Shame on You
January 14, 2014 10:39 AM
From: “Ted Noftall” <Ted@TedNoftall.com>
To: “Greg Kisela” <gkisela@port-orange.org>
Cc: “Bob Ford” <rford37@cfl.rr.com> “Dennis Kennedy” <DennisK@port-orange.org> don@amlsfl.com “Drew Bastian” <db2070@cfl.rr.com> “Allen Green” <AllenG@port-orange.org>
Dear Manager Kisela,
Shame on you for allowing your resentment of my criticism of your excuse filled administration to besmirch the reputation of an individual who has given more to this community than you likely ever will.
You have twisted my observation as to the difficult position, that individual or any individual, would experience in serving on a board that could be called upon to be critical of your error laden finance department while waiting on approvals from other of your departments, into something it was not.
You have shown yourself to be calculating and totally un-trustworthy. You can bet that others will look most unfavorably on your action here, and will be far more cautious in their future dealings with you.
Do not think for a moment you are going to divert your inability to provide a credible explanation as to what went on with the un-permitted land clearing in question on to my shoulders. AND as for finding out what
really occurred well that will take a special investigator armed with subpoena power as is the case with the County’s investigation of its dealings with Waverly Media – and in the succinct words of Attorney Jon Kaney ‘ some people know some things , and now I don’t have to ask so politely ‘
If such a special investigator had been asking questions of you and your staff in the public meeting last Wednesday evening you and they would not have been able to hide behind the hundreds of “I don’t know ” that we heard that evening.
You need to get to work on sending an apology to the individual you have besmirched, AND Council needs to get to work of hiring a special investigator.
Ted Noftall
—–Original Message—–
From: Rivera, Cynthia [mailto:CRivera@port-orange.org]
Sent: Monday, January 13, 2014 5:36 PM
To: Ted Noftall
Cc: City Council; Kisela, Greg
Subject: Letter to Ted Noftall from CM
Ted,
Please see attached letter to you from City Manager, Greg Kisela.
Thank you,
Cindy
Thank the founders for our first amendments rights, a free press, our ability to speak Truth To Entrenched Power and ultimately for the Freedom of Information Act that allowed us to find out finally what is really going on at the City of Port Orange. And we thank some of our very civic minded citizens who can rouse the rest of us from our lethargy to finally take some action and get involved. And I include myself among those who needed rousing. It took a crisis in my neighborhood to get my attention. Thank you Ted Noftall for all your help. And we needed help.
I was deeply offended at the use of the term “players” at the Visioning Session by the facilitator on Saturday January 11, 2014 at the Port Orange Adult Center. The “players” being in her opinion the City Council. No ma’am, we the voters and residents and taxpayers are the “players” in Port Orange. That would have been those of us at the outside tables with no linen tablecloths and no candy as Corey Berman so cogently pointed out. We were clearly not the guests of honor. Yet we paid for that event. And we paid for every cell phone they answered that day and every company vehicle they drove to get there. Government is or should be responsive to us. We certainly fund it 100%. As someone who has struggled for weeks to get answers from the city about the development proceeding behind my home, I know whereof I speak. Our neighborhhod has had to go to radical extremes to get the truth.
Wake up Port Orange residents and taxpayers. Get involved. Know the issues. Please..pay attention to these blogs. Read them and ask questions about the issues being discussed. Come to city council and planning commission meetings, learn your councilman’s positions on these incredibly expensive projects and where and how your money is being spent. Who gets it and why and HOW. And it is YOUR MONEY, not theirs.
Watch POG TV..Channel 199. Schedules for these meetings and their dates of broadcast are on the PO City website. If you have a concern or issue get up and talk about it at the 3 minute non agenda citizen participation portion. Get to know your neighbors. There is strength in numbers. Yes..some of this material is arcane and takes a while to grasp, but none of it is beyond the ability of the average person to understand it if we only make the effort.
Evil triumps when good men do nothing. My 91 year old Mama, 40 year retired teacher, college forensic debator, and Navy Wave in WW II, Mary Templeton, told me that years ago. It was true in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland and it is still true today.
Dianne Templeton Gardner
Ted,
My question is did you express any doubt that this person on the board was not performing their duties correctly? I see from your response that you are offended and called Greg out to apologize to that person (We can assume that it was Jack Wiles) because he is a member of the board and is also in a dispute with neighbors about a parcel of land, but the real question is did you at any time question Jacks ability to do his job on this board, or say to Greg that Jack was doing something to get a favorable response to his issue? As someone who claims to want open government (which I truly believe that you do) this should not be a hard question to answer.
Interested,
The offense I took with Kisela was his sneaky underhand public suggestion that I should consider reporting an individual to the Florida Ethics Commission for “not performing their duties” in the 2nd sentence of a letter that follows his opening reference to a meeting held to discuss the “overall effectiveness” of an Advisory Board that I Chair.
My desire to improve the effectiveness of that Board had nothing to do with the performance, ethical or otherwise, of any person on that Board but rather the lack of cooperation and timely information Kisela and his staff had been providing.
The answers to your questions are an easy No, if for no other reason than zero duties, abilities or performance standards have ever been established to my knowledge.
As for the larger question of whether you, me and everyone else both say and do things to get favorable responses to our issues …the answer is of course we do – each and every one of us, each and every day of the year. Indeed I had kidded Jack good naturedly of this universal truism in the presence of others on 2 occasions that I can think off.
BUT AT NO TIME HAVE I EVER CONSIDERED EVEN FOR A MOMENT THAT A COMPLAINT TO THE FLORIDA ETHICS COMMISSION WOULD BE APPROPRIATE IN THIS INSTANCE – EVEN FOR THE REMOTEST OF POSSIBILITIES.
Kisela did nothing more than take a cheap shot, to twist a universal observation as to the difficult position everyone is in vis-à-vis saying anything UN-flattering about the City while they are awaiting a City approval into, in this instance a supposed ethical violation which is, something it is not.
AND HE DID SO A WEEK AFTER OUR CONVERSATION HAD OCCURRED AND AFTER A PUBLIC MEETING HAD TAKEN PLACE DURING WHICH HE AND HIS STAFF LOOKED LIKE A BUNCH OF KNOW NOTHING INCOMPETENT FRAUDS.
In my first comment on this whole fiasco I said in many ways Jack is as big a victim as the area residents, and i stand by that observation. Kisela and his merry band of incompetents should be paying the City to work here – not the other way around.