Inside The Box: A Sad Day For MTI

The decision Thursday by the Manatee County Planning Commission to approve the siting of a new Mantatee Technical Institute campus on Caruso Road ignored not only the many neighbors who don't want it there but the reality that East Manatee has just a shadow of the need for the facility that exists over in the "crime box," the nine-and-a-half square mile zone where most of the people that need MTI now live.

In a recent essay "The Hope A Tire-Changer Has," we told you the story of a more or less typical murder in which a young man was killed and his killers were not caught. In writing it, we tried to put a human face on the need for the MTI facility on 34th St. West, close to where I live in El Conquistador.

For my wife, trying to learn English, MTI offered ESL classes that were superbly taught; for my daughter, who got her cosmetology education there, it was a path to a promising career. We wonder how important those issues will be for the folks from Lakewood Ranch and elsewhere in East Manatee whose children attend the best schools in the county, enjoy the most affluent lifestyle off the riverfront, and who probably hold out higher hopes for their children than mastering the intricacies of a jerry curl.

But with a 49 percent drop in new home sales, there is still a chance that the County Commission will take another look at the existing campus and its potential for a vast enhancement that the Caruso Road property could pay much of the cost for.
Taking that step would breathe new life into central Bradenton and restore a sense of balance in a county where everyone has a sneaking suspicion that the affluent side of town is sneaking away with the lion's share of local resources and commitments.

We urge the County Commission to correct the terrible error the Bradenton Herald made when it popularized the "crime box" with a big front-page splash, and to turn the tide of decay and abandonment the paper and Sheriff Charlie Wells have created with their ill-conceived and destructive "inside the box" thinking. Send the project back to the Planning Board and tell them to think "inside the box" for once.

Monday Was 'Bash McClash' Day At The Herald

Many readers will enjoy this riposte to the two OpEd pieces in Monday's Bradenton Herald attacking County Commissioner Joe McClash. He recently declared his independence from subdivision developers in a forceful editorial he wrote for last Sunday's Sarasota Herald-Tribune, which was apparently an embarrassment for the Herald, whose editors tend to support every proposal that comes down the pike.

So, while I didn't intend for this site to become a partisan of Joe's chairmanship of the County Commission, his courageous stands on development that outpaces road improvements and on Bright House fees has stirred real admiration in me.

Accordingly, I responded:

August 21, 2006

Dear Editor:

Two OpEd pieces attacking County Commissioner Joe McClash on the same day? It's obvious that the Herald is getting desperate to preserve its editorial franchise in favor of uncontrolled growth.

When taxpayers and voters say over and over again that they do not want to pay for new roads for developers, do not want 14-story condo towers on the waterfront, and do not want to raise gas taxes, the Herald always finds a way to pooh-pooh their concerns as though someone had given your editors a crystal ball and divine guidance to read it.

In fact, one of the greatest ironies of the recent Republican congressional debate sponsored by the Herald on METV was the frequency with which the hopefuls cited the Sarasota Herald-Tribune as a source. That paper has scored one of Monday's OpEd attackers, Sen. Bennett, for his self-dealing real estate interests. It is no surprise that he now comes to the aid of developers in East Manatee.

Your own paper has failed repeatedly to mention that Lakewood Ranch was given a $4 billion bonding authority to build roads and doesn't need taxpayer help to manage its many profound impacts, a fact that totally denudes the threadbare arguments of the other McClash attacker.

It is rare indeed when a County Commissioner stands up to developers and cable franchisees like Bright House, the Herald's news "partner," and demands they pay their own way. Your paper needs to start setting its own interests aside and should defend McClash, who speaks for the great majority of Manatee County residents and taxpayers your editors so blithely patronize.

Joe Shea
Bradenton, FL
941-753-1136

150 Cardinal Mooney High School Students Quarantined

BayNews 9 has just reported that some 150 students at Cardinal Mooney High School in Sarasota are being "quarantined" after potential exposure to mercury poisoning and three are being "decontaminated" by a county Haz-Mat team.

The station didn't provide additional details, and a story posted at 12:37 on the Sarasota Herald-Tribune Website added nothing to our report.


