Mr.
President of Hillsborough County Bar
Mr. Stanley:
I want to alert you to a good job possibility for bar members in the county.
Mr. Tom Gonzalez’s firm has had what I believe to be a no-bid contract for a long time with the Hillsborough County School Board. He was, for example, the lead attorney in the Doug Erwin case in which the board and administration savaged a school employee who reported hundreds of thousands of dollars of waste in his department.
I have tried for over a month to get the public information about Mr. Gonzalez's relationship with the board that a citizen is entitled to. He has not acknowledged my request despite the manual for the public records law’s saying a citizen is entitled to timely relinquishment of information including financial information. I am afraid I shall have to get the Bar Ethics Committee, the governor, and the attorney general to help me.
I heard Mr. Gonzalez defend the no-bid contracts that have scandalized everyone who has heard about them who pays taxes. He made an impassioned case on the dais for the contracts after Board Member
The discussion that followed the revelation that the administration and board had awarded a no-bid contract for $148,000 to a recently retired administrator for whom it was his first contract and whose business phone La Gaceta had printed in “As We Heard It” did not answer with a human being and did not return the message left on voice mail.
I myself tried this recipient of the no-bid windfall on his home phone. I got a recording of a Minnie-Pearl voice that said, “It’s another beautiful day. Let’s live it for the lord!”
Such is the aura that surrounds the no-bid ritual of the taxpayers’ largesse as performed by the
My citizen’s mystical view says that Mr. Gonzalez is not a disinterested but an interested adherent of the no-bid paradigm since he, I believe, is a beneficiary of it. This inference gains strength from his refusal to yield the public information to me about his relationship with the school board that I have requested a month ago. And I also conclude that he should not advise the board on the no-bid contracts because his position as recipient makes his advice suspect as, indeed, I believe this to have been the case from the time Mr. Gonzalez reaped the no-bid contract that his firm has enjoyed and from which his firm has gleaned hundreds of thousands of tax dollars.
We can’t know what the
Gonzalez fees are since the board sets them at what they think is OK with a hey nonny nonny and their mystical intuition.
Mr. Gonzalez, in fact, may be making the same hourly rate for dozing through those tedious board meetings as the flossiest corporate lawyer who graduated from Harvard or Yale makes who has argued umpteen dozen cases before the Supreme Court and outwitted Mr. Scalia to a faretheewell.
The young man who replaced Mr. Gonzalez at a recent meeting, one Greg Hearing, showed a cavalier attitude toward the First Amendment and a citizen’s right to approach the representatives of government for redress of grievances. He sat looking at his desk or whispering to Superintendent Elia behind his hand and allowed the board chair, Ms. Jennifer Flowers, now under scrutiny for her irregular relationship in school precincts with a former school administrator, to gavel a citizen down during citizen-comment time before the citizen had a chance to ask the questions of the board that she wanted to pose.
The Gonzalez firm has, in my opinion, flunked not only the subtleties of no-bid contracts but also the Constitutional rights of citizens who come before the board for redress of grievances.
The which situation leads me to suggest to you that the time is now for other firms to bid for the school-board attorney slot.
I hear that the Gonzalez firm no longer has a contract for board business but continues to do the job, apparently functioning under some kind of arcane legal protocol of motion that would puzzle the brains of us non-legal civilians since it is doubtless mystical.
I posit that it is not fair of a legal guy to grab a no-bid contract and cut his brother and sister lawyers out of the chance to bid on it. I am surprised that Mr. Gonzalez saw no ethical problem and did not tell Dr. Lennard that he could not take a no-bid contract because it violated his sense of fairness.
But all those unlovely events are behind us for, if the board now has no formal contract with the Gonzalez firm, I suggest that your organization should spread the glad news to the legal priesthood that its practitioners can hustle to get the plum school-board contract themselves and may the best firm—or at least the most aggressively mystical--win.
As a citizen, I insist, however, that the winning firm foreswear no-bid advocacy and that its denizens serving the board know how the Constitution works to protect a citizen’s right to free speech and right to approach the worthies in public office to plead for redress of grievances.
I note the many distinguished legal personages on your Web page. Pray provide them a copy of this missive. It’s indeed a job ad. I suggest they call up the members of the board—the one in their own district would be most politic in my view—and request a job application for the lawyering job for the board.
I am sure the board is eager to reduce the stain of cronyism and sycophancy that attaches to the no-bid practice of the school board and administration presently. The four incumbents running for re-election may be eager to explain that they plan to run on a new-rules platform of putting all contracts out for bids as a part of their platform for re-election. These are
Respectfully,
lee drury de cesare
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