ed to make $8,000,000 amends (that’s what the city had ended up paying for giving Ed’s conch trains and trolleys a monopoly in Key West). What a great poetic bubba justice that would be! Ed’s always talking about one human family and affordable housing. He and his multi-millionaire condominium owners would have a great chance to prove just how much the believe in all of that. Laughter in the audience, some sniggling on the dais and among city staff. Some scowls on the dais.
Since its inception in 2004, the overnight shelter that was originally called the Safe Zone before it became Keys Overnight Temporary Shelter (KOTS) has always been on the same property as the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office. Its capacity is 140.
During citizen comments, I said Attorney Sam Kaufman (who recently announced he is running for retiring city commissioner Mark Rossi’s seat, and who was in the citizen audience) and I were the reason KOTS was built. We told the city we would put it into federal court, if it did not stop arresting homeless people for sleeping outside at night. We would have applied the Pottinger case to the city, and the city would have ended up just like Miami ended up when the Pottinger case finally settled, having no control over its homeless policy; a federal judge would have been in charge of the city’s homeless policy, just like is still the case in Miami. So, the city built KOTS so it’s police could arrest homeless people who slept outside at night, instead of going to KOTS. However, KOTS has only about half as many beds as there are homeless people, and the new shelter should be big enough to accommodate all the city’s homeless people, including those who live in vehicles. Contrary to what some people think, homeless people cannot be made to pay to stay at KOTS. They don’t have to have paying jobs to stay there. They do not have to be sober to stay there. They cannot be kept out because they have criminal records. Only if they don’t stay there can they be arrested for sleeping outside at night. That’s the Pottinger case. Earlier today, I spoke with a woman who said she was banned from KOTS because the reported the manager of KOTS for tearing up homeless people’s mail and she is on probation and her probation officer wants … my time ran out. The rest of her story was, her probation officer wants her to stay at KOTS and is threatening to violate her probation because she does not have a permanent address, and the rest of the reasons she was banned from KOTS were because she reported that she got bugs and scavies while she was volunteering by collecting the used linens and towels each morning, and for telling a male client, who had called her a cunt, that after he left KOTS that day, he would be a dead man. She told me all of that at the soup kitchen a couple of hours before the city commission meeting. Just a coincidence, of course. You just read a few of the reasons I would not care to stay at KOTS, and other homeless people do not care to stay there.
Mayor Craig Cates said he was heartbroken at hearing some of the “mean things” from “mean people” about the homeless in Key West, a city that adopted “One Human Family” as its motto.
“Calling people parasites because they are less fortunate is very sad,” said the mayor. “The right thing has won out, and we’re moving forward in a positive direction.”
Cates said that during closing mayor and commissioner comments, after the crowd from the golf course community had left and there were only maybe a dozen citizens still there. Citizens don’t get a chance to respond to closing mayor and commissioner comments. If I had gotten to respond, I would have said, tell Charles Eimers, whom your police thought was homeless, about mean things being said about him, and mean things being done to him, by your police, and by you and your city commissioners, who backed your police all the way. Say that to the many homeless people your police make miserable pursuant to your and your city commissioners’ orders. I had told them during my earlier citizen comments that it was the city and them who wanted KOTS. The homeless people never asked for a homeless shelter, and they were made to stay in it, or be put in jail for sleeping outside at night. For a fact, city police are under orders from Cates and the commissioners to lean on homeless people, to cause them to want to leave the area, and to put as many of them as possible in the sheriff’s jail on Stock Island. Or in the nearby hospital. At huge cost to the sheriff, who is funded by Monroe County, and at huge cost to the hospital.
Voting in favor of the relocation, which the city agreed to do in order to settle a lawsuit with Sunset Marina condo owners, was Mayor Cates and Commissioners Johnston, Clayton Lopez and Jimmy Weekley.
Dissenting were Mark Rossi — “absolutely no” was his vote — Billy Wardlow and Tony Yaniz.
Wardlow said he didn’t believe city staff had thoroughly searched the island for alternative sites for the shelter. He asked the panel to table the item and vote on it only after collecting “in writing” letters from the county, school district and Navy saying whether certain lots they own are available.
“I’ve been lied to by staff before,” Wardlow said. “We’re moving this thing from one side of the street to the other side of the street. What are we doing? There’s other property.”
“No,” Yaniz said, having argued that working families and the elderly deserve first crack at housing on the city-owned lot that formerly housed the Easter Seals nonprofit.
