‘Third Audit Protocol’ derails as election nears

Needelman campaign throws caution to the wind

I can tell the disgraced and disenfrocked former Palm Bay lobbyist is back in town as the negative attacks have moved from the (Florida Today) BLOG to the radio, TV, and the nebulous website, mitchforclerk.com.

New to the Needelman website is a “What Ellis Says, What Ellis Did, What Mitch Will Do” section put together minus the Third Audit Protocol.

There are various disjointed statements entitled What Ellis Says, yet there is a curious LACK of quotation marks, perhaps because these disjointed sections have been written by Mitch and his campaign staffers to paraphrase in their words what I ‘said’.

Well, when you say someone SAID something, there needs to be a quote and source and there is no quote and no defined source for any of these comments.

However, being a mixture of fact and fantasy, I will address them.

On the Term Limits issue, Legislative Term Limits passed in 1992.  I ran all of 1992 for the Brevard County Commission.  I did fully support the amendment, but the embellishment contained in what I did is false as my old Toyota truck had a topper, I did not even have Scott Ellis for County Commission signs on it, and in the radio forum Mitch claimed I stood around on corners with a sign for the Amendment when the only sign I had to wave was for the County Commission race.  Local term limits were later enacted and deliberately did not include any of the Constitutional Officers as they were considered Administrative/Executive in nature rather than Legislative.

As for the late night radio show, I do not recall I ever ‘demanded’  Dr. Weldon step aside nor severely chastised him.  The “will of the people” is in quotes, so where is the radio clip with the What Ellis Said?  It’s pretty easy to state in 2008 what was allegedly said anywhere in 2007 when there is no record to back up anything, and without a show date I am unable to provide a playback (like I could provide an image of the Sarno landfill check) to show what really was said (and by who) on the show.

What Ellis Says on the Certification issue is a huge mish mash.  He actually had a quotable answer I had written to him and his aide who surreptiously acting as a concerned citizen asked me the question.

My answer and the question asked, which Mitch and his aide COULD HAVE QUOTED me:

Q: Why have you not obtained the certification for the Clerk of Courts in the 8 years you have been in office?

A: The State certification required 8 weeks of hotel in Tallahasee the first two years. Most of the material covered was material I already had in school (finance, technology) or on the County Commission (budget, minutes).  For the first four years I was in office I did not take a day off, much less have time for 8 weeks off learning most of what I already had.  I inherited a crashed Clerk’s Office and put in countless hours around the clock, it would be poor leadership on my part to go off for weeks of unnecessary conferences while everyone else was struggling with the recovery.
But, hey, that’s not as good a quote for What Ellis Said as the jumble of phrases and comments passing as if it were some quotable commentary or reply written by myself.  What is covered above is we were swamped in work, I was swamped for the first years taking ZERO time off, and I did have experience as a County Commissioner and a Programmer as well as a Computer Science degree and an MBA, and that many of the certification classes were geared to rural Clerk’s Offices.
Satisfactory completion means you go for the eight weeks, there is not a certification exam.  Being certified means you get an extra $2,000 annually in salary, meaning I chose to forego $12,000 to be in our office putting my shoulder to the wheel with my co-workers rather than camped out in a Tallahassee hotel.  As for the other Clerk’s, none inherited anything like the mess we had in Brevard County, a collapse quite well known amongst the other Clerks.

Now the section entitled What Ellis Did is so full of baloney the infamous Third Audit Protocol must be whimpering in some corner after being banished from the Needelman Campaign.

The reporting function was one of the last functions to be fixed as the first priority of the crashed system and backlog was re-establishing daily operations (a days work in a days time) and knocking down huge backlogs in case dispositions, uncollected fines and tickets, license suspensions, squaring monies with the cities and counties (it has all been estimates) and fixing the general ledger and getting it current.  The reporting function was fixed and the State claimed the error rate was too high, and when we asked what the error rate was for other counties, we got a blank answer.  Now while Needleman claims our answer of we needed to do nothing was arrogant and flippant, the reality is since 2004 we have virtually done nothing and what was not broke at the time of the letter in 2004 is not broke today.

Mr. Needelman complains we fail to meet State Collection Standards for one area yet conveniently fails to state the shortfall (89% versus 90%) and neglects that the other collection rates exceed the State standard.  On top of this, the Clerk is not a Judge and we do not have debt enforcement powers.

This one is so false (and conveniently no numbers are mentioned) in “His courts are a mess of backlogged cases, mismanaged schedules, and failure to meet even minimal expectations from Judges, Lawyers and Citizens.” all I can say is ask a lawyer how much, if any, of this statement has any credibility.

One would think if AFTER EIGHT YEARS of failing to meet ‘minimum expectations’ the State would have already removed me from office, I would have had an opponent in 2004, and the Florida Today would have my transgressions living on the front pages weekly.  None of this has happened because none of the charges are true.

Now here is a whopper that is both not true and in part completely verifiably not true.  Now one may claim “His computer system is still not functional after EIGHT YEARS” and pass it off as hyperbolic exagerration and opinion, but the follow up claim that  “over $500K of ‘consulting fees’ in just the last year alone” has been spent is another flat out fabrication like the lawsuits I allegedly filed against the county and my signature on the Sarno Landfill check.  We are NOT paying consultants on the Courts software, have had little work outside ourselves and the vendor for the last eight years, and in fact there are NO software consultants allowed to work on the Courts program because it is PROPRIETARY software.

One final comment on my oft ridiculed 25 year old degrees.  I survived numerous weed-out classes at UCF in the Computer Science curriculum to get the degree in one of the top two programs in the State for Computer Science.  I worked as well in the computer field during my four years in the Air Force.  I completed my Masters in Business Administration at UCF at night while working as a software analyst for RCA at the Cape. The MBA was difficult at night, but not as hard as the Computer Science degree had been.  Maybe after a few months of this it is time to get personal as Mr. Needelman has a 1990′s undergraduate degree from a flunk-proof diploma mill which taught a few classes at the Sarno Plaza by my house.  There is no comparison in the two educations we achieved.  I am one of the first to state that often one may be well educated but lacking in common sense, and that formal education is not everything, but for someone who brags about a diploma mill degree to constantly knock a real degree from a real university is the ultimate in chutzpah.

Best of all, however, is TWO DAYS before the election Mr. Needelman NOW decides  “Today we begin to post issues and answers for you”.  The man has been in the Clerk’s race for eighteen months and NOW decides to begin to post issues.  He has had the opportunity for months for candidate Forums and events and dodged nearly every one except two (which had no debates) and the joint appearance on the Bill Mick Live show.

I do not blame him. Just like the other baloney issues the last week and the month of despicable garbage thrown into the Florida Today Blogs, had any of these issues been tossed out months ago they’d already be in the Third Audit Protocol Trash Bin, or for the more slyly disappearing phoney claims, down the Memory Hole with an interview re-write.