THE LESSON --- IT ISN'T ON ETHICS !
( A Refresher Course For 2008 elections )
ALL incumbents -- Bush/Blake/McGinnis -- had similar contributions, and unethical campaigns.
(Publisher's Note: You website visitors just can't wait with your emails -
Want to see another GOOD email --- Check this one out -- click [ Here ].
(It's about firemen unions, and how they are being used in the political world.)
Is what incumbents did legal by getting slush funds like that? -- Yep --- that's POLITICS !
This email from a website visitor is a shocker. To publish it and it's contents PFGG had to use another full page. It shows how twisted the background of politics has become. Click [ Here ]
Michael S. Blake’s (used as an example) campaign treasurer reports provides ample proof that Blake was rewarded well for his instrumental part in pushing through the Keewin Real Property Company’s application for a large-scale comprehensive plan amendment on 47 acres in the City of Winter Springs. Public documents show the $3,250 from Allan Keen’s other corporations and friends (excluding the headwater Keewin Real Property Co.) including Keen associates Jay Folk and Dean Jennings.
It is of no surprise that after approving Keewin’s two small-scale comprehensive plan amendments that were related to the already approved larger amendment that Blake was seen bolting from the commission chambers while the meeting continued to throw a firm handshake and slap on the back on Keewin right-hand man Dean Jennings in the lobby.
(Note: City Manager Ron McLemore bolted too so he could chase down attorney Rebecca Furman to congratulate her.) Unfortunately from that exchange, it was clear that the poor residents of Winter Springs who opposed the large-scale amendment to put 350 townhouses/apartments adjacent to their community never, ever stood a chance.
Seminole County residents who hold rural county land in high esteem are now royally being snookered by Blake’s empty campaign promises. And, this monetary connection between Blake and real estate mogul Allan Keen isn’t the only one. There seems to be more reward trails between Blake and companies like 4/46A Corp, Picerne Development Corporation of Florida, and others on his campaign treasurer reports. However, on the surface, it is difficult to tell because Blake is accepting contributions through these developers’ attorneys, corporate directors, and secondary corporations and not from the primary headwaters.
The Keewin comprehensive plan amendment has been in the works since 2003 as was confirmed by the Winter Springs commission after it approved all the amendments relating to this predicted affordable housing project. Michael Blake and Seminole County Commissioner Randy Morris are wholly responsible for bringing the deal to Winter Springs’ doorstep and involving the county’s CRA. Through Morris’s connections with Allan Keen (those two serve on the Orlando Metroplan board together) and Blake’s connections with Morris (the two serve on the East Central Florida Regional Planning Board with County Commissioner Brenda Carey), this diabolical large-scale comprehensive amendment was born.
For two years while Winter Springs’s citizens were unaware, the cast of characters was being selected to help push these amendments through. Blake exerted himself upon Seminole’s County Redevelopment Agency with the help of Commissioner Morris who is the commission’s liaison to that agency. Also, the “historic” utility agreement made between Winter Springs and the City of Longwood for the purpose of helping the amendment’s passage was the product of Blake and City Manager Ronald McLemore’s efforts with Longwood’s top administrator John Drago, a long-time friend, and employee of McLemore’s from their South Florida days.
And, through some well hidden request that no city, or county official will own up to ---- Progress Energy mysteriously appeared in early 2005 replacing miles of underground power lines with much larger ones to carry more electrical capacity through the Highlands and Wildwood heading to the property under contract by Keewin Real Property Company.
To even further help get the amendment passed in Tallahassee, a failed attempt by Blake and the Winter Springs Commission to annex Soldiers’ Creek Park into the city, with the help again of Commissioner Randy Morris, was made a year earlier to bolster the city’s complete lack of recreational land in the northwest area of the city. All the while, Blake used a willing Mayor John Bush to lead the charge for this park annexation at county commission meetings, since it is chaired by Bush’s old friend Carlton Henley. (Is it any wonder that County Commissioners Henley, Morris, and Carey are endorsing Blake in the 2006 primary election?) Not only is John Bush the lapdog of Ron McLemore but now Michael Blake as well. How pathetic and weak can a mayor get?
Blake needed to wrangle up a star-studded cast of supporting characters to assist him in his plans to help Allan Keen get his amendment application through Tallahassee. Of course Blake looked to his loyal stage director Mayor John Bush to carry out marching orders. Mayor Bush used his old connections with the Seminole County Public Schools to even get Deputy Superintendent George Kosmac to say whatever Blake and attorney Rebecca Furman wanted him to say in regards to schools and capacities. Funny, Kosmac’s analysis of school capacities mysteriously flip-flopped when talking about similar sized projects in Lake Mary and by the Oviedo Mall.
And Mayor Bush forged strange shaky alliances with new best buds Commissioner Sally McGinnis and his 2002 mayoral opponent Cindy Gennell during quiet breakfasts at the clubhouse of the now defunct Winter Springs Golf Club. Gennell was given marching orders to have quiet meetings at the school district offices with Superintendent Bill Vogel. Commissioners McGinnis and Robert "Shirley" Miller were given the task of putting the fear of God in citizens of the Highlands and Wildwood on how awful the city’s light industrial zoning is, which was absolutely false and misleading.
They even threatened that strip clubs could be allowed but failed to disclose that zoning laws prohibit adult businesses anywhere near residential or schools. Don’t these two know the city’s ordinances and zoning laws? So, for her role Commissioner McGinnis received a campaign donation from Walt Dittmer on May 27, 2006 per her last campaign treasurer report.