Yanis is right. The Easter Seals property should be used for affordable housing. But right seldom has anything to do with how things go down in Key West.
“Spending a million dollars to provide a chronic homeless shelter,” Yaniz said. “I represent the working people in the city of Key West and that has always been my issue.”
City Manager Jim Scholl said “of course” when asked if the city could change locations if another suitable property becomes available.
“This is going to be a 24-hour shelter, I guarantee it,” said Yaniz. “You can dress a chicken like a duck; it’s still a chicken.”
After the crowd had thinned out, Lopez said homeless people often do whatever they can to stay “invisible,” even in tiny Key West.
Yep, and they did that before KOTS was built, to make them invisible at night, when they already were invisible at night, before that City Commission went on a frenzy about them living outside (and not paying rent). Jimmy Weekley was mayor, then.
“Because they still have that one shred of dignity that keeps them recognizing themselves as human,” said Lopez, who works for the county health department, “it’s difficult to go and beg for services. I’ve seen it. I deal with it on a weekly basis.”
That is true of some homeless people, Clayton, but most of them could care less what you or other people think of them. You’d know that, if you had ever been homeless in Key West. You’d know what KOTS is like, if you’d ever stayed there, which I several times asked you and the other commissioners and the mayor to do, so you would know what you really are providing to homeless people,
As for the threat of more legal action, commissioners were told that the old Easter Seals location may hold a homeless shelter as a conditional use.
City Attorney Shawn Smith told commissioners that Key West will be on solid legal ground if it moves the shelter to the old Easter Seals lot.
“This is not the Sunset Marina case,” Smith said. “Follow your rules and you’ll be fine.”
Maybe my recollection is foggy, but I think I recall Smith told the mayor and city commissioners they could not possibly lose the Sunset Marina case.
gfilosa@keysnews.com
During my closing citizen remarks, I said I probably know the county commissioners better than most of them do, and the county commissioners, not the county administrator, will make the call on how much the county will participate in a new city homeless shelter. The county commissioners are trying to be good neighbors, but they view this as the city’s homeless problem, which the city is trying to make the county’s problem, and the county commissioners are not happy in the least with the city’s police putting the city’s homeless people in the sheriff’s jail and in the hospital, which is costing the sheriff millions and the hospital millions. The city is blaming the county for not helping the city more, the city is giving the county no incentive. I said at the city-county “homeless summit” early last year (which they all attended), that the city needs to give the county incentive. The city needs its own drunk tank, manned by city guards, into which the city puts its homeless addicts for 6-8 hours, under the Marchman Act, then lets them loose, and they go out and get drunk or high again, and back into the drunk tank, on and on. Maybe they get tired of that and leave the area, or they decide to try to get themselves straightened out. Take all of that off the sheriff and the hospital, millions and millions of dollars saved by the sheriff and the hospital, and then the county commissioners will be interested in spending a lot less to help you with your new homeless shelter.
Don’t you just love how the Citizen reports city commission meetings? The Citizen did just as exemplary a job reporting the city-county homeless summit. The Citizen ever reported what I said at the homeless summit about the city needing its own drunk tank, and why. Or that County Commissioner David Rice, a psychologist, who had run the Guidance Clinic of the Keys, which treated homeless people ongoing for addiction and mental problems, said he really liked my city drunk tank idea. Nor, I don’t imagine, will the Citizen report my saying last night that the city needs its own drunk tank, to save the sheriff, thus the county, and the hospital millions, and thus give the county commission incentive to help the city out with its new homeless shelter.
Sam Kaufman told me after closing citizen comments that he liked what I had said about the city having its own drunk thank. Sam is Chairman of the Board of Florida Keys Outreach Coalition, which gives homeless people, who have clean urine, a chance to live inside, do community chores, attend 12 Step meetings, get counseling, get jobs, and turn their lives around. I told him I had refrained during my citizen comments from saying he is my good friend and my lawyer, because I didn’t want to cost him votes :-).
I had thought all day yesterday that I would tell the mayor and commissioners last night, now that their own liability insurance carrier had decided their police had killed Charles Eimers, and for that reason had settled the case to avoid spending even more money defending the city in a case that could not be won, would the mayor and commissioners now apologize to the Charles Eimers children for what their police did to their father? Alas, there never seemed a good time to say that last night. Maybe I should have said it anyway, but there seemed to be other important matters, in which I had been involved for a lot longer than I had been involved in the Charles Eimers case.