UPDATE

The Bradenton Herald, which we notified about the BayNews 9 story at 12:16pm, has a fullish story on the Web now, posted at 1:08pm:


Posted on Tue, Aug. 15, 2006

Mercury scare shuts down Cardinal Mooney High School
RICHARD DYMOND
Herald Staff Writer
SARASOTA- Cardinal Mooney High School was shut down today after it was discovered a student brought a quantity of mercury onto the campus.

Most of the 500 students, drawn from Manatee and Sarasota counties, were told to go home.

School officials learned about the mercury today, which apparently was brought onto campus, located on Fruitville Road, Monday and stored in a student's locker. Several students may have also touched or played with the toxic element.

"We understand that some of it may have spilled today when they were playing with it," said Sandra MacLeod, medical executive director of the Sarasota County Health Department.

As many as 150 students may have been detained for testing for mercury exposure. All of those except about 10 were subsequently released.

"We believe it was a bottle with several ounces of mercury," MacLeod said.

American Compliance Technology from Bartow was summoned to conduct an analysis on the mercury and test the students for health hazards.

Also on the scene this afternoon is a Sarasota County environmental team, law enforcement and firefighters.

John Mylett, a 17-year-old senior from Mill Creek in East Manatee, was among those tested and cleared.

Mylett was the students were in isolation for three hours without knowing what why.

"We thought it might be something to do with the chemistry lab," he said.

High Praise

Our coverage of Manatee County won some high praise from none other than the Chairman of the Manatee County Commission, Joe NcClash, who wrote to us today and said:

This is a great service. Someone needs to keep the press in-check and keep an eye on us!

Joe McClash
Chairman

We'll try to do both of those jobs as the months progress, and we're grateful for the kind words.

Reluctant Heroes

Manatee County Commissioners as local heroes? It's hard to imagine, but in a series of meetings, interviews and public forums, it's appeared that they have at last understood the public's anger about being to forced to pay for roads that developers need, and are at least for the moment fighting back.

And that has the Bradenton Herald worried.

Columnist Vin Mannix seems to be praising Commission chair Joe McClash all the way to the end of his column on how the "feisty" McClash is standing up to developers, but it suddenly become apparent that everything Mannix said was predicated on McClash going back to the developers' camp.

"He's stubborn, but not stupid," Mannix writes, as though Mannix himself was bright at being dishonest.

McClash has taken the position that developers can pay for the roads they need themselves. Schroeder-Manatee Ranch has a $4 billion bonding authority to build roads and infrastructure, but has used only two percent of it ($80 million) while causing what is probably more than 95 percent of the new traffic that has overloaded the roads in question. SMR builds thousands upon thousands of new homes west of I-75 that impact State Road 64, State Road 70 and University Parkway, which are nearly eight miles apart, and McClash has called them on it.

A Herald editorial in the same edition quotes McClash as saying that the builders can afford to build their own roads, since "they are selling lots for $200,000 or more and have sold tens of thousands of them."

Newer residents who learn that 10,000 housing units have already been approved but not yet built, and then watch as the commission is asked to approve thousands more in a single day, must feel that developers own the county commissioners lock, stock and barrel. I have always believed they did, too.

Bur the fact that Vin Mannix and a Herald editorial have to schmooze McClash and Jane Von Hahmann, a commissioner from the older West side of Bradenton, tells us worlds if we listen well.

The Herald's irresponsible support for unchecked growth is born of greed. Without new homes, it can't get new subscribers and new advertisers - not to mention more of those pricey full-page home sections that lard the papaer every Sunday - and its owners apparently don't have the wit to expand their numbers by better service, more honest reporting, and stronger efforts against their Sarasota rival.

The paper's economic constraints forces it to support uncontrolled development in hopes of boosting ad lines and circulation (the two are mutually dependent).

