| Newsletter Contact: TallyMark@Rocketmail.com |
| January 20, 2011 An open letter to City Commissioner Mark Mustian and Mayor John Marks, members of the Long Range Target Issue Committee What is Neighborhood Historic Preservation? It appears to be a legal short-circuit path for taking private property rights away from innocent people and property owners without their permission, consent or desire. Why are we doing this? We already have individual historic property designations. Why, exactly, are we designing a system to literally take someone's rights away with no compensation to them just because they happen to own property near someone who does want to give up their rights and is so pushy about it they want their neighbors to give up rights, also? Are we going to take someone's property away from them because we want cool-looking brown street signs in a particular neighborhood instead of the old standard green signs? Maybe we ought to look at revising what it takes to get brown street signs instead of robbing people and families of their rights? Are we going to get a neighborhood plaque that says "This neighborhood is old"? Is that worth the loss of property rights and quite possibly animosity against the perpetrators? The
Long Range Target Issue Committee and the City of Tallahassee need to
take off their blinders and see what kind of neighborhood "wars" they are about to
start. It's going to be very costly to everyone in
Tallahassee. Lets leave neighborhoods, as a whole, out of the
rights-taking process. Let people decide for their own property, and
keep the pushy ones out of their neighbors' business. Lafayette Park has learned how divisive this can be. Right now, anyone who is a property owner in any neighborhood can apply and receive Historic Preservation status on their own property. That is a given, and apparently is not up for consideration. What you are trying to do, Commissioners, with neighborhood historic designation is put a semi-acceptable label on an intrinsically evil act of government--the taking of property without compensation. This taking of private rights is so abhorrent, and so basically inimical to our cultural nature, that it is one of the basic precepts of our national constitution--the very purpose of founding our nation through war with England and the very purpose of defending our nation through wars across the entire world. Do you really want to open up this can of worms? You know me from my previous emails and from my website: HistoricLafayettePark.com I am very clearly against the taking of private property without compensation and I have found substantial agreement with this belief in the laws, codes, court decisions and general public opinions. I have also been a sounding post of sorts for people to to vent their feeling on this issue. Hearing people talk on the street is quite an eye-opener. Believe me, if neighborhood preservation visits Lafayette Park in even the very distant foreseeable future, there is going to be a war-of-sorts in Tallahassee. People are going to get really mad. We've only seen the tip of that iceberg. I have studied a lot of records and have tried to get close to what happened in regard to the Lafayette Park HPO process. This is some of what I have learned: THE ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW BOARD I have learned that the Architectural Review Board, as it is currently defined and comprised, is a collection of individuals, half of which are completely incompetent in anything remotely related to the study of architecture or history or historic preservation. Maybe you should address this issue. Their only qualification is that they live in an old neighborhood or house. I
have also learned that about half of the current Architectural Review
Board members are compromised ethically due to a significant financial
grant they have received, partly through the efforts of their own staff
director, a member of the Tallahassee Trust for Historic Preservation,
who served at the time of my research on a financial grant
committee. The TTHP has only one purpose: make as many
properties "historic" as possible--there can be no fair game with them
in control of the house. Why does the City of Tallahassee flaunt
their un-ethical practices? As a community, we should be striving
to do the Right Thing. See this web page for more detail: http://historiclafayettepark.com/archive-aug-6-09.html THE TALLAHASSEE TRUST FOR HISTORIC PRESERVATION TTHP has a lot of explaining to do on how they could produce the largest historic neighborhood application in the history of Tallahassee/Leon County, and submit it for review and approval when it had a certification by Mr. Jim Pfost, president of a social club called The Lafayette Park Neighborhood Association, which contained an outright lie that he was the "official representative" of every single property owner in the entire 500+/- property neighborhood. See this web page for a copy of the signed form: http://historiclafayettepark.com/ Scroll halfway down to the headline that states: THE TERRIBLE LIE THAT STARTED IT ALL Additionally, the application was primarily made up of approximately fifteen hundred blank pages of forms. And, yet, with no explanation, the City of Tallahassee continues to award TTHP a contract to continue business as usual every year. Why? Are we, as a community and city so stupid that we think it's a good thing to get robbed and cheated every year by the same organization, instead of trying to find an honest way to get the job done? It appears so! Although, I personally attribute the stupidity to you commissioners who vote on the contract every year. See this web page for more detail: http://historiclafayettepark.com/tthp-failure-examples.html THE ROLE OF NEIGHBORHOOD ASSOCIATIONS Tallahassee