One other thing about last night’s commission meeting came up after it was over, when I spoke to a woman, who had spoken during citizen comments and had told of a couple of homeless people she had befriended, who had gotten off the street and were doing much better. I thought maybe she was a therapist, but she said, no, she was a journalist at KONK Life, which publishes daily on line. Its journalists are not paid, as far as I know. After some chatting, I asked her what she thought about putting the new homeless shelter next to the Steam Plant condominiums? Blank look. I said it again. Blank look. I said, you don’t know what the Steam Plant is, do you? The what? The Steam Plant condominiums. That’s why lots of people laughed, when I said that, they knew about the Steam Plant, and you didn’t understand what I said. You never heard of it, right? Right. How long have you lived in Key West? 5 years. You should attend city commission meetings, get to know the city, if you are a journalist writing about it. You should be polite, she said, as she hurried to leave. You should attend city commission meetings and get to know the city, I said, again.
After the commission meeting, a friend told me Mayor Cates has laryngitis and that’s why he didn’t give his state of the city address last night. Maybe he needs to rewrite his address to reflect the true state of the city.
Moving beyond Key West the Insane Asylum to a much bigger insane asylum, Facebook commotion provided by Gary Ek, of Key West, aka Soundman from Hell (Norway):
1,000 military bases around the world but 66,000 structurally deficit bridges here at home…
This was on bigpinekey.com’s popular Coconut Telegraph blog the day before yesterday:
[“What conspiracy theorists think happened on 9/11?] ] The Pentagon was hit by a bunker buster cruise missile. The size of the hole, lack of wreckage outside, size of the jet turbine displayed, Rumsfeld’s interview slip-up, and penetration depth all are consistent with a missile. A 757 is impossible as an explanation. The twin towers were hit by remotely piloted drones. The video “In Plane Sight” slows down official footage of the second plane hit. Before the shadow of the plane and the nose of the plane itself meet at the building wall, there is a bright flash at the impending impact point. In other words, something exploded at the building wall just before the plane hit. missile? explosive charge? There is clearly a bulge on the bottom of the plane. Eyewitnesses reported no windows and no commercial airline paint job. I have a friend who was working in the second tower, and often worked long hours. There was a complete floor closed above, and heavy loads could be heard rolling across the floors at night. There was extensive wire pulling throughout the building for months. The official story was “network cables”. My friend and some coworkers defied security orders to stay in the building and slipped past guards to escape in the nick of time. They felt and heard explosions, just as firefighters there reported. The buildings came down at very near free-fall speed- an impossibility with the official story. The buildings came straight down uniformly. Building 7 was not hit by anything, but also came down in an obvious controlled demolition. No skyscraper had ever been brought down by fire and there were far worse and far longer, The twin towers were specifically designed to withstand the impact of a fully loaded freight plane, because a building had actually been had actually been hit by one not long before. I watched an interview with one of the architects explaining the special design features to minimize damage. After the fact, molten steel was found in the debris, and steel column stubs were found sheared off at!
a 45 degree angle as if torched. There are plenty of photos of these. Jet fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel, and burns especially low temp when starved for oxygen. No, commercial plane hits did not bring down the towers. They were intentionally demolished. Of the vast stores of gold bullion stored under one of the towers, only a very small percentage was recovered and that was found loaded in a 10 wheel truck abandoned in a tunnel below the buildings. My brother-in-law was to have started work in the towers, but got viciously ill the day before. He thought that was rotten luck before he saw what his alternative fate would have been. Think about that the next time you are delayed in traffic or otherwise prevented from following your plan. Meanwhile, “never forget”, but don’t blame it on a few party animal Muslim guys (a disgrace to their religion) with box knives. That is the outrageously wild conspiracy story. You would think they could have come up with something more convincing.
I submitted to the Coconut Telegraph yesterday:
From the get go, the angel bosses of me told me Osama bin Laden was behind 9/11. They never changed their story. Even so, many people believe Americans were behind 9/11. So, after reading yet another CT rant slamming people who don’t believe Americans were behind 9/11, I told the angels enough was enough, it was time they told me what brought down the twin towers.
That evening, I bicycled to Higgs Beach to watch another as yet still free gorgeous sunset. Super Cop was there and we got to talking about this and that, and finally our conversation drifted to 9/11.
