January 23, 2011

City Commissioner Mark Mustian 

and Mayor John Marks, 

Members of the Long Range Target Issue Committee, and  

Members-to-be-selected: Historical Preservation Process for Neighborhoods Committee

RE: Agenda Item for Procedure for Designating Historic Preservation Districts

Let's Try Starting With Some Truth in the Process

The following is a cut from the agenda document for the process to initiate revisions to the historic preservation designations for neighborhoods, with a portion highlighted:

This agenda item is the basis for your proposed revision, and renewal, of the historic preservation process for neighborhoods and will be the basis for re-activating the profoundly defective application currently “in abeyance” somewhere in the planning department's files, or under a desk in the Senior Assistant City Attorney's office....

Later in the process, between the time it left the Architectural Review Board, passed through the Planning Department and arrived at the Planning Commission, in early 2009, it had been switched one more time: One of two “property owners” turned out to have been compromising the truth and was NOT a property owner at the time he allowed his signature of convenience to be used on the second application. So another withdrawal of an application occurred and a second substitute put in place with the willful assistance of City of Tallahassee employees....a completely new application with no legal notice that had not been reviewed or publicly discussed, but which was substituted to continue and commit a fraud on the citizens and property owners of Lafayette Park. This third application, which never received proper public notice or review by the Architectural Review Board, or review by the Planning Department, or review by the Planning Commission is the application currently “in abeyance.”

Your real job as members of this committee, is to continue this fraud, justify it, and legitimize it, in order to continue to do as much harm as possible to the property owners and citizens of Tallahassee.

However, you have the right to re-define your committee's purpose:  To find all three applications, identify the exact process they went through, and demand accountability and integrity in a system so filled with illegality, unethical practices, unethical relationships, and corruption as to be an outrage against us all. By doing so, you may find the right tools to create an honest, workable system for Historic Preservation.

Commissioners and committee members, if you ignore the corruption and illegality rife within the current historic designation process, and pretend it does not need to be addressed, you will be defining a keystone of your public service reputation.

Tallahassee is subject to that old saying: If you act like a crook, you will be treated like a crook.  As members of this committee, this maxim will apply to you, also.

Members of the committee, you do have a choice!

More details follow:

This agenda statement makes the false claim of which application is in abeyance and deliberately conceals that the true, original application was prepared and submitted to the Architectural Review Board (ARB) by two corporate applicants: The Lafayette Park Neighborhood Association (an entity which has no legal standing in the code to submit an application) and The Tallahassee Trust for Historic Preservation, which, according to the Tallahassee Land Development Code may, indeed, be an applicant, but only with the advice and consent of the property owner...Sec.10-318(b).

Information and a copy of the minutes on this August 6, 2008 ARB meeting are available at the following web address:

http://www.historiclafayettepark.com/august6arb-minutes.html

The original application was withdrawn or disappeared, and through the suspected connivance of the city attorney's staff with the staff of the Tallahassee Trust for Historic Preservation as well as an ethically-compromised and incompetent Architectural Review Board, an entirely new application with different applicants and (very importantly) a different Owner Awareness Statement was prepared, which left the owners as non-participants in the rezoning of their own property.

Throughout the Tallahassee-Leon County Land Development Code, any rezoning requires the approval of the property owner. The original owner- awareness- statements in all previous and subsequent historic preservation applications comply with this requirement by requiring the property owner or his official representative to certify full understanding of the process and consequences upon which they are embarking when asking for historic preservation rezoning. This new, one-of-a-kind, custom-written “Owner Awareness Statement” for the illegal second and third applications contained a provision that provided for the rezoning of the properties affected (over 500 properties in a major downtown neighborhood) to be rezoned without the knowledge or consent of the property owners.

To Elaborate:

This second application was entirely new (submitted by entirely different named applicants), which then proceeded forward in “the process”, although it did not have any legally-required notification to property owners, and skipped the first necessary steps mandated for an application.

Furthermore, this new application was submitted to the Architectural Review Board by Mr. Jim Pfost and Kathy McGuire, who stated they met legal property-ownership requirements for submitting an application, although it was later proven that Mr. Pfost did not own property in the neighborhood and was again certifying in another public document an outright lie as to his right to act. A copy of an after-the-fact quitclaim deed making him a property owner is available in the Leon County Clerk's Office of Public Records. Note: This is the same Mr. Pfost, who on the previous application that was withdrawn, certified in writing that he was the “official representative” of each and every property owner in the application (approx 500 properties). A copy of this certification is available.