Unfortunately, people who still read newspapers are too smart to fall for that, and at least one letter, by Jeff Hale in Sunday's edition, takes editors to task for its hypocrisy:

Again, The Herald has come out in opposition to an effort (this time by certain county commissioners) to take an action that might slow growth. Whatever the idea, and whoever makes it (including private citizens - note the Wares Creek and Point Pleasant efforts of a majority of homeowners to regain single-family zoning in their areas), The Herald editorial looks the same: first, a cursory acknowledgment that growth causes problems, and second, an explanation of why this proposal (fill in the blank) would adversely affect our economy and not solve the one identified problem caused by growth. Frequently that explanation is accompanied by flawed reasoning.

In the latest example, The Herald has concluded that a requirement that road capacity exist before development is approved would "force developers to spend tens of millions of dollars up front without even having a development permit in hand" (emphasis in editorial). Baloney! Road capacity can be increased by our normal system, using gasoline taxes. Yes, that might slow growth. But is a requirement that road capacity exist before the building crews, concrete trucks, and then new residents move in, really so radical? I suggest it is only radical to someone whose sole concern is economic development.

I recommend The Herald consider walking the walk, and not just talking the talk.

But I don't think Mr. Hale knows the worst of it.
Recently the Herald, which sold out the All-American downtown district by supporting developers of high-rise towers that will forever alter its character and hide it shoreline, produced a huge, four-color map on its front page of Sheriff Charlie Wells' "crime box," a purported "target" for deputies extending over 9 and 1/2 square miles.

Well, a nine-and-a-half-square-mile target is hard to miss. Especially if you live in it.
Within days of its publication, the For Sale signs started sprouting on Bayshore Gardens Drive, which the map included. But in the Sunday Herald's Local & State section, which publishes a weird crime blotter, week after week of statistics show that an average of four crimes - and all minor ones like burglary and shoplifting - occur there.

Dozens of crimes occur in the area closer to downtown, where there is a viable target for a determined police force, yet both areas are painted as undesirable by the same broad brush. Time to move! Not.

The "crime box" was invented by Sheriff Charlie Wells (whose own %2 million home was paid for by the earnings of his wife, Leslie Wells, who heads Leslie Wells Realty, Inc.). The area stretched from downtown, where the Herald has supported high-rise towers that will forever obliterate the character and community along its shoreline, to Bayshore Gardens Parkway, where there's a community of small, modestly priced homes that house real middle-class families with real children where for decades families and seniors have enjoyed safe neighborhoods.

Within a few weeks of the article, seven or eight For Sale signs sprouted on Batshore Gardens Parkway, and in the quiet neighborhoods around it came many more.

Again, the problem is that the Sunday Herald's Local & State section, which lists the crimes in the greater Bradenton area, show almost no real activity in the 256 square blocks the Sheriff and the Herald together impugned. It doesn't list crimes in Lakewood Ranch.

In the portion between 53rd and Bayshore Gardens Parkway, between 14th St./US 41 and 34th St. West, the average is about four crimes per week, all of them minor, non-violent ones like burglary and shoplifting.

Those 256 square blocks actually experience very little crime, and what there is tends to be concentrated in the commercial strip along 14th St/US 41 and west of 34th on 53rd, not in the quiet, peaceful, family-oriented and safe neighborhoods near MCC, MTI, Bayshore High and the new elementary school at 23th St. West and Bayshore Gardens Parkway.

It is hard to understate how deeply the "crime box" nonsense has diminished the value of homes in this nearly crime-free area.

Why does the Herald want to ruin these neighborhoods?

Well, for one thing, they are too frugal to produce a lot of subscribers, and the homes are priced too low - and the communities are too stable - to produce turnover that fills up the ad pages and makes money for the likes of Leslie Wells. It is also the kind of honest, hard-working community that will not readily give way to row upon row of Clearwater Beach-like condominiums to be inhabited by wealthy retired seniors. Unless.

The strongest reason for urban redevelopment, you see, is a high crime rate and the appearance of unkempt homes and properties that in the name of "community redevelopment" can actually erase stable communities and replace them with new subdivisions that produce everything the newspaper, the developers and the sheriff's wife want.

And for creating unkempt homes, there's nothing better than creating fear that leads to emptied houses, and publishing horror stories of drug raids and shootouts so bizarrely complex that no can grasp what happened. It helps to jack up the landscape fees, too.