She said the notion that Americans were behind it is B.S. She has a woman friend, who worked in the airline business, who just happened to be watching TV the morning of 9/11 and saw the big airliners fly into the buildings. Her friend saw the American Airlines markings on the planes, and the planes’ numbers. She had friends in the airline industry, pilots, stewardesses, etc., all of whom knew it was American Airline planes. And there were other airliners Arabs got on, which were not allowed to take off, and the Arabs got away. They intended to fly planes into buildings across America that day, Super Cop said. Muslim terrorists did it, Super Cop said.
I said, back in 2003, when George W. Bush was running for a second term, something went up on the Internet supposedly from Osama bin Laden, addressed to Americans. Osama explained what had turned him against America went back to America’s involvement in the Middle East, especially America’s support of Israel and involvement in the liberation of Kuwait and using Saudi Arabia, his home country, for a military base. Osama said he hoped Americans would elect a different kind of president, who would stop tampering in Islamic countries’ affairs, and he said their president was easy to bait.
I told Super Cop that I tried to get lots of people to read that letter, but nobody wanted to read it. I asked, why not? Didn’t they want to know how Osama thought? That was, and is, the problem, I told Super Cop. Isn’t the first rule of war to know your enemy? They actually believe they will die and go be with 72 virgins, just like many Christians believe crazy things.
I told Super Cop that I also didn’t think George W. Bush and his gang were behind 9/11, but I felt they were capable of doing something like that. She said, probably, but Iraq hid its weapons of mass destruction, so America could not find them. Or Iraq sent the weapons to Syria. I said, so what? Iraq did not attack America. Iraq was not behind 9/11. Super Cop said, Baby Bush attacked Iraq because Saddam Hussein had tried to kill Daddy Bush. I said, yeah, and before that, Saddam and Daddy Bush were buddies. Daddy Bush and America built up Saddam to defend America from Iran, after the Shah got run out. Super Cop agreed. All it was about was Iraq’s oil, I said. Super Cop said, true, but do Americans want terrorists controlling Iraq’s and other Islamic nation’s oil? I said, it’s those countries’ oil, not America’s. They will sell us the oil no matter who has control.
Super Cop and I agree on lots of things, but not entirely on America at war in the Middle East. She has no answer, though, for my saying there would have been no Islamic terrorists if America had not meddled in Kuwait, and then invaded Iraq, and then Afghanistan, and if America had not supported Israel, which, Super Cop said, is where God sent Moses and his people, maybe because that land had no oil and nobody would want it. We laughed.
A short distance away a little while later, a retired NY City vice cop asked if I’d seen any movies lately? We had bumped into each other a couple times at Regal Theater. The last time was when I saw “Sniper” there. I said, nothing at Regal had interested me since “Sniper”, which I sat through wondering if any American soldier was going to ask, “What’s the point of us being here?”
A fellow standing nearby, whom I’d never seen before said, don’t say that. I said, it needs to be said, there was no point in America being there. The retired vice cop, who had lost a number of friends when the Trade Towers collapsed, said same with Vietnam. I said, America learned nothing from Vietnam, and it learned nothing from Iraq or Afghanistan. War makes many Americans’ testosterone feel good, and it makes them money. The retired vice cop agreed.
A bunch of folks were now gathered near us, but not Super Cop, who loved “Sniper” and was over talking with other people. The retired vice cop asked me to explain to another new person what I’d said on Christmas Day about what brought down the Trade Towers. I said it was what someone else had told me might have brought down the twin towers. I’ll tell that. The retired vice cop and the other fellow said, go ahead.
I said, the fellow was an M.I.T. PhD, who had taught there before going into the private sector. When I asked him what he thought might have brought down the twin towers?, he said the buildings had unusual construction. The center core was load-bearing, the external walls were not. If there was a fire and enough heat was generated, the rivets in the girders in the external walls might have expanded and popped out, and those walls would then have collapsed, and the weight of the floors above would have come down on that floor, and all of that would have proceeded downward, as each floor below collapsed under the weight and force of the floors above coming down.
At that point – ta da! – the fellow who had told me not to ask what was the point of being Iraq?, said I was right about the center core being load-bearing and the external walls not being load-bearing, but there were no rivets. He had worked on the first tower hit by an airplane, when it was being built. The two towers were identical. All the external girders were held together by nuts and bolts. He started working on that building after the 30th story was built. He was a steel worker, he did high altitude construction work all of his life. He started out in trade school as an apprentice on constructon jobs, but now he is retired.
