Countdown to indictments?
City Manager Marty Black is about to issue a public statement on the EPA investigation in what is rumored to be a prelude to Federal indictments; meanwhile all of Venice is holding its collective breath, waiting for the blast that may not come for quite some time
-- John Patten, 03/13/05, revised 03/14/05
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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Three or four seasons in Hell
It's been some three or four years since the EPA first started their investigation into activities by the city's utilities department, and hellish years they have been.

I've been following it closely, as close as anyone can get without being an actual participant. The things I know that I still can't print would enrage even the most ardent supporters of the Hunt/Calamaras administration.

Last year, during the campaign trail, Dean Calamaras, while running for reelection as mayor of this fine burg, repeatedly stated that the FBI had investigated the town, had found nothing wrong, and had packed up and went away. I knew it was a lie then, but trying to convince anyone was a moot point. Calamaras was slick, he looked good in a suit, he exuded confidence and even I wanted to believe him.

The FBI had been investigating the town in conjunction with the EPA's massive investigation, and maybe the FBI went off into their own private sub-investigation(s). While nobody, myself included, seems to have a handle on what all the FBI was/is investigating, one thing became very clear early on after their first reported involvement: they did not walk away giving an all-clear. They stuck around, reappearing here and there in concert with the EPA's questioning of employees and witnesses.

Now recently, the EPA came out in the open in at least part of their investigation. Shortly after I wrote about the sewage dumping that had taken place at the Venice Municipal Airport, EPA criminal investigator Dan Green was at the utilities department pulling in the very employees mentioned in the article.

Meanwhile, City Manager Marty Black hired a private investigator to cover the same ground, a move that I was originally elated at and now am extremely suspicious about. Considering the fact that the mayor threatened to sue me for libel because I documented that he had knowledge of crimes alleged by city whistleblowers and that he backed former City Manager George Hunt's play in attempting to squash the whistleblowers; and further considering the fact that Black wants to keep me away from the private investigator (which is strange as I do have some information which one would think he would be eager to acquire), one could conclude that the investigator might have been hired solely to find loopholes in my stories, loopholes that might help the mayor in his stated quest to shut this web site down. After all, the mayor did do a call-out at one city council meeting practically urging the business community not to buy advertising on this site.

Given all that, one could conclude that maybe the private investigator's purpose was more than just fact-finding, that his purpose was to further a mayoral agenda on cracking down on information available to the public. One could especially conclude that if one were paranoid. In these days and times, one would be certifiably nuts not to be paranoid -- these are exactly the kinds of days and times that gave birth to the phrase "fear and loathing."

THE BIG WHY?
The one thing that the general public and even most of the press could never understand was THE BIG WHY? Why did the utilities department feel the big need to cover up excess spills, why were they processing and dumping so much treated wastewater secretly when it would have been simpler just to dump it, fess up and state "Hey, we had to do it, we had wastewater up to our gills with no place else to put it?" Because, like all major scandals, it was all about the money, massive amounts, money that the mayor and council were going after hand over fist in order to keep propping up a Ponzi scheme that Taxpayers League prez Herb Levine had been pointing at for years. At the core, this was all about growth, growth that would keep developers happy, growth that would keep the Boone law firm and the boys in the CQG happy, growth that would keep the business community happy, beautiful, wondrous growth with all of the amazing short-term financial gains that only growth can bring to a city government.

The problem is, as Levine has pointed out, the only way that works is if you keep piling bigger and bigger growth on top to keep the upside-down Ponzi pyramid balanced. Stall or stagger once and the keystone drops out. Such staggering would have happened if utilities started releasing true numbers on the amounts of sewage that they were processing and  the volumes of sewage truly coming into the plants -- it would have stalled growth and annexations to a sputtering standstill, suddenly leaving a huge bill with no more growth income to pay for it.

It all goes to the city's Comprehensive Plan, that guidebook on the future and sustainability. That plan has to go to Tallahassee for approval and ultimately defines how much growth that the county and the state are going to allow Venice to have. All kinds of things go into the comprehensive plan, from information about schools and roads to information about utilities infrastructures: phones, electric, sewer, water, etc. If you can't prove you can handle growth, you ain't gonna get growth (although it somehow hasn't prevented North Port from spreading like a dark cancerous out-of-control tumor across the gulf coast of Florida).

