Friday, December 21, 2007


Ybor City Bluestocking Roslins


Will the person who sent me the anonymous post on breaking down the Gonzalez school-board loot please send it to me again? I lost it. I am a fool about money and need the text verbatim.

I want to forward it to the Faithful Heggarty of the Public Affairs office to answer for us. He replaced poor Marc Hart, whom our board Jezebel gutted and threw on the slag heap of her conquests.

The poor wretch now has no job, and his family is wrecked with his two children both suffering. I bet his wife is not in great shape either. Mr. Hart is a shattered man.

The administration forced his resignation but made Falliero board chair and did nothing to the middle-school principal in the bruited companion adultery of Falliero's coach husband and the principal.

Hart is having a heck of a time trying to get a job. This must be a swell Christmas for his shattered family that includes two children. Meanwhile Le Jennifer gavels down citizens that who want to ask about the rumors, and the board sits by passively as well as the lawyer dispatched to warm the seat in Gonzalez's place and lets our board La Belle Dame Sans Merci rip up the First Amendment and the one that says a citizen has the right to petition elected officials for redress of grievances.

Meanwhile the Minions of Darkness in the administration and board continue to romp unchecked. After Christmas, we must gird up our loins and resume the quest as Knights of the School Board and Administration Worst-Nightmare Roundtable. Our weapons are our mouths and the mighty blunderbus of the Blog.

The prissy, flaccid press won't touch anything to do with sex. They think about it but won't write about it.

En garde! Lee

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Freud's Couch: Doesn't it look comfy? I think the couch rug is a Tabriz. I'd lie there and make up things to recline on that beautiful rug. I love the old rascal although Freud said the only thing women had invented was weaving to construct a cover for their pudendum because of penis envy. I wish we had met. I would have slapped the old sexist silly. lee


Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2007 20:54:32 -0800 (PST)
From:"lee decesare"

Subject: Re: School District Response To Public Records Request
To:"Stephen Hegarty"
CC:doretha.edgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us, candy.olson@sdhc.k12.fl.us, mbrown@sptimes.com, webster@tampatrib.com, april.griffin@sdhc.k12.fl.us, hooper@sptimes.com, susan.valdes@sdhc.k12.fl.us, tobin@sptimes.com, carol.curdell@sdhc.k12.fl.us, letitiastein@sptimes.com, jack.lamb@sdhc.k12.fl.us, larsen@tampatrib.com, donaldstanley@hcbar.com, pgailey@sptimes.com, maxwell@sptimes.com
Thank you, Mr. Heggarty. I now request information regarding the board-related participation in filing and pursuing through appeal the infamous Doug Irwin case. Every teacher in Hillsborough County is still incensed about the unfairness of it.

I believe I am right in believing that Mr. Gonzalez was the lead attorney in what I consider the legal crucifixion of Mr. Erwin.

Don't you have those records in a big box somewhere? I am particularly interested in reviewing participation of board members still hunkered on the board in the decision to sue Mr. Erwin instead of giving him a medal.
Those are Kurdell, Olson, and Lamb. They have languished on the Hillsborough County Board since the Pleistocene Era. I want to determine what savage relish the records show that they exhibited in rubber-stamping the tax-paid legal cruelty of Mr. Erwin. I also want to know the number of days and the dates which The Honorable Ms. Jennifer Faliero missed for school-business events this past year--summer, I think--- when she went to Arizona. I believe she said that she went to California. But I have since heard from the person whom she visited that she visited him in Arizona.

I think the voters need to know if Board Chair Faliero missed her board duties to make social trips that dispossessed them of her valuable participation in school- board duties. They do not pay La Falliera's a bloated salary more than teachers with years of experience earn by real work to lallygag in Arizona with a hey nonny nonny.


Can you as well give me a copy of the policy which makes an exception and allows Mr. Gonzalez to keep his own personnel records instead of the usual school-records people? Ms. Cobbe said that y'all didn't have them, that Mr. Gonzalez kept them. Is that a law or simply a privilege granted Mr. Gonzalez; and if so, why? I am going to send a copy of the email you sent me on the money the Gonzalez firm made off the tax payers last year to the HC Bar Association as an incitement for other firms to apply for the job since I understand that it is open and that Mr. Gonzalez fills it per diem.

