Last Thursday, the Pensacola City Council voted to hold a special meeting regarding the Emerald Coast Utility Authority’s proposed storage tanks on North Palafox Street. The five members in attendance requested that City Attorney Lysia Bowling to give her legal opinion whether any statutory requirements were violated by ECUA.
Some have opined that Florida law required the utility to receive to city approval before erecting the tanks that residents of North Hill have opposed for two years.In March 2016, 22 residential property owners, 3 corporations and the North Hill Preservation Association jointly filed for temporary and permanent injunction against ECUA for its North Palafox tank project.
Since 2016 was an election, the issue has been dormant until recently.
North Hill Preservation Association yesterday presented Council President with a petition against the tanks.
From: president@historicnorthhill.com
Subject: Submission of our official Petition Against the Construction of Sewage Storage Tank on Palafox Corridor
Date: September 18, 2017 at 9:31:27 PM CDT
To: EBurnett@cityofpensacola.com, bspencer@cityofpensacola.com
Dear City Council President Brian Spencer and City Clerk Ericka Burnett,
Please find attached our official petition to the City of Pensacola against the construction of the sewage storage tank in the Inner City CRA District on the Northern Palafox Corridor which is adjacent to the Historic North Hill District, the Long Hollow Neighborhood, the Eastside Neighborhood, in addition to being adjacent to the Hollice Williams Recreational Center/Park where our City Pool, tennis courts, football & soccer fields, basketball courts, and the new to come Skatepark will be built. Now is NOT the time to add a blighting influence in our CRA District that was established in 1984 for the express purpose of eliminating blight. The City Council has already declared sewage storage to be a blighting influence in the CRA District when it agreed to pay ECUA $19.5 million dollars to remove sewage storage from the City because of the release of noxious fumes. ECUA will try and say that the tanks will only be used in an emergency, but once built, they can legally use them as often as they wish and there will be nothing that you or anyone else can do to stop it.
There are places for all industrial type tanks that release noxious fumes, and it’s called the Industrial Zoning District. You have an empty, clean, ready to be utilized piece of property 1.2 miles up the street in the Industrial Zoning District where this tank could and should be built. It will cost $400 a foot for the pipeline according to our court records and deposition with ECUA’s engineers. You already pay ECUA this amount of money every year in your Interlocal Agreement. Make them spend it on moving the tank where it belongs and where it can be used without destroying the chances of continued economic revitalization to the Palafox Street corridor, or degrading residential property values.
You would never allow this use near the Roger Scott Recreational Complex or the Bayview Recreational Complex and we implore you not to do this to Hollice Williams Park either.
Our neighborhoods have waited 33 years for the City to begin work in our CRA District. Please do not let the addition of blight be your first project.
Please let me know if you have any problems opening the document. It is 38 pages long. Please forward to the City Council members.
Thank you for your assistance,
Melanie Nichols, President
North Hill Preservation Association, Inc.
See petition_77250_19-09-2017.
City Attorney Lysia Bowling’s record for legal opinions and expertise hasn’t been good.
The request for a city attorney legal opinion comes on the heels of the council repealing an anti-panhandling ordinance that Bowling drafted after it was challenged in federal court by the ACLU of Florida. She assured the council last spring the ordinance would stand up to a legal challenge.
In April, she gave conflicting legal opinions regarding the council’s desire to hire a budget analyst – Dueling Opinions on Veto.
In June 2016, Bowling had an opportunity to provide an affirmative defense that might have saved the John Sunday House but didn’t.
In April 2016, she opined that council resolutions weren’t binding on the mayor and he could ignore them without a veto.
Then November 2015, Bowling rendered an opinion in favor of the radio tower in the Long Hollow Conservation District. Several local attorneys, including former Hayward’s chief of staff, disagreed with her opinion.
And where is Mayor Ashton Hayward on this issue? As the city’s strong mayor, Â what does he believe is best for the city? He has had two years to work on it -how would he recommend it be resolved?
The Tanyard Community knows this all to well. The smell from a “closed” site keeps us in our homes – shelter in place. We have asked for H2S monitoring devices – dead air.. We asked for our streets to be cleaned from raw sewage releases every time it rains – the total amount of raw sewage release since August – 65-hundred gallons of sewage that by the way, drained directly into the stormwater drains and into the bay. AND onto our yards. Asked for soil testing – dead air.
Finally had to get the FDEP and EPA District 4 to get some attention. Still we don’t know how much toxic air we are breathing nor will anyone playing in the new, still not open playground and “retention” pond or how contaminated our properties are from sitting in raw sewage.
So, we feel your pain – maybe you could lend us your lawyer to help our community too.
Tomorrow, because the issue involves a state law and whether its words have their normal meaning or a special meaning known only to the Mayor, the City Council should direct the City Attorney to request an Advisory Legal Opinion from the Attorney General. Whatever way she comes out on the issue tomorrow, the City Attorney’s legal opinion can be sent as part of the request. Then we just wait. If it turns out that the Mayor violated a state law, then he can be recalled from office for violating the City Charter’s Section 4.01.(a)(2) and as provided in Section 7.01. Plenty of people who do not care about the ECUA issue would sign the recall petition and vote to recall the Mayor for a laundry list of other reasons. The City Council can also amend the City Code to require that it must approve all permits or only certain types of permits. If proposed as an emergency ordinance, and this seems an emergency, the Mayor is not even allowed to veto the ordinance. In sum, the City Council has plenty of tools in its political tool box but for more than six years they have mostly cowered in fear of the Mayor. I think the long-term lesson is that we need to form a Charter Review Commission sooner than anticipated to draft a new City Charter modeled after the one in Gulf Breeze.
If Lysa Bowling can’t understand the relevant statutes, why does she continue in that position as city attorney?
Those tanks will mean that the old Medical Center Building will now be practically worthless to any developer wanting to renovate the structure. No one will want to rent an office space in that building with two big sewage tanks sitting in the backyard.