It is my honest belief that our sewage and water infrastructure is not what it should be and it is not what is stated in the Comprehensive Plan; that if we were honest about our sewage and water capabilities in the Comprehensive Plan, we would be left with two choices: either massively upgrade the sewage system in a very big hurry or stop building new homes immediately.

So that's THE BIG WHY?

We had two -- count 'em -- two wastewater treatment plants that were seriously screwed up. An old one at the beach was falling apart due to lack of proper maintenance and was deliberately being allowed to get worse because of its then-impending retirement. The newer one, the Eastside Wastewater Treatment Plant, had become a monetary black hole in trying to keep up appearances as though it could operate at its full rated sustained capacity of treatment of six million gallons of sewage a day.

The problem is, according to some sources who I've talked to over the years, it can't even do its rated six million gallons a day on a sustained basis. Four maybe, but definitely not six. Why? The stories I've heard tell me that it's because of corners cut during its construction, contractor-saving shortcuts that made the construction cheaper and thus weakened the plant from doing the full job that it was originally intended to do. Construction that was overseen by former utils director John Lane and his staff.

At least that's the story that I've heard over and over again and then denied over and over again when I've queried city officials about the matter. I fully expect a massive municipal backlash on this theory, that my answer to THE BIG WHY? is a big lie. Watch for the backlash, but look for this inside the backlash: if I'm wrong, then there has to be another reason.

Sure, during a big storm a few years back the Eastside Plant handled 6.69 million gallons. For one day -- August 10, 2003. Then it was down to 5.68 million on August 11 and then back to 4 after that (see chart in the middle of this page -- actually the whole story is pretty interesting, it caused a virtual blood war in council and the audio links from that council meeting should still be working). That's the only time to my knowledge that the plant has ever exceeded its six million-per-day rating, and it was only for one day. Statements made to council at the time grossly exaggerated the amounts -- former utils assistant director Pat Wilson stated that it was over eight million gallons a day for "a few days," while the city's own flow records did not support her statements.

By all accounts, the Eastside plant could never handle such volume on a sustained, daily basis, it's just that Wilson and Lane were giving inflated figures at the time. Now, since they were giving an account of such a stressed out system on the only day that the system ever reached its rated capacity, that tells me that there's some serious problems.

It's not that the Comprehensive Plan is a pack of lies, it's just that nobody currently on the city's payroll knows if the sewage plant can actually do a sustained six million gallons a day. We've never taken it to the limit for a sustained period of time to see if it can actually handle the load that it's rated at. We took it a little over the limit for one day and were given tales of disaster and woe.  Meanwhile, knowledgeable operators within the utilities department have had a long-running argument over whether the plant can do everything that it was originally designed to do.

One other thing. I am told that with a six million per day rating, a plant should be able to exceed that rating for a few days without falling apart. The plant should be able to do eight million for two days or so in a pinch before being taken back down to its rated six. The rating applies to how much sewage that plant should be able to handle on a day-to-day basis as a matter of course.

It's the only thing that makes sense
After having gone over it and over it over the past three years, this line of thought that the plant can't live up to its rating is the best theory I have to fit the facts as I know them, and I know I'm not alone in this line of thought. This isn't some brainstorm I've just come up with. I've been working with this theory for some three years now, trying to find a credible way to disprove it, trying to find some alternate explanation. There ain't one.

Right now, this theory is the only thing that makes sense. It's the only possible reason that so many people in city hall and in the utilities department would go along with all of the deliberately misreported readings, falsification of documents and unreported spills, both accidental and deliberate, that have gone on through the years and that have become the focus of the EPA's investigations. If not for the reason of falsely supporting growth that in reality was probably not sustainable, there would be no other material reason for covering all of this up, especially when the cover up involved so many individuals at so many different levels of municipal government.

This overall behavior within the utils department wasn't just a few people changing a few forms here and there, this was a city-wide system-wide conspiracy of deception aimed at under-reporting the volume of total sewage that Venice was handling and at under-reporting the creative and alternate ways that Venice had come up with to dispose of its stealth sewage.

Back to the question of why. Why cover any of it up? The EPA, the DEP and the county are not going to come down on the city like a ton of bricks over sewage spills, not if they are reported and cleaned up properly, no matter how many you have. Eventually somebody will offer to help, but they aren't going to be punitive if you report everything honestly. Maybe a few fines here and there. But if you lie and get caught? We're talking potential prison time. So it makes absolutely no sense to have a cover up of any kind in the wastewater biz, such cover ups cannot help you in any way, they can only hurt you.