Since the board's flossy lawyering job is not currently under contract; since the board is in prayerful rumination about this unfair-to-other-area-law-firms-and-kick-in-the-pants-to-equal-employment-
opportunity; since Gonzalez and his firm's cohorts have luxuriated for years in riding the school-board-no-bid gravy train; and since the no-bid procedure that features such unlovely choreographs as lavishing a no-bid plum $148,000 windfall on a former administrator bereft of business phone makes people vomit imprecations when they hear about such outrages, I suggest it's time to advertise the board law job to the legal community of Hillsborough County and let all the lawyers have a whack at it. Otherwise, I advise these mistreated members of the bar to file a giant Title VII charge for patterns and practices of discrimination against the legal priesthood by the the Hillsborough County School Board. In that case, Mr. Gonzalez can put his Doug-Erwin-savaging talents to fending off local bar combatants.


I don't think Mr. Gonzalez's unlawyerly boosterism in board orations praising the no-bid situation is worth a hundred dollars an hour. That's way too much for his beating the drums for his own firm's tax-supported no-bid plush job. Le Gonzalez, Esquire, should have the ethics and grace to hush up when no bids come up for discussion since Dr. Lennard apparently had awarded him one although Mr. Gonzalez won't answer my public-information question on this topic. I bet his brothers of the legal priesthood are ticked off about Gonzalez's hogging this no-bid plum. I understand the reason he got it was that every time he met Dr. Lennard at Chamber-of-Commerce summits that he told him he was an ornament to the town instead of being, as everyone knows, the most profoundly mediocre man in Hillsborough County.

Thank you for your help in providing public records.
lee drury de cesare Thank you. lee Stephen Hegarty <shegarty@sdhc.us> wrote:

Ms. DeCesare,

In response to your earlier request, I am providing the following information:
Between July 1, 2006, (the start of last fiscal year) and December 11, 2007, the Hillsborough County Public Schools made payments totaling $477,467.72 to the law firm of Thompson, Sizemore and Gonzalez.
The payments include any services provided by the law firm, including litigation.
I would add that according to his contract, Mr. Gonzalez hourly rate is $100 per hour.


Stephen Hegarty
Office of Communications
School District of Hillsborough County
901 East Kennedy Boulevard
Tampa, Fl. 33602-3507

office: 813-272-4060
fax: 813-272-4510


Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2007 21:41:11 -0800 (PST)
From:"lee decesare"
Subject: monkey biz
To:"Tom Gonzalez"
CC:president@hcbar.com, scottrinberg@tsg-law.com, tash@sptimes.com, "Phil" , maxwell@sptimes.com


You have made my blog, counselor. leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.

I await the public information I have requested from you.

I see your firm made a half million last year at your school-board no-bid sinecure. That's highway robbery.

Now I understand your enthusiasm for the no-bid racket.

Your participation in it is unethical, Tom. You don't have to read the Nichomachean Ethics to see that it is. We learn "Play fair" on the school- ground swings.

Monday, December 17, 2007


Mr. Donald W. Stanley

President of Hillsborough County Bar

president@hillsbar.com

December 17, 2007

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 Griffin asked for the latest no-bid contract to come off the consent agenda for public discussion. Mr. Gonzalez said the board did not have to accept the least expensive bid, that money was moot, and if I understood the meaning of Mr. Gonzalez’s soaring rhetoric correctly, claimed as well that the board possessed some kind of mystical intuition that made possible its picking the right no-bid candidate and giving that candidate whatever amount of tax money that inspiration dictated to its mystically endowed members.

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 Hillsborough County school system with the legal advice of Mr. Gonzalez.

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 Susan Valdes, Doretha Edgecomb, Jack Lamb, and Carol Kurdell.

Respectfully,

lee drury de cesare