Commissioner Gene Valentino has turned over his personal computer to the state attorney’s office which is investigating a complaint by atty. Greg Smith that the commissioner had not released all his emails regarding a bingo casino on Perdido Key.
We discovered that Valentino no longer had his computer yesterday when we were told a record request which we had regarding the commissioner would not be fulfilled until his computer was released by the SAO.
Valentino has his version of why he had so much difficulty complying with Smith’s request—which took over two months—in the daily newspaper.
Emails can be deleted from laptops. The SAO needs to check if Collector Solutions (Valentino’s company) has a backup system on its server that stores all of the commissioner’s emails.
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The State Attorney has Gene’s computer and it has nothing to do with Rick Outzen or economic development or the Chamber or Mort O’Sullivan. Gene is accused of not making his emails public as required by law. The emails concern a bingo casino. The complaint was filed by attorney Greg Smith. What Gene wrote in the emails that the IN and this blog has published is Gene’s responsibility.
darn – don’t you just hate it when facts get in the way of insinuation and innuendo?
Just a hunch Rick but I am guessing that Anonymous will be conceding this round of “gentlemanly discourse” to you… Well played sir
Anonymous:
I am not a favorite of those who post on pnj.com. However, I do sign my name to what I post. I stand by my statements and my explanations for those statements.
Now to answer your questions:
1) Yes, I was appointed to complete the term of Jack Williams on the Chamber Board. My first meeting was in Sept. 2008. I’ve attend four or five board meetings since then. Kevin Doyle, PNJ publisher, is also a board member. Gene Valentino was on the board when I was appointed, but has since been replaced by Grover Robinson. I think Valentino served on the chamber board for two years.
2) I have no professional association with Mort O’Sullivan. His firm does the accounting work both for Gene Valentino and Jane Birdwell. The firm does not do any work for the IN.
3) I am not a tenant of Mort O’Sullivan. My landlord is Dunlap Property Management. Gene Valentino’s company, Collector Solutions, is a tenant in the same building as O’Sullivan Creel and Levin Papantonio. I don’t know who owns the building.
4)I have not filed any complaint against Commissioner Valentino with the State Attorney’s Office.
5)I have no intention of doing so against Sam Hall or Mort O’Sullivan. Sam Hall is the one who met in City Hall with Comm. Valentino. Mort O’Sullivan did not. If you know of any specific violation by O’Sullivan, what is it?
6) I do support the Chamber proposal. I have written why. I still don’t know much about Comm. Valentino’s plan. Do you? I know it calls for a politically appointed board (PEDA) that I disagree with. I know it calls for increasing the franchise fee- which I also oppose. Other than that, Comm. Valentino has told us very little in either the joint city-county meeting or the special BOCC workshop. The lack of specific information from the commissioner has led me to question how much of a plan does he really have.
What is it that you like about the Valentino plan?
Hello Rick,
It would have been gracious of you to have given the Commissioner the benefit of the doubt… but, from your postings it seems evident that from your perspective the Commissioner is undeserving of any consideration.
Am I wrong to discern from your blog entries that you have a tendency to lob personal assaults and suggestive inuendos at individuals (in this case the Commissioner) with which you disagree in what would seem to be a rather obvious attempt to descredit the individual and, by extension, any position the indvidual supports.
Rather than challenge the participants in your blogs to pursue fair, enlightened, rational conclusions, you seem content to post absurd diatribes that serve only to reduce any discussion into non-reflective, emotional, scandalmongering.
There was an interesting article in the PNJ today concerning the Chamber. From the associated blog activity, it would appear that the article has generated a great-deal of interest from our fellow citizens.
Many of those citizens seem to have a very low opinion of you and, in particular, your ability to be impartial on any topic that involves the Chamber. As you can imagine, many assertions were being made.
If you wouldn’t mind; Just to be sure that I am appropriately educated and not jumping to some rash conclusions based on mis-information, would you mind replying to the following:
1) You are a member of the Board of the Chamber?
2) You are both personally and professionally associated with Mort O’Sullivan?
3) You are a current tenant of Mort O’Sullivan?
4) You filed the complaint with the State’s Attorney accusing Commissioner Valentino of violating the State of Florida’s Sunshine Laws only weeks before he was to present his opposition economic plan to Mort O’Sullivan’s economic plan?