So if there is going to be a cover up, especially one of the magnitude that we have had here in Venice, there has to be some other highly compelling reason other than simply to hide the info from the EPA and the DEP. A highly compelling reason like a humongously huge pile of development money and a small but highly motivated and high-incomed segment of the local business sector who will not be happy if the truth comes out -- that we can't handle the growth the we covet so much.

The terrorists have moved into our sewers
Now couple that with something else that I had been harping about as much as three years ago -- the sewer lines. Lane and council were satisfied that our sewers were in pretty good shape, or at least that was the surface story. In truth, we had some very close calls two and three years ago, enough that it became apparent to anyone paying attention that our sewer lines were about to implode under the weight of years of neglect.

Back in 2001, the city decided to smoke test some sewer lines. That's where you cap off a section of sewer and force high-pressure smoke into the lines, then you walk around looking to see where the smoke is escaping from the ground and how much smoke is escaping. The utilities department did this once, then hurriedly shut the program down after becoming horrified by the results. Shortly after the first test came the 9/11 terrorist attacks in NYC and at the Pentagon, and suddenly the city had a great reason for not repeating the smoke tests in other parts of the city: terrorism.

Yes, you read right: terrorism, the same reason we now need backflow devices (it's such a great lie and it works for such a wide variety of governmental bungles, so why not use it over and over?). It seems that John Lane was very worried that an over-excited citizenry might see smoke coming out of the ground all over the place. Naturally, the populace would automatically assume that they were suddenly living on top of an underground Muslim uranium mining operation. Panic and gunfire would ensue, not to mention a run on bread and canned goods at the supermarkets.

The truth: Lane and company were scared to death that the populace would see smoke coming out of the ground all over the place and suddenly realize -- hey, that's a lot of smoke, there must be a lot of leaks.

I can only assume from the subsequent behavior of collective denial on the part of the city and the utilities department that Lane was hoping to ride out his remaining days on the creaky infrastructure, hoping it wouldn't all fall apart until after his retirement, at which time he hoped to hand the whole mess over to his assistant Patricia 'Pat' Wilson -- let it all fall apart on her watch and let her take the heat (this, of course, assuming that the EPA criminal investigators could be stalled off and finally be ignored into impotent oblivion). If it weren't for a couple of very heavy storms that were key to the hastening of the sewer system's failure, that's exactly what probably would have happened.

Pat Wilson can rail all she wants about the unfairness of her layoff due to the privatization of her job, but the plain fact is: she and John Lane had already arranged her doom by their joint inactivity in planning and implementing a proper sewer replacement policy. Wilson had already set herself up for her own demise due to the inevitable unabated exploding sewers, it was only a matter of time before the odiferous fireworks started in earnest. As loyal as she was to John Lane, Lane had done her no favors and I don't think she ever looked that far down the road.

The streets shall inherit the poop
Over 75 sewage spills last year by election time and the future can only be worse. During one of the storms last year, almost every lift station on the island failed and had to be restarted and pumped out almost simultaneously, a near-impossible job that the wastewater workers miraculously pulled off. It was a near-disaster of near-epic proportions as both storm sewers and sanitary sewers city wide were full-up and flowing to maximum capacity. As one wastewater worker told me, "The only thing that saved the island was the fact that the power didn't fail, which allowed us to work through it. If we had the same lift station failures and a power failure at the same time, the entire island would have been flooded with sewage coming up out of the pipes and into the streets."

So while we missed that bullet once, will we be so lucky a second time?

What we have ended up inheriting from Lane, Hunt and Calamaras is a set of sewer pipes city wide that explode spasmodically out of seeming pure whimsy and joy in the destructive process. There needed to be an ongoing replacement program and there wasn't. Now we're stuck with facing the prospect of having to replace a majority of city sewage lines in a very short period of time. That coupled with the investment that needs to be made in new sewer hookups to current and planned growth and it is readily apparent -- they don't make enough rubber wading suits for the sewage spills we have been through and are going to go through.

They do make enough money, though, to pay for such a system-wide overhaul, and guess who is gonna be signing those checks? There will have to be tax increases to cover the bill, large ones at that. There just isn't any way around it -- the city is already in a major financial crunch (all departments within the city have been ordered to reduce their budgets over last year's figures by 1.5%), and the purchase of new and replacement sewers isn't one that can be put off for much longer. People are going to flush their toilets, take their baths and do their laundry, and thanks to more and more development and annexations, there's more and more people flushing, bathing and laundering. Plus, we still pay the expensive bills of repairing the dilapidated system still in existence.

