I guess you can have your cake and eat it too. Ironically, Andrews takes me to task for using sewage and sludge synonymously in some of my online accounts.

Allegations that the city was trucking massive amounts of raw sewage and dumping it on Venice Municipal Airport property appear to be untrue. However, questions about how city supervisors handled soil taken from water- and sewage-line breaks five years ago remain.
-- J.J. Andrews, Venice Gondolier Sun, 07/22/05

Uhhhh... J.J.? There's a word for sewage-tainted soil that's been lying in drying beds. It's called sludge. Which you reported back in April as never having been dumped at the airport. That was in the first piece in which you slimed me, which I later referred to as "bullshit."

On Wednesday, I was contacted by J.J. Andrews as sort of a pre-interview. Andrews was angry and he wasn't making any attempt to hide it. He was upset that I had referred in print to his April story as "bullshit." Which it was.

In looking at the Steele Report and how he was going to shape the story, he stated it didn't look good for me. He discussed my use of the word "bullshit" and, referring to the use of the word, he repeatedly stated in angry tones, "You remember this. You just remember this."

I even asked him at the time, "What is this, a threat?"

Andrews denied it was a threat, but it was clear that he wanted me to know that the coming smackdown was personal, a result of my referring to his April article as "bullshit."

Andrews didn't ask me to delete the sentence and I even told him at the time that I wouldn't.

However....

Feeling buffaloed and bullied, and in an attempt to appease him into looking at the actual report, I removed the offending sentence from the piece and then I e-mailed him that I had made the deletion. Gutless. Absolutely gutless on my part. But I did it. If there's any room to throw stones at me, that's it right there. I caved.

Typical of such cowardly actions, it didn't do any good. You'd have thought I would have known this.

Now why? Why did Andrews decide to target me with an ill-researched attack that, on its face, clearly makes no sense? I wish I knew. His latest piece is self-contradictory -- no, no sewage was dumped, Patten's a liar, but wait, some sewage was dumped, Patten's still a liar.

WTF?

The end of a friendship?
Andrews and I have enjoyed a unique friendship and mutual interest in good writing and good journalism. A friendship that is pretty much over for now as I can't trust him after this incident and I doubt he'll trust me after reading my response.

Such is life.

The city manager said this is not a sufficient explanation. [City Manager Marty] Black has a pushed a new policy within the past two weeks that during any type of utility-line break, assume the soil and water are contaminated and practice all safety requirements. If there was a policy such as this in 2001, there would not be a debate today on whether the soil dumped at Venice airport was contaminated.
-- J.J. Andrews, Venice Gondolier Sun, 07/22/05

Ahhhhh, no. Nice try, but entirely untrue.

There would be no debate today over whether or not sewage or sludge was dumped at the airport if I hadn't dug away at it and written about it.

Maybe they were just lazy that day
The mayor and former city manager George Hunt knew about the illegal dumping at the airport in 2002. Marty Black knew I had some information and that I was looking into it late last year, but Black stated at the time that he was dubious, this in spite of his own conversations with Troy Evans prior to the fated meeting in 2002 as documented in Evans' diary. To be fair, Evans never writes what he told Black, just that they conversed prior to the meeting and that Evans wanted Black to be at the meeting. Black did not attend and no reason is given by Evans, but it's probably a good guess that Hunt excluded Black deliberately.

Here's one additional tidbit of info, given to me by one of the individuals who was in the meeting with Hunt, Mayor Dean Calamaras and Evans in August 2002. Somewhere in the digital stack of photos that was shown, a pic popped up showing sewage or sludge in the process of being illegally dumped on land (and not in a drying bed) either just inside or outside the perimeter fence at the Eastside Wastewater Treatment Plant. Apparently, one of the workers standing near the dump truck had a camera. Anyway, Evans showed this pic to Calamaras and Hunt and explained what the pic meant. Calamaras is quoted as responding, "Maybe they were just lazy that day."

Yeah. OK, Dean. They were just lazy.

Ya know, this crap used to amaze me when I first was hearing about it. I just could not believe it. I guess I've grown numb to it all, as now this kind of normally shocking tale now just sounds so.... typically Venice.

Moving right along.