5) You have no intention of filing a similar complaint with the State’s Attorney accusing Sam Hall and\or Mort O’Sullivan with violating the same Sunshine Laws based on Councilman Hall’s comments of last week?
6) You support Mort O’Sullivan’s economic plan while opposing Commissioner Valentino’s economic plan?
Thank you for responding to my previous posting. While I may occasionally take exception to the apparent impropriety of your blog postings, I do greatly appreciate the opportunity to engage you in gentlemanly discourse.
My 8-year old knows better than to leave personal e-mails laying about his computer where others will eventually discover them. I taught my kids from the get-go this old internet adage which was drilled into my head from the time I knew how to type: DO NOT EVER send or do anything online you DO NOT want to become public knowledge! If we have a grown-up county commissioner who can’t grasp that then I think it is high time we replace him. Whether or not Valentino is a scam artist or just a jerk, time will tell, but we do not need a public official who is so techno-dumb as to fall into this trap. I voted for Gene, shame on me.
Anonymous:
We have a Commissioner who resisted turning over his emails after three public records. He has given family health issues as the reason that he insisted to the County Attorney that he had no other emails than those on his official county account. Could he have deleted emails advertently or inadvertently from his personal computer? I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that he might have. Either way such emails are probably stored on the Collector Solutions—that was my point. I don’t know how deeply the SOA is scanning his laptop. You are more knowledgeable about deleting files on a pc than I am.
It’s Commissioner Valentino’s behavior —the cursing of his fellow commissioners, his attempt to find a challenger to Grover Robinson and/or Kevin White and his interference with a Board of Adjustment hearing by not properly delivering the emails in time for the hearing—that make anyone suspicious of the Commissioner.
As far as Councilman Hall’s comments, I reported Mort’s reply -as well as the PNJ has— in another post on this blog.
Thank, Randy Cudd. The statement is “Commissioner Gene Valentino has turned over his personal computer.” I think “turned over” and “handed over” mean the same thing.
Just so the record will be correct for a change Gene handed the computer to them with out their request. THEY DID NOT SEIZE IT, as is implied in this rag.
Yea, go Gene….go home and get out of office, stop messing with TPO, Economic Development, Incentives, Parks….you have made a mess out of every one of these issues.
Your comment ‘Emails can be deleted from laptops…’ is rather asinine…
Short of physically destroying a harddrive, there isn’t much one can do to completely remove the footprint of a deleted file from a pc’s harddrive…
In spite of your implication, simply deleting a file (or email, in this case) would not render the item unrecoverable (even if one remembers to empty their ‘recycle bins’ and ‘deleted items’ folders).
The only method outside of physically destroying the drive that will allow one to achieve some level of ‘deleted data irradication’, is to use what we call a ‘Shredder’. A Shredder is a program that overwrites the corresponding disk space of deleted items with randomized data defined by a series of algorithms. The writing of this random data occurs in ‘layers’ (i.e. it is repeated many times). The goal here is to mask the original digital profile of any deleted files so that they, at best, become unrecognizable and, at least, if recovered, represent a useless, corrupt representation of the original file.
Catch one; it’s rather easy to discern if a ‘Shredder’ has been used against a drive. So, while a ‘snoop’ might not know what you’re trying to hide, they would know you’re trying to hide something.
Catch two; the ‘snoops’ have very good tools that allow them to look beneath even the most advanced ‘shredding algorithms’ which takes us back to destroying a drive as the only true option to achieve what you seem to be implying.
Catch three; it would be very easy to discern if a drive had been replaced (was not original to a machine)… especially for a pre-packaged machine (DELL, HP, etc).
Of course, given that you seem to be insistent on charactrizing Commission Valentino as a misinformed buffoon barely capable of tying his own shoes, it would seem disingenous of you to suggest he now miraculously possesses the intellect to outsmart the techies on-call with the State Attorney’s Office.
With all this being said; if your true intent was simply to raise unreasonable and unnecessary suspicion of the Commissioner, then your comment makes perfect sense. If not, then I am left to assume that your knowledge concerning this topic is somewhat deficient.
By the way, how about Councilman Hall’s commments concerning Mort… when are your going to start a blog thread on that one?
GO GENE!
It may be George T… but just say, No, please, District 2.
WD Childers!
I’m sure we’ll all re-visit this episode during next year’s election. Who in Dist. 2 will emerge to challenge GV in the primary?
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