It was sheer stupidity and greed that got us into this mess (mostly greed) and the money flowed every which way but where it should have. Those very folks who led us here will now stand aside and graciously allow us to pay our way back out, assuming we can in time. I seriously doubt it can be done in time, as the next storm season is almost upon us already.

Crazy and angry looks
I once tried to explain all of this to Waterford developer Mike Miller -- the whole story, about how the sewage plant was reportedly messed up from the start and about how our sewers were about to have a meltdown. He nodded and smiled politely in that way that I could tell he thought I was nuts but that he didn't want to let on. To be fair, think about it from his perspective -- I was bad news. If what I was saying was true and it became openly acknowledged, his short- and long-term business model would go straight into the same cracking and powdery sewer pipes. Miller hasn't had the time of day for me ever since. I don't blame him, but it all seems so stupidly short-sighted to offhandedly ignore such warnings, if only because they very well might be true.

Back in the days when I thought the mayor might still be a good guy, I also tried telling all of this to hizzonor. The mayor was, at least, more candid in his response, suggesting that I might be full of the sewage that I had seemingly become so obsessed with.

All of that said, the closer I have followed the EPA investigation, the more convinced I am that I am on the right track, and there's a lot of incidental evidence to support my line of thought, most of which still can't be brought to light yet in these pre-indictment days.

The last major piece I wrote involved the utilities department dumping sewage at the airport, all to save the expense of processing it, not to mention the space needed and the necessary reporting. Which, on the surface, makes absolutely no sense at all from the perspective of the utilities department. Why would any sane rational person even consider such a career-suicide action? That question alone earned me incredulous looks from city officials as I was asking questions and slowly uncovering the story. The whole thing just doesn't make sense.

Unless....

Unless at the end of the day, you have to report that you received and processed a lot less sewage than you really did. Before you bring up the argument of -- "yeah, but with x number of people in town, you know what your sewage should be," think about this: Venice, with its ever-vacillating occupancy numbers due to a transient snowbird population, can get away with such fudging of residential numbers where other cities, with more stable populace numbers, can not.

One thing is indisputable: numbers were fudged in a massive way. Those that tried to unfudge the numbers ended up getting stomped on and a couple of them turned around and sued the city for violations of the Whistleblower's Act. So yes, a truckload of numbers were fudged and quite a few folks were coerced into helping out with the fudging -- that's what brought the EPA and the FBI to town in the first place.

Once you know that it happened, all that is left is trying to figure out why, which I'm pretty confident that I've done. Think it's all horse manure? Time will tell, but can you give a better explanation?

So now what?
So that's the why, at least as I understand it, and it explains a lot. And if it is all as true as I am convinced it is, it would seem incomprehensible to me that all of the developers and their attorneys were totally blind to what was going on. I had heard the stories and I had passed them on as well. I'm sure others did also. But short term big bucks were to be made, any stalling would cost millions, and so grow we did and still do, and our infrastructure is fine and dandy, or so we are told. Heck, that last sewage spill wasn't even caused by the city's deteriorating pipes, it was some nitwitted contractor digging up a tree that was the cause of some 35,000 gallons of raw sewage that ended up doing the breast stroke in Roberts Bay.

On Monday, Marty Black is scheduled to release some information about an agreement, pending or done, between the city and the EPA. This has been the cause of numerous rumors and of constant calling on my own personal phone line.

Alright, here's what I know.

If you follow the line of investigative activities that the EPA has been involved in here in Venice and then you compare that to the numerous cases that they document in their press releases, it becomes fairly safe to assume that the EPA is looking at a number of criminal defendants to be named in the future, very soon in the future if you believe current rumor (I've heard soon for three years now, pardon me if I don't jump through that hoop right now). The City, capitalized as a corporate, single entity, is just one of those criminal defendants. The City is trying to negotiate itself out of big trouble on its own, separate from the any other individuals who end up as criminal defendants. Unless I totally misunderstand the City's stated stance, the City is not racing to the defense of those individuals. The City is facing the potential of some big, big fines along with a lot of bad press and humble pie-eating.

Couple that with the criminal indictments that are rumored to be coming out and one thing will become readily apparent that hasn't been so far: if you go back through the EPA press releases, it is probably not much of a stretch to state that Venice has been and is the subject of one of the most massive investigations into a government in the entire history of the EPA! This has all the appearances of a groundbreaking and historic case.