At the same time, just go ahead and relocate the only school that trains the kids of these modest, middle-class families for useful lives as cosmetologists, mechanics and computer repairmen - trades that pay well here - out to the borders of Lakewood Ranch, about 8 miles away, where the kids live who will become doctors, lawyers, CPAs and drug addicts.

Yes, Mr. Hale, the road issue is not the be-all and end-all it seems. The historic core of Bradenton, with its quiet, unchanging ways that are as regular as Sunday services and as patriotic as Marine Private 1st Class Christopher Cobb, the first Bradenton resident to die in Iraq, is going to be erased. They plan, in the next 10 or 15 years, to bulldoze it.

Joe McClash, who according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune owns 150 homes in the redevelopment area, is an odd one to champion the control of growth, but that growth won't affect his properties (except to possibly create less interest in them). But truth be told, SMR's Rex Jensen has sniped at him, too, and that has burned him a little.

Underneath it all lies the profound change that incorporation of Lakewood Ranch as a new city will bring when it moves forward, probably catalyzed by some element of the current hostilities. If Manatee County has spent tens of million of dollars to build roads that this new city and its funding authority can easily afford to build, the commissioners will look like a bunch of fools - and some of them will seem distinctly dishonest in light of the campaign contributions they get from developers.

Some men (and women) are born to greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them, they say.

A county commission that is among the first in the country to stop rampant development, and to turn inward instead to repair and enhance its historic communities, would be great indeed. But the Herald thinks that in the end, they'll come around.

Politicians always do.

Bad Beaches

When I was honored at a Los Angeles City Council meeting in 2003, Councilman Dennis Zine - the former president of L.A.'s Police Protective League - stood up to make a little speech about me and mentioned in passing that Florida suffered from killer humidity and mosquitoes as big as airplanes. I responded, thinking of the beautiful sand I'd seen here on an earlier visit, "Yes, but they land on pure white beaches!"

Well, a story in today's Herald has something to add to that perception today.

While the headline bravely declares that six beaches flunked tests for levels of fecal coliform and enterococcus bacteria performed by Florida's Healthy Beaches project and provided to the National Resources Defense Council, it went to great lengths to avoid the more painful truth: While only four percent of Florida beaches failed the nationwide testing, 60 percent of Manatee County beaches did.

Rather than front-page news that might hurt tourism, the Herald's boosterism seemed to get the better of it. There is a long account of the testing results statewide, and only after five paragraphs does the story - from the paper's wire services and unnamed Herald staff - move into the local situation.

While context is always good, here it is used to obscure a powerful testament to the pollution fouling so many county beaches as the result of uncontrolled growth, red tide due to phosphate runoffs, and a lack of storm drains.

Here's they way we might have written that lede:

"Manatee County beaches far exceeded statewide pollution rates, a major environmental group says. In a study that found only four percent of beaches statewide have unacceptably high levels of fecal bacteria that can cause serious illness, 60 percent of beaches tested in Manatee County exceed those levels, according to a report by the National Resources Defense Council."

What are the consequence? Well, first the NRDC notes:

This year's report highlights another disturbing trend: Most municipalities have failed to identify and control sources of bacteria and other pollution tainting water near beaches. In 2005, 75 percent of closing and advisory days stemmed from monitoring that revealed high levels of bacteria associated with fecal contamination. Typically, bacteria come from sewage discharges or runoff from urban streets. Yet 14,602 closing and advisory days -- or 63 percent of the 2005 total -- were attributed to unknown sources, the second highest number of days attributed to "unknown sources" since NRDC began tracking beachwater quality 16 years ago.

And is it dangerous? The study says:

Yes. Exposure to bacteria, viruses and parasites in contaminated beachwater can cause a wide range of diseases, including ear, nose and eye infections; gastroenteritis; hepatitis; encephalitis; skin rashes; and respiratory illnesses. Most waterborne disease outbreaks in the United States occur during the summer, when Americans are most likely to be exposed to contaminated beachwater. Experts estimate that as many as 7 million Americans get sick every year from drinking or swimming in water contaminated with bacteria, viruses or parasites.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) epidemiological studies in the Great Lakes from 2002 and 2003 found that more than 10 percent of swimmers report contracting gastroenteritis or respiratory infections after swimming. Based on those results and beach attendance numbers, nearly 300 people could expect to contract a respiratory illness after swimming in Lake Michigan in Chicago on a summer weekend.