This second application, at the time of submission to the ARB was legally deficient for the following additional reasons:

For each of the properties under consideration, (500+/-), there was attached a three or four-page form, a model of which is promulgated by the Florida Department of State and is intended to properly document the architectural, personal, cultural, and neighborhood justification for identifying that particular individual property as possessing genuine historical significance and deeming it so extra-ordinarily worthy of recognition, that the property rights of the owners could be stripped, without their permission or any compensation, and placed in the hands of the Architectural Review Board.

Once the application passed the Architectural Review Board, no further review of the contents would be done. The planning department wouldn't even open the covers. It would simply be voted upon in stages through the Planning Commission and City Commission, both of which had absolute trust in the ARB's evaluation.

However, since the properties obviously did NOT meet true historic requirements, and the effort of making up lies on nearly two thousand pages would be a lot of work for the contract staff provided by the Tallahassee Trust for Historic Preservation contractor, the forms were attached with only the address, a few universally meaningless comments, and the balance left blank. A detailed review of these forms with specific examples may be found at this website address:

http://historiclafayettepark.com/tthp-failure-examples.html

Regrettably, for all of Tallahassee, the Architectural Review Board is a profoundly compromised organization, with a membership governed by ignorance, ethically-questionable financial quid-pro-quo, and zealotry. A fair hearing of any proposal is not going to happen in the Architectural Review Board. By code, nearly half the membership is made up of persons with no architectural or historical training or background - their only qualification is to live in an old house that has previously been recognized as “historic”. They do not need any training in legal rights, or proper procedures of public bodies. They are very likely to take their guidance from the TTHP staff that selected and approved their membership, and this staff quite likely had something to do with the approval of a significant loan or grant they may have received for work on their old house. One of the other members of the ARB is a designee for the planning department, who, of all persons the planning director could have named, happens also to be an historical grant recipient - and guess who was on the committee making that member's financial grant? — our favorite TTHP contractor's staff director who guides the ARB's schedule and affairs and who wrote the application for Lafayette Park. Some surprising and specific details on the grants , loans and makeup of the Architectural Review Board as well as the financial grant committee can be found at this web address:

http://historiclafayettepark.com/archive-aug-6-09.html

Committee members, I sincerely encourage you to stop, before you get started in the wrong direction, and demand an accounting of the truth and find out just how many members on your committee have been “pre-selected” by the same City Attorney staff referred to above, for the sole purpose of creating a committee subject to manipulation, with a demonstrated tendency to do the bidding of people intent on controlling the property rights of others without compensation. Or, else, they are active participants in the development and daily practice of the immoral, corrupt system we currently have in place.

Commissioner Mark Mustian and Mayor John Marks, please read this following agenda section carefully and consider the history of the Lafayette Park HPO war from 2008-2009. If you follow the membership guidelines given in the following list of cherry-picked selection of committee members, you will be seen solely as puppets of your own City Attorney.

I urge you to consider your positions as City Mayor and Commissioners; you were elected by the citizens of Tallahassee to provide honest leadership with integrity. All I ask from you is careful consideration of what I have written and the fact that no bona fide or significant defense has been offered by any of the identified perpetrators in the Lafayette Park HPO war.

The three applications, as well as the process, were overwhelmingly shouted down by a huge, vocal majority of the residents who were nearly deprived of their property rights. Take the time to thoroughly investigate what I have described, and find out how dedicated to wrongful behavior some of your own city employees and appointees are...will you be shocked or not?

Are you going to be identified as part of the problem or part of the solution? If you are not willing to demand an accounting of what happened previously and publicly identify the compromises and illegal or unethical acts of city staff and city contractors and planning department staff, you most certainly will be considered part of the problem as you embark upon a cover-up while greasing the wheels for an illegal application to proceed against the property owners of Lafayette Park.

If you follow the detailed make-up of a committee, as identified by your City Attorney staff, you will quite possibly find a whitewash committee as good or better than any painting contractor.  

It is very important to get the rotten wood out of the pile, before you begin to build anew.

I entreat you to do the right thing for the sake of our City of Tallahassee and the citizens who trust you.

Very truly yours,

Mark S. Daniel

HistoricLafayettePark.com        January 23, 2011