He said, in his opinion, what brought the two buildings down was the airplanes hitting and penetrating the buildings. He said, the buildings actually were flimsy, not well designed. Once the airplanes hit the buildings, the external walls weakened, and the enormous weight above caused the weakened external walls to collapse, and it all went down to the ground. He said he had many friends who were steel workers, who had worked to remove the rubble, and the most amazing thing to them was all of the floor slabs had come down intact and were stacked one on top of the other where the buildings had stood. There were stress fractures in the slabs, but they were still intact. I asked, like playing cards stacked on top of each other? Yes, he said.
By now, only he and I were talking, and everyone else had moved away, but one man who was in on the discussion on Christmas Day, who was just listening. I said, look at what happened. Some who really might know something shows up, and the conspiracy theorists all left, they didn’t want their religion threatened, like Christians won’t let anyone threaten their beliefs.
The retired steel worker said he knew nothing of the 3rd building which came down nearby, but he would be doing some asking around. He said the new buildings, which replaced the twin towers, were built to 1000 percent safety [coefficient] standard. They could withstand an 8 point Richter earthquake. They were much better built than the twin towers.
The fellow still hanging with us asked about the steel being melted and burning jet fuel was not hot enough to melt steel? The steel worker said he knew nothing about the steel being melted, but the bottom parts of the twin towers were electrical power stations. I said, yeah, and if they blew up, that would produce lightning. Yes, the steel worker said.
The steelworker said there was a big explosion in the second building, when it was struck, which came out the other side of the building. He said in the first building, the jet fuel could have pooled on the floor, when the walls were still in tact, and with all the oxygen above the pool, it would be really easy for that to ignite and explode, and collapse the exterior walls, and down it all came.
The fellow hanging with us had taken the brunt of my pokings on Christmas Day. The vice cop now was back, and brought that up. I said, well, the theory we discussed on Christmas Day was explosive charges were set in the buildings to implode them, and the charges were detonated when the airplanes struck the buildings. But, gosh, how did the people who set the charges know for sure the airliners would be hijacked? And how did they know for sure the airliners would make it to the twin towers? And how did they know for sure when the airliners would get there, and if they would actually hit the twin towers? And if they did hit the twin towers, on what floor? There are too many moving parts in that theory for it to work for me, I said again.
And, I said, I don’t think back then the technology was good enough to fly empty jumbo airliners by remote control from take off somewhere else to those two buildings and hit the buildings, and I’m not sure the technology today is good enough to fly drones that size in that way, from airfield to target.
I told the retired steel worker of the prayer I had made just earlier in the day, for me to be shown what really happened to the twin towers, and here before me showed up a man who had helped build one of the towers. Someone else who had drifted near the conversation said it was a miracle. I said, it was just that that, a miracle, the steel worker showing up like that after I had made that prayer earlier in the day.
Yes, I asked the angels to explain to me what brought down the third nearby building, and what hit the Pentagon?
The angels don’t let me leave any stone unturned in what they give me to engage, and I think it’s only fair that they do likewise, given the night of 9/8-9/2001, they asked me in my sleep, “Will you make a prayer for a divine intervention for humanity?”, and I woke up and made the prayer.
If they show me what brought down the 3rd building and what hit the Pentagon, I will report that to the CT.
***********************
Later yesterday, I told the angels the steel worker’s explanation did not explain why the central steel core of the twin towers collapsed and came down almost at free fall speed. And, I would not put it past B.W. Bush and his gang to cut a deal with Osama bin Laden. Bush was friends with one of Osama’s brothers. There were bin Ladens in Falls Church on 9/11, and they were whisked out of the country by aircraft, when all aircraft were grounded. I told the angels, Osama was certainly capable of pretending to go along with Bush and his gang, because more than anything Osama wanted America to declare war on Islam. And maybe, beyond my understanding, charges were set in the twin towers, and in the third building nearby, in which damning evidence records about Enron and the US Treasury was being kept. And maybe it was a missile that was fired into the Pentagon, and not an airplane. And maybe there was no airplane that went down in Pennsylvania, but was a missile. I heard nothing further from the angels, so maybe that’s how they see it. I’ll report anything more, if they provide it.
Yesterday, I received a Facebook message from the fellow who took the photo below at his and his wife’s wedding reception at his home on Big Pine Key in 2012, that she had passed over yesterday morning after losing a fast battle with cancer. I replied that the news brought me to tears. I thought, I could never use that photo again. Now I’m about to weep again, I love that photo of me chomping into a pulled pork sandwich. There is so much pork in my life (politics). Maybe she wants me to keep using the photo. I’m weeping. Maybe she does.