Of course, Calamaras swears he didn't understand anything that Evans was explaining, it was all charts and graphs and such ("technical things" was the phrase that Calamaras used to describe Evans' presentation). Evans can't talk because of an agreement with the city when they caved on his Whistleblower lawsuit: the city gave him $25,000 on the signed condition that he would not divulge any information concerning the particulars of the lawsuit. In questioning Evans, he refused to talk about the 2002 meeting, citing his non-disclosure agreement with the city. So, essentially Evans' silence was bought, although for Evans it no doubt meant at least some kind of resolution and closure. I can understand that and I do not envy Evans for a second.

I'm not sure, but I seem to remember that the matter of sewage being dumped at the airport even came up in the utilities investigation on which Black served as a board member. I'd have to go back and look (500+ pages in no apparent order when it was first compiled and published by the city), but I'd swear that this is where I first learned about it. The road from then to now has been one loooooooooong road.

The best vegetables I've ever tasted (ewwwwwwww)
At any rate, the sewage dumped at the airport, as exemplified by the number of employees who talked about it to Steele, was hardly a state secret. According to The Steele Report, even the jokes about the sewage were legendary. John Newburn, in denying that sewage was ever spilled there, offers as proof that no fruits and vegetables normally associated with spilled sewage were growing out at the airport. Quite a few others in the report specifically mention seeing those same fruits and vegetables -- tomatoes, watermelons, corn, etc.,  -- growing in very large and healthy states*. "The best I've ever tasted" is one legendary joke that surfaces in the report.

In fact, from the Steele Report, it would appear that everyone with a blue collared shirt and a city pay stub in their wallet knew about the sewage dumpings for years.

Millions of gallons
As for millions of gallons that Andrews and the mayor have referred to, they both know the real story on that. There were millions of gallons dumped at the airport -- effluent. You are never supposed to flood with effluent, it too is an environmentally bad thing to do, but the city has done it repeatedly, most notably at the county's Knight's Trail park. The county finally told the city never to release another drop there as the city had kept abusing the privilege despite repeated hand slaps. This was part of the EPA's plea bargain, the tale appears in the original plea agreement docs that Marty Black had to sign.

When Knight's Trail became a closed option and Curry Creek became too obvious, the city had to find other outlets to get rid of excess effluent that they claimed they never had.

So the city flooded the airport (this according to my nefarious unnamed sources that both the mayor and the Gondo seem to take issue with): millions of gallons of effluent, all of which eventually flowed into the Intracoastal Waterway. One of my nefarious unnamed sources described the flooding as being so intense that when you walked on parts of airport land, you sunk into the water up to your knees.

The city knows the story on this, the Gondo knows the story, and I kept a lid on it because I was requested to at the time (and no, I ain't sayin' by who). Why the Gondo never pursued the lead is their business.

I originally hinted at the millions of gallons in a front page teaser that promo'd the then-upcoming article, but I never followed up on it in print. The teaser was posted as I was formulating the first draft of the December article. As I was gathering the original information just prior to the first version of story publication, it appeared that there were millions of gallons of sewage involved, but as my investigation evolved (and prior to actual publication), it became clear that the millions referred to effluent. The teaser was removed and I offered no explanation in print because I couldn't at the time, at least not without breaking my word. The concept of effluent, sewage or anything else in the millions of gallons never appeared in an actual article until now.

There are quite a few other tales that I've never gotten around to telling for one reason or another. There are other places that the city was dumping at. Wellfield Park** immediately springs to mind, but I also interviewed a property owner back in 2003 who claimed that she caught the city dumping wet dirt on her land a couple of times, land just outside the city limits. She made them clean it up. The Gondo knows this story as well.

Here, however, it seems that I'm getting slapped around publicly for telling too much and not enough at the same time.

* These are all plants which have seeds that pass through the digestive system relatively unscathed. Some of these seeds then pass through the sewage system and survive, finding themselves in a very delightfully food-rich environment. Delightful if you are a tomato plant, anyway.

** Wellfield Park has long been a bone of contention between the city, the county and residents. Part of the park was once a garbage dump that has had numerous stories told over the years about what was and wasn't dumped. In more recent years, the DEP has stated that the heavy metal content of groundwater at the park was problematic and the city has had a bit of conflict with the DEP. As to what historically has and hasn't ever been dumped at Wellfield Park, I don't think anyone is ever going to know the real story. Last year, I discovered that road cleaning crews were dumping water from their truck in a copse at the park and I showed Public Works Director Larry Heath a hole that had been dug at the park for this purpose. The hole was filled in and I received assurances from Heath that the practice would stop immediately.

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.