Finally, Walt Dittmer, seller of the 47 acres up for rezoning played a pivotal role as well but needed specific direction from City Manager Ron McLemore to deliver. In November 2005, McLemore had a long conversation with Dittmer to recommend that Dittmer call every city commissioner to get their support for the amendment well before the city’s own Planning and Zoning Board had a chance to vote on it in a public hearing. Dittmer did what McLemore said, and he got most commissioners’ backing.
McLemore did not recommend that Dittmer talk to individual P&Z board members, so Dittmer did not call them. The material point was that the P&Z Board advisory process was purposely being diminished by McLemore’s lobbying process. Why? McLemore has little regard for the P&Z because he has not figured out a way to take control of it. With absolute intelligence and thought, the P&Z board would vote on all occasions not to recommend the amendments or pass the ordinances because it wanted to uphold the city’s comprehensive plan by not removing much needed light industrial uses.
Throughout the commission’s public hearings Mayor Bush manipulated the reception of public input, made a mockery of the P&Z board members, and scowled at anyone in opposition. Not surprisingly, the commission ignored the P&Z’s recommendations every time and voted for Keewin Real Property of Winter Park over citizens of Winter Springs who opposed the ill-advised amendment.
With the application for the amendment safely hundreds of miles away in Tallahassee, Blake could lobby for it out of the eye of the public given his extensive ties to the Department of Community Affairs (DCA). The objections and recommendations raised by the DCA were met with vague responses, poor alternatives, and false data by Keewin and the City.
The biggest falsehood relates specifically to the potable water statistics provided by the city to make it look as if potable water use has gone down due to the city’s conservation efforts when in fact it went down because more residences were moved from potable water to reclaimed for irrigation and the fact that mandatory water restrictions were put in place year-round.
The City is still in a serious situation regarding potable water and adding more homes is not going to help the problem but make put it on crash course to disaster in the next five years. However, if government is tainted and illogical in Winter Springs, it is worse in Tallahassee. The DCA posted its notice of intent that the amendment was in compliance on August 4, 2006.
Now it returns to Winter Springs to start rezoning hearings. Citizens of Winter Springs still have a chance to apply pressure on the commission to do the right thing and demand that the property not be rezoned. Of course, the prediction now is that the public hearings will be rushed through so they are completed before the November 7th municipal elections.
Much is at stake with the upcoming elections on September 5th and November 7th. Putting someone like Blake in county office and keeping people like Mayor John Bush and Commissioner Sally McGinnis in municipal office will only continue the escalating madness and under table deals that have taken place with these three.
Well as telling as those contributions to Blake from Allan Keen and friends are now, it comes too late for residents in Wildwood and the Highlands because they will be staring down the face of 350 affordable housing townhouses (or apartments) when the property is rezoned. However, it should come as no surprise that the development everyone knew would be an affordable housing project, but the city denied would be back in February, is now morphing itself into the new nomenclature of the day “workforce housing”. Under his seat, Mayor John Bush called a workshop meeting on August 21, 2006 to receive a report on workforce housing from some Tallahassee not-for-profit rep.
Call it what you want, last year it was affordable housing, in the 1980s and 1990s it was called low-income housing, and regardless of the times its been called the projects in places like the South Bronx and Camden. This is where contributions to Blake from Gray Robinson law firm in Orlando (and one of its attorneys) gets interesting because Gray Robinson represents Picerne Development Company, a developer of government assisted multi-family housing, oh we are sorry, we mean workforce housing. Freddie Mac is a dear friend of Picerne’s not just in Orlando but in Houston too.
Then there is Picerne’s registered agent attorney Richard Fildes from Lowndes, Drosdick Doster Kantor and Reed (yes, Rebecca Furman’s firm too) who is also a registered lobbyist for Picerne. Gosh, this is getting so twisted. And you wonder why people distrust attorneys, developers, and politicians like Michael Blake. Bottom line: Blake owes his developer friends to push through their expensive initiatives that rely heavily on taxes for funding.
Well maybe people north of Lake Jessup need to take notice. Two of Blake’s contributions came from Keen’s associate Dean Jennings of Jennings Ventures and Seminole County Farms LLC. Hey Michael Blake, since when is a farm located at 1031 Morse Boulevard, Suite 325 in Winter Park? What is Blake trying to hide and what is Allan Keen trying to gain through Michael Blake?
Perhaps Keen’s up and coming attorney Rebecca Furman has been put out to pasture on that 20 acre “farm” out on 380 Myrtle Street in Sanford to rustle up some 200 townhouses. Hey, Jim Logue --- (Black Hammock activist -- now for developers) --- are you reading this?
The City of Winter Springs Planning & Zoning Board members, city business owners, citizens of the city especially in Wildwood and the Highlands, and citizens of the unincorporated areas of Florida Avenue and 17/92 have Michael Blake to thank for unplanned growth just like the unplanned for 350 townhouses on Shepard Road and Florida Avenue.
Unfortunately, Michael Blake has plans to inflict his brand of under-the-table dealings at a much higher level and hopefully voters will not let that happen on September 5th. There is nothing Blake can’t do county-wide with the support of the county commissioners who are endorsing him that he hasn’t done already in Winter Springs.
So laugh when you hear about Michael Blake’s promises of growth management, protection of rural lands, and ethics in government. Michael ------- we know where on issues you lie.
And lie you do!