During the summer of 2003, 8,800 beachgoers participated in a study at the six most popular Mission Bay beaches in San Diego, California. The study found skin rash and diarrhea to be consistently significantly elevated in swimmers compared to non-swimmers. For diarrhea, this risk was strongest among children 5 to 12 years old, with more getting sick with increased degree of water contact: an estimated 27 cases per 1,000 among children with any water contact, 32 cases among those with facial contact with the water, and 59 cases among those who swallowed water.

The state ranked 7th in the nation in fouled beaches, although the information may be skewed by including Great Lakes and other coastal regions that have far less than our 1,300 miles of coastline.

What is also troubling is that in Manatee County, only 10 of 13 beaches are tested. Currently, beaches in Longboat Key, the city of Anna Maria access beach, and Emerson Point are untested, so the percentage of bad beaches could be even higher - or lower - than revealed.

All the other local beaches are tested weekly; the Herald doesn't mention the untested beaches or explain why they are never sampled.

Judge Not

Manatee County Circuit Court Judge George Brown was out in the car waiting for his son while his son broke into a home and stole an aquarium, Manatee sheriff's deputies revealed, but they haven't charged the judge with being an accessory to the crime because they believed him when he told them he was unaware his son was committing burglary.

It's the latest indignity to be visited on top Manatee County officials, where County Commissioner Jane Von Hahman just witnessed the embarrassment of her son being arrested for appearing naked in the bedroom of a pre-teen girl who lived nearby. Von Hahmann's son was not charged but diverted to a mental facility, while Judge Brown's son will go to court and face jail time.

We're not above believing that parents can be complicit in the crimes of their children, and that often seems to be the case in some families. But there is little doubt about the judge's innocence in my mind, and I am particularly sympathetic in this case.

Back when I led a substantial community organization in Hollywood, Calif., I used to take a number of teenage gang wannabes out to the drive-in on Friday and Saturday nights because I enjoyed their company and it kept them out of the trouble most of their older brothers were having with drugs, gangs and the law.

But one night they asked me to stop at a dingy San Fernando Valley liquor store - to get some soda, they said -and they came running out a few minutes later yelling "Go, go, go!"

I was used to their concocted emergencies. One of their favorites was to fake their hand being caught in a door. There was no end to the number of pranks they'd play to incite my ire. I drove off in niormal fashion until one of them showed me a pellet gun that looked an awful lot like a 9mm handgun, which were popular among gang members at the time. It sure got me going, I can tell you, and a few months later they let on that they had actually robbed the place.

By that time, I had no memory of where the nameless place even was, and no evidence they had really committed the crime. But I can assure you that I was completely innocent of their plans, if indeed they did what they said, and if I had seen evidence - cash, stolen goods, etc. - I would have found a way to report it to the police.

Most of these kids by now have unfortunately gone to jail several times or are dead, and yet I would treat any one of them like a son if I came upon them today. That gives me some insight into Judge Brown's predicament; I'm sure he's a good guy who loves his son and was only trying to assist him in something mundane the kid couldn't do for himself.

Commissioner Von Hahmann's case raised more questions for me than Judge Brown's did. I felt as though the boy got special treatment in being diverted rather than have to go through a process that could leave him branded for life as a sex offender.

However, it would certainly be a worse outcome if the boy was indeed someone so confused and disoritented that he had made a forgivable mistake, but had to be branded by the phrase, anyway.

I would - the first time - rather not risk that second outcome when there was apparently no physical contact and the young girl was only mildly traumatized.

Both as a Catholic and a human being, I believe in mercy and forgiveness when remorse is present, although that does not extend to removing consequences where appropriate.

I'm hopeful that in both cases, justice will be tempered by wisdom and compassion, and that young lives will not be destroyed - and adult lives with them.