Village of Palmetto Bay's New Poll Tax

I have now had the opportunity to peruse ten days of Ron Williams emails amounting to approximately 500 sheets of paper.  You might think to yourself "that Ronnie Williams, what a hard working man - 500 emails in 10 days, that's 50 emails a day. When does he rest?" But you'd be sadly and unfortunately mistaken. What I got from my $700.00 investment to the Village of Palmetto Bay for 'public' records, which incidentally is an exorbitant fee equivalent to a poll tax, was government efficiency at its, ahem, very best.     Every email that was sent, forwarded,  cc'd  etc.  to Mr. Williams was meticulously printed with its entire thread of the previous conversation with all attachments no matter how many times it was forwarded. I basically got the same email and whatever was attached and forwarded around 4 or 5 times between staff and Mr. Williams.  What colossal waste of paper.  I feel trees weeping in the forest somewhere.  So much for the Village of Palmetto Bays attempts to be a Green Village.  Why couldn't they just email it to me or burned a disk.    Regarding the emails,  I've come away with the opinion that I'm not really sure what Ron Williams does to earn his relatively large salary.  Judging from small sample of emails I reviewed, one can surmise that Mr. Williams does not generate any original thoughts or emails.  He receives them and may or may not respond to them, and when he does respond to them it's with with three or four non-committal words.  Mr. Williams, it seems, prosecutes his duties verbally to avoid leaving a trail. I wonder why?   I was able read some interesting information that Mr. Williams was cc'd on.  For instance, I ran across a very interesting email from Village Attorney Eve Boutsis to Councilman John DuBois in response to a request by Mr. Dubois questioning the State of Florida's Attorney General's (AG's)opinion on the Sunshine Law with regard to releasing records related to the Palmetto Bay-Palmer Litigation.  Ms. Boutsis states to Mr. Dubois "the AG punted." Punted?  In other words, I assume, there is no legal opinion from the AG that states the shade sessions need to be kept from the public.  They can be disclosed.   I, along with numerous other individuals, have been requesting access to the Shade Sessions related to the Palmer Litigation for months.  I even went so far as to ask the Village Attorney to write to the Attorney General and ask for the opinion.  I figured since the primary litigation is finalized the shade sessions should be open to public scrutiny because revealing the Councils passed errors, if there were any, can't effect the outcome case anymore.   I think it is in the best interest of the Village and its Citizens to uncover exactly who made what decisions and why.  This way the Mayor and Council Members can clear their names from the suspicion that there was wrong-doing.   It seems to me that since we have the AG's non-answer, the Council should immeditately bring up the question of releasing the Shade Sessions in a public forum.  If there was a legal basis to hold back this information from the public, the AG would have given one in its opinion.  That the AG would "punt", Village Attorney's word, once again sounds like there is no legal basis for withholding this information.   In her email dated December 18, 2012, Ms. Boutsis writes "I need to do further research as I need to determine whose responsibility it is -- to make the final determination" to release or not release this information.  Now that it's the end of February, I wonder whether she's done that research or whether there has been pressure on her not to release the information due to the damage it could do to Mayor Shelly Stanczyk, Councilwoman Joan Lindsey and Ex-Councilman Brian Pariser.   If I was any one of them, I might want those Shade Sessions buried as long as possible if errors were made in the litigation process that could/will eventually cost the Village Millions of Dollars. Currently, according to the Village Attorney, there's no legal basis preventing the disclosure of the Shade Sesssions on the Palmetto Bay - Palmer Trinity litigation and if there's nothing to hide then why not disclose?  Once again, this topic needs to be be discussed at the next Council meeting.  The citizens of Palmetto Bay have the right to know what happened. Any effort by the Current Council to protect the prior Council from scrutiny will reflect poorly on the present Council.  It's time to open up the books, learn the facts and move on so this never happens again.     David Singer