has a very bad habit stemming from an innate laziness towards finding the truth and
a predelection to find "the easy answer". They treat neighborhood
associations as formal representative governmental bodies with the
legal right to bind their members. This is a profoundly wrong
practice, depriving too many citizens of a say in what happens in
their community, be it neighborhood or city as a whole. As an example, consider the "Lafayette Park Neighborhood Association" (LPNA). There are approximately 650 properties in the true neighborhood known as Lafayette Park...about 2000 adults living there, not counting businesses. The LPNA made written claims and acted as bona fide legal representatives of the entire neighborhood, and this false representation was aided and encouraged by the City of Tallahassee Parks & Recreation and Neighborhoods department as well as the Tallahassee-Leon County Planning Department and Planning Commission. Yet, it is really only a social club with 76 members at the time of the HPO war in Lafayette Park, and of those 76, only about 30 were in favor of the HPO application. The City of Tallahassee, primarily the Planning Department, encouraged and assisted thirty people to steal the rights of two thousand people! See the web page for more detail: http://www.historiclafayettepark.com/archive-june1-09.htm This
outrageous theft of people's rights continues today throughout the
city--a city with a government too lazy to contact real people who live
in the areas affected by their decisions and instead rely on
neighborhood clubs to claim representation without challenge or proof. FOR MORE INFORMATION When the outrage of the Lafayette Park Historic Preservation rezoning came to me, it was through a "backdoor" information source--an old friend told me about it. I had been left out of the legal notice mailings, which are controlled by the Tallahassee Trust for Historic Preservation staff. They should not be in charge in any way with legal notices. Download and read this newsletter: The Wake-Up Call for a first-hand view of the process: Understand that a lot of people don't like other people telling them what they can or cannot do.... The City of Tallahassee's Office of the City Attorney demonstrated throughout the Lafayette Park HPO process that they were biased to the point of ignoring the law and ethical considerations in order to pass the proposal. See
this web page for the minutes of the ARB meeting of August 6, 2008 and
read the statements made by City staff attorney Hetal
Desai: http://www.historiclafayettepark.com/august6arb-minutes.html Read about secret meetings in the city attorney's office and correspondence being copied to HPO proposal adherents, along with refusal to yield public records: THE BIG PICTURE Tallahassee is a little pond in the great swamp of Florida, surrounded by the Big Pond of the whole country. As a city, we enjoy pretty good name recognition, thanks to the Seminole sports and the Bush election of 2000. However, any pretense at being the cutting-edge legal trend-setter is a ridiculous image. That is what Tallahassee is trying to do, as you members on the LRTI decide what to make of Neighborhood Historic Preservation. The
specific wording of our present code is nearly identical to the wording
of the code in Chicago that was struck down by the Illinois Supreme
Court. The basis for striking that decision is valid here in
Florida as well as every other state in the nation. Read more at this web page: http://www.historiclafayettepark.com/archive-june7-09.htm If we, as a city, wish to squander the precious resources of our city commissioners' time and effort, and if we wish to squander thousands of staff hours providing supplementary materials and having meetings ad infinitum, we are entitled to do so. But that is exactly what we will be doing. We will be trying to re-write the national code to replace a law that has been found to be so profoundly defective, that to date, no inkling of a reasonable replacement has been offered by any jurisdiction, anywhere. The really sad part of this process is what I said at the beginning of this letter: We have perfectly good individual-property historic preservation processes in place. Clean up the unethical practices and get rid of the Tallahassee Trust for Historical Preservation, and throw out the City Attorney and Planning Director, and we can move forward in a reasonable manner. We do not need to plot how to take people's private property rights away without paying for them. Thank you. Mark S. Daniel January 19, 2011 |