As Black told me in a meeting a month or so ago (and this is ever-so-slightly paraphrased), "Anything we are negotiating with the EPA is based upon the premise that those responsible for getting us into this mess are held fully and individually accountable."

Black's recent statements to the press indicate that the EPA is not looking to go after anyone currently on the city's payroll. Now there's where I respectfully disagree. I don't know everything Black knows, but by the same token, Black doesn't know everything that I do. Based on my knowledge of activities and of information that I know has been turned over to the EPA, I can think of three individuals currently on the city's payroll that I would be amazed if they are not charged.

And Dean?
As for hizzonor, the Right Honorable Mayor Dean Calamaras? I stand by the last story I wrote about him (Calamaras under fire). As documented in that story, some very serious wrongdoing that was going on in the city's utilities department was brought to his direct attention back in 2002 and he subsequently turned a blind eye of denial away from it, all while knowingly allowing (and giving lip service to) George Hunt to run roughshod over the employees who were trying to bring all this to light.

Calamaras was outraged that I would point such a finger at him, so outraged that he publicly threatened to sue both me and this web site. I have not retracted the story, nor will I. It is true. Calamaras knows it, the EPA knows it, the wastewater workers involved all know it, and the last place the mayor wants me is in front of a judge telling what I know.

So the big question that I've heard on more than a few occasions is -- is the mayor going to get indicted?

Short answer: How would I know?

Long answer: Maybe, maybe not. It's definitely possible, but who knows how far and how wide the EPA and the FBI want to go? Black doesn't know, City Attorney Bob Anderson doesn't know, the EPA won't even officially acknowledge that they are working on an investigation in spite of a number of Federal Grand Jury subpoenas that have been dumped on city hall over the last couple of years, and the mayor and I aren't exactly in what you would call a chummy chatty relationship. Nevertheless, the possibility of a mayoral indictment has been the talk of the town and there's no easy or delicate way to talk about it.

I couldn't attend the last council meeting, but there was one thing that was repeated to me over and over by others who were there: the mayor ain't himself. He's lost weight, he's aged, he acted nervous, quiet and subdued and he was hardly recognizable. So whatever happened in the shade meeting of last Tuesday that dealt with the current EPA mess, the mayor's behavior, as described to me by others, tends to indicate that he was mightily shaken up. As one city official told me, "I don't want to stand close to him for fear I might get photographed with him. Who knows how that photo might look in the future?"

Could the mayor be included in the EPA's sweep, assuming the EPA ever does do a sweep? It's possible. My own personal opinion is that there's already enough information out there to indicate some culpability as an accessory on his part, if only an accessory after the fact. Will the EPA look at the situation in the same light? That's up to the EPA, and we won't know what they're doing until they've already done it.

"Crimes have occurred. I have seen the evidence." That's what Marty Black stated to a group of employees gathered at city hall during one of his meetings with city employees recently, and he was speaking specifically of the recent history in the utilities department. Those crimes occurred under Calamaras' long watch of nine years as a councilman and six as mayor. If the mayor could plead ignorance of all of the city's environmental ills, that would only beg the question of "So what is it exactly that you do as mayor, then?"

I can't decide which is scarier -- a mayor who knew about some of the illegal activities and willingly looked away or a mayor who was so incredibly blind and stupid that he ignored all warning signs in spite of the fact that many of the accusations were openly discussed at council meeting after council meeting. In the mayor's recent denouncements of this web site, he swore he didn't have a clue what was going on, that the presentation of criminal activity in the utilities department made to him in 2002 was filled with a bunch of technical information that he had no understanding of. The mayor is publicly playing the blind and stupid card as best he can, his stated defense so far has been that of claimed absolute cluelessness. I just can't bring myself to believe it. Calamaras is no rocket scientist, he's a C student at best, but he is not blind and he is not stupid.

I truly don't know all of the mayor's involvement with Lane and Hunt, but I do know some of it, and from what I do know -- if I was the mayor and I was looking at the legal package that the EPA appears to be putting together, I'd be worried.

Even if the EPA's shadow does pass over him and leave him legally unscathed, history will not be so kind. He will be known as the mayor that let this all happen, the mayor who presided over a town that was the subject of one of the biggest criminal investigations in the history of the EPA. If his own version of events becomes the official reason, that's still nothing to brag about: the mayor who had absolutely no clue what was going on around and underneath him.

"Hang on to your seats, boys, it's going to be a bumpy ride!" -- Bette Davis

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.