Hillsborough High School Class of
'51 50th Reunion: Lily Massaro and I. Lily lived across the creek from me. Her family owned a dairy. We rode the bus to HHS together.
United Way of Tampa Bay
1000 North Ashley Drive, Suite 800
Tampa, Florida 33602
January 12, 2008
Dear United Way:
My husband, Tom De Cesare, used to serve on the board of the United Way when we lived in Tampa’s Beach Park for twenty years.
I taught at HCC then, during which for a time Dr. Ambrose Garner was college president. He told the assembled faculty the year he arrived that he would “cut off your legs at the knees and make you walk around on bloody stumps” if a hundred percent of the faculty did not donate to United Way. Dr. Garner wanted to cut a swell figure at Chamber-of- Commerce breakfasts.
I rose to object to that crude coercion and said I refused to donate to the United Way because at that time it gave more to the Boys Clubs than to the Girls Clubs. I debated this point with my husband at home.
Dr. Garner did not cut off my legs at the knees but rather chased secretaries around the desk. I helped one quarry get an attorney, Steve Hanlon, who is now with the flossy Holland Knight law firm. Secretary Iris Willis was willing to press charges against Dr. Garner for his untoward behavior. Other women were afraid to object.
I am always surprised at the outrages people will put with if the somebody who inflicts the outrage has power to fire the victim.
Mr. Hanlon involved the Florida Ethics Committee, which removed Dr. Garner from his job. After Dr. Garner’s eviction, I used to see him wandering about the airport post office looking forlorn. No doubt he missed the days when he threatened Ph.D.s with cutting off their legs and making them walk around on the stumps, not to mention his sprints around desks in pursuit of clerical help at Gordon Keller’s Penthouse Playhouse for guys.
I see on the January 15th school-board agenda that United Way is donating money to the Hillsborough County School Board:
Approve Accepting $42,500 from United Way of Tampa Bay as Match Funding for the Early Childhood School Readiness Programs for the Period lower-case “period” ont>of January 1, 2008 comma through June 30, 2008, Effective lower case “effective” January 15, 2008 (Student Services and Federal Programs Division) period
I consider a fine thing that United Way donates to the schools, especially for the Early Childhood project. HCC’s administrati
Some on-site observers suspect graft is the root of HCC’s administrative efforts to turn HCC into a business wi
I have talked some of those HCC people's complaining not to tell me about the problems but to go to the feds. They have finally.
So there exists ballast in these gestures to children: United Way’s benign, HCC's malignant.
I urge United Way to be aware of Hillsborough County school board's carelessness with money and its disinclination to rein in the waste of tax dollars by the profligate administration. The board allows the superintendent to indulge in no-bid contracts for buddies and sycophants, bloated salaries for featherbedding administrators, and hiring-and-firing irregularities that violate the equal-opportunity laws and imperil the schools’ federal grants with eqal-opportunity riders on them.
The board claims it is an equal-employment-opportunity employer, but that claim is utter piffle if you look at what goes on in fact. The school board presides over a jobs program for administration friends, sycophants, and family and hands out plum jobs with no advertising.
Once in a while you read hints of this situation in the print press, but mostly the press goes along with the outrage by reporting the lunch-room menus instead. This look-the-other-way by board and press gives Superintendent Elia patronage power to hand out these jobs—many of the featherbed variety--paid for with tax money. The attorney says that some footnotes in the state rules for education make possible the board’s considering money no object in the no-bid contracts.
The corker is that this board attorney, Mr. Tom Gonzalez--who lives in my old Tampa neighborhood, where our family occupied the sole hovel with our four children; two-earner minimum-wage-head-of-the-family, Tom; ill-paid-house-wife professor, Lee; arthritic bulldog, Obie; and no-pedigree cat, Twink—Tom Gonzalez, as I was saying, luxuriates at this very minute back in our old neighborhood in a baronial hacienda with Olympic-sized pool, servants’ quarters for butler and three maids, lawn service, pool service, house calls from the $400-John-Edwards hair cutter to attend Le Gonzalez’s tonsorial rituals, not to mention gourmet pizza delivery from the Michelin four-star Pizza Hut ad lib.
Senor Gonzalez’s life style is little short of that of the emperors of imperial Rome. There is even talk that Counselor Gonzalez may present legal rationale to the board to have his horse Stare Decisis made a board member. He doubtless will cite horse precedents that reach back to Caligula. I bet the board approves the petition and makes a place for Stare’s stall on the podium in Dr. Hamilton’s old chair’s location next to Dr. Otero. However, I hear Gonzalez is having trouble getting the Hillsborough County Bar to admit steed Stare to membership. But that may come too when the board makes Tom board attorney for life.
Where does Tom keep his horse, you ask? In the equestrian expanses of Beach Park, of course. Surely by now everybody knows that Beach Park is horse country.
All this Gonzalez wretched excess gets paid for in large part with the ten million dollars the flossy firm of Thompson, Sizemore & Gonzalez has raked in from taxpayers for its having laid hold of the board-attorney job via Tom’s kissy-poo relationship with Dr. Lennard fourteen years ago: a gift encumbered with no Title VII advertising athwart federal law, fairness, and base-line ethics.
