A parking garage in Centennial Park?
Boone and Miller hijack council, threaten to nuke the Manhattan Project
Tacy's response: Let's roll
-- John Patten, 11/16/05
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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RELATED:
Zoning in the dark
-- editorial, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 12/15/05
Vice-Mayor John Moore on the CMU
Transcript of Moore's dissenting statement on the passage of the Conditional Mixed Use development ordinance
-- Venice Florida! dot com, 11/11/15
 

Boone and Miller's 15 minutes of fame
City council this past Tuesday was an understated bloodbath.

I took a stand for the city's workers and the mayor tried to pull out a Howitzer to shoot me down, but I'll be writing on that in a later piece. Note to Hizzoner: you have to take the safety off, otherwise the firing mechanism won't work.

For now, I want to focus on developer Mike Miller and his attorney Jeff Boone. For the uninitiated, the pair have spent the latter half of this past year pushing hard for the passage of a Conditional Mixed Use ordinance, a push that turned this town politically upside down. Boone drafted the ordinance and submitted it to the city. The city's power elite pushed hard for it while residents screamed bloody murder. It is an ordinance that would allow for some pretty big height variances in some contestable areas on the island portion of Venice, right along Venice Avenue and Business 41.

The ordinance narrowly passed in a heated 4-3 vote, with Vice-Mayor John Moore giving a well-reasoned speech about why he was dissenting. So well reasoned, in fact, that I thought everyone should read it, so I transcribed it and posted it in its entirety last month.

This past Tuesday, Boone and Miller went before the dais during the public speaking portion of the council meeting. They would normally only be allotted five minutes like any of the rest of us peasants. I only get five minutes when I speak.

Herb Levine of the Venice Taxpayers League had spoken earlier -- Levine was reminded by the mayor twice to wrap it up as his time was done.

Miller and Boone? I wasn't watching the clock, but I'd wager that they were given right around 15 minutes to have their say before Rick Tacy finally ended their 'presentation' by suggesting that the pair may have hijacked the meeting. What a strange say the pair had.

You can take your workshops, sir, and put them where the Sun doesn't shine
Boone, who drafted the original version of the ordinance and was heavily involved in the revision process, was now parroting John Moore's speech to the effect that the ordinance was unclear and gave muddy direction to potential developers. Miller complained that he was hesitant to bring anything before council as it seemed like they were of a mixed mind when it came to passage of the law, meaning he didn't know how they were going to react to his proposed Manhattan Project plans for downtown Venice.

It sounded like Miller was backing off of the proposed set of developments if you were watching the surface. I sensed deeper meaning. Miller and Boone were stating the case that because of a split council, they would indeed have to argue about every nut, bolt and fixture before council just as Moore had stated on November 8 in his dissenting speech. Boone and Miller didn't want that, they wanted a cleared roadway and no stop signs and a 6-1 or 7-0 vote on the CMU would have said that.

To me, it read like a power play: we thought we owned you, but you only gave us 4-3 in the vote. Now we may not do it at all and you three that voted against it will take the heat. Get on the bus or get run over.

Councilman Bill Willson suggested a workshop.

Miller stared right back at him and stated point-blank that he didn't want another workshop.

A parking garage in Centennial Park? Say what?
Apparently now off of the table is the additional parking that Miller had promised with the project. That was the bait that made the whole thing palatable before passage of the CMU. But fear not: Public Works Department head Larry Heath was on the case. Heath made a presentation telling council that he had been directed to find a place for the missing parking garage since, apparently, Miller wasn't about to provide one after the insulting treatment he had received in a mere 4-3 win.

Heath stated he had looked at three places to put a parking garage, and this is where things get really wacked. First, his 'team' looked at putting a garage behind the Venice Little Theater, but they didn't like that idea.

Then they looked at building one in Centennial Park.

Which is about when I figured somebody had laced the drinking water in city hall with acid, cuz either Heath was tripping or I was.

Centennial Park? That's that strip of land downtown where the gazebo is, right along Venice Avenue. It's a wide open grassy area with a meandering set of parking spots in it. It's the core of the downtown area's open and airy feel.

Heath was thinking about plopping a parking garage there?

Say what?

Damn, that's some good acid
Heath stated he had ruled out Centennial Park and then had thought about putting the garage over the shuffleboard courts across from city hall. Which would also mean putting it over the tennis courts and the basketball courts, but he didn't say that. Just the shuffleboard courts.

Definitely top notch Ken Kesey-approved chemicals were involved here. I looked down at my hand and could clearly see five fingers. I moved my hand back and forth to blur them -- nope, no funny color trails, no slow-motion clipping illusions. My vision was fine. So I now knew I wasn't tripping out on some 70's flashback.

Levine leaned over to me and asked "Am I hearing this right? Am I losing my mind?" So I knew Herb was having the same self-doubts about sanity that I had just come out of.

Heath said he was ruling out the shuffleboard courts as well. For now. He said he didn't really have a good place to put a garage and we were definitely going to need one because of all of the downtown growth that was coming.

Bingo. The light went on.

The implied threat, and the job had been given to Heath to make it: Miller has a toned-down version of the Manhattan Project coming, toned down due to council's hesitancy to fully back the Boone/Miller plans, and this toned-down version won't have any frickin' parking spots in it so you council members who have voted against the project have already unleashed the fury -- deal with it.

What does a parking garage have to do with garbage?
Normally the idea of where to put a parking garage would come from City Manager Marty Black or from Tom Slaughter in city planning. It was clear that Heath was being puppeteered here by Black, who ended up staying above and out of the fray.

But Larry Heath? Public Works Department? Sure, parks and garbage.

What the heck was the city's top garbageman doing pitching the destruction of Centennial Park?

Councilman Fred Hammett was nodding enthusiastically during all of this, so it seemed pretty clear that he was in on the fix. In fact, I have this theory that Hammett can't speak while Jeff Boone is drinking a glass of water, but I need to get the two of them together on camera to prove this.

Moore, meanwhile, was listening intently with not a hint on his face of what was passing through his mind -- not a single sign of a scowl or a smile, just a dead-on stoned-faced gaze as he listened to and absorbed all of the information given out by Boone and Miller before and now by Heath.

The message I got from the whole thing was that Heath's and Boone's presentations were tied together and what Boone was saying was this: Give me what I want or I will screw this town up so bad that the council members who voted against me will be roasted at the stake by the residents. The hell with your workshops. I own you and you WILL do my will.

Council gave the pair some 15 minutes in a speaking spot where everyone else only gets five.

Only Rick Tacy spoke up with the overdue accusation of hijacking.

Maybe Boone and Miller do own council after all.

One thing remains clear: Tacy never got the memo.

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.