Spittle and froth - the background story to a
mayoral mental meltdown
As part of a follow-up to
a story on governmental
headhunter Colin Baenziger, Venice Florida! dot com's John Patten asked the
mayor if quotes attributed to the mayor by Baenziger were accurate.
The mayor's responded by... well, as the folks at
Fark would say, his head asploded.
The mayor went off on both Patten and the Venice Taxpayers
League in a long litany of largely fictional ills. Example: Calamaras implies
that the League had filed an ethics complaint against former councilman Earl Midlam when no ethics complaint was ever filed against Midlam
by anyone.
Midlam was, however, criminally
charged with secretly taping conversations of other city council members without
the knowledge of the participants, a misdemeanor. Midlam pled guilty and
resigned from council. Curiously, the tape has never surfaced.
That's just one of a number of...
revisionisms, for lack of a better word, that the mayor spouted off in an
unexpected spittle and froth diatribe that could only be described as a moment
of mayoral mental meltdown.
Then came the golden quote: "Your web site is the worst
thing that ever happened to the City of Venice."
To prevent an accusation of misquoting the mayor (cuz you
knew that'd happen),
his entire
rant was published online in MP3 audio (2.8 MBs).
Just to be clear on one thing that the mayor glossed over
in his rant -- both he and former councilman Jim Myers were fined $500 each by
the Florida Commission on Ethics for campaign violations. Contrary to Calamaras'
statement in the audio, the ethics commission did say the pair did something
wrong, specifically that the two of them had unlawfully used Venice Main
Street's non-profit bulk-mail permit to send out campaign literature when they
should have purchased their own permit.
The ruling, however, avoided the
issue of using the wrong permit and instead focused on the pair's failure to
report the free use of the meter as an in-kind contribution.
That said, now that this web site has been singled out for
being historic in its sociologic harm by the mayor verbally, the question was
raised: is there a plaque or official award or something involved in all of
this?