Tom knew this scam was wrong. His firm specializes in labor law. He can invoke Title VII when it suits his purpose. He can also ignore Title VII or any other of the panoply of equal-opportunity laws when doing so is to his advantage. Tom’s filching the job from dumb-as-a-stump Dr. Lennard prevented Tom’s Bay Area brother and sister attorneys from competing for this lucrative, tax-money lawyer perch.
Tom doubtless cheated at marbles too on the playground and even filched pure-es from weaker kids. Skullduggery tendencies surface early according to world-famous psychiatrist and massage therapist Ronda Storms.
Since getting the job, Tom has hyped the desirability of no-bid contracts with lawyerly flourishes. Doing so constitutes a conflict of interest since Tom is the recipient of no-bid largesse. Thus Tom should hush up on the subject. He doesn’t. Tom touts his ethical purity instead. But, as Milton said, “I cannot praise a fugitive and a cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed.”
Or was it Tom’s horse who said that?
Tom’s firm’s school-board hiring was unfair and belied the equal-employment-opportunity spin of the board, which stamps “We are an equal-employment-opportunity employer” all over the place.
Mr. Steve Hegarty presides over the ROSSAC tax-paid wind machine that spins this equal-opportunity claptrap, although he chiefly issues press releases cataloguing the many gimcrack education- bureaucrat awards won by Ms. Elia in the perpetual Crackerjack Education Bureaucrat Awardee Sweepstakes. These have begun to arrive in dump trucks to the ROSSAC redoubt, so numerous are they.
Le Hegarty replaced Mr. Marc Hart, fired on the trumped-up charge of alcoholism as cover for the real reason for kicking him out: an affair with the board’s La Belle Dame sans Merci Jennifer Faliero at her instigation. Board and administration aimed to cover the ugly situation up for fear that families would disapprove an on-site adulterous pas de deux as unwholesome environment for their children.
This adultery dust-up presented instance of the board and administration’s double standard. After kicking out Hart, whose two children his ongoing homewrecker divorce has injured, of course, the board then voted La Faliero in as board chair, in which position she gavels people down who want to make inquiries about this Peyton-Place atmosphere that surrounds her. We have an instance of adultery cover-up trumping the First Amendment presided over by the school-board elected officials.
To give you some idea of the administration and board’s exotic, non-EEOC hiring practices, there looms the employment saga of Dr. James Hamilton. He held a top administration job for many years despite his not knowing the difference between homophones “your” and “you’re” and inability to write a literate paragraph.
Dr. Hamilton in mid-07 had second thoughts about retiring after a career of decades of huffing and puffing to make underlings afraid of him and augment his self-produced reputation of being a ba------rd to work for. Dr. Hamilton was far gone in the glamour of ba…rd swagger and Jimmy Buffet songs. To soothe his dithering, Superintendent Elia created him a job out of thin air, did not advertise it, and put him into the slot before it even went on the books one staff member told me. This maneuver represented the creating of a sinecure for an administrator incapable of making up his mind. That is one of the most exercised skills of the superintendent: creating fluff jobs for buddies. She too has writing deficiencies, so she and Le Hamilton are birds of a feather. Both write with the rhetorical felicity of essays one finds scrawled on bathroom walls.
Taxpayers forked out $140,000 a year for this faux job without knowing it so that Dr. Hamilton could hang around ROSSAC and have the willies about whether he wanted to retire or not. Somebody even scribbled in by hand his name beside that of his administrative replacement, Dr. Otero, on the school Web site. One infers that citation signaled that he hung out in Otero’s office and drove him crazy.
When Dr. Hamilton bestirred himself to leave-- a beneficent moment for education--about nine months had elapsed while he shambled about ROSSAC in a pother. This decision equipoise made Hamlet look a model of dispatch and cost taxpayers about $80,000, bled from a shrinking school budget which the board and administration claim doesn’t have enough money for students’ needs. It is wicked to throw away $80,000 in school money to indulge a spoiled, vacillating-doesn’t-know-the-diffence-between-“you”-and-“you’re”-from-a-hole-in-the-ground departing buffoon.
Upon Dr. Hamilton’s retirement, the public-affairs office says Ms. Elia wiped out Dr. Hamilton’s ad-hoc job. That fact testifies to its having been a boutique job for Dr. Hamilton's dithering period.
The board had rubberstamped this tax-rip off coming and going on the consent-agenda conveyer belt. Not one board member demurred. Four—Valdes, Kurdell, Lamb, and Edgecombe—are up for election. One wonders whether they will reveal to voters this Grand Guignol that they staged. A good place for such admission would be after they make the template board-candidate promise to "save every penny of taxpayer money that I can, cross my heart."
For more irregularities about how the school board and administration misappropriate tax money, see http:www//SchoolBoardSpending.blogspot.com.
And for probity’s sake, put a rider on your money to the board that dictates that it goes strictly to the early-childhood project. Otherwise it could divert to one of the create-a-job-for-a-irresolute-buddy projects the production of which Ms. Elia excel. Behind her members of the school board wave pompoms to cheer her on.
Lee Drury De Cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
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