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To C6JJB Statutory Members: Stop Calvin Harris (email from Plyer 4/18/07) Dave Plyer <d.plyer@gmail.com>
Calvin Harris has taken it upon himself to decide which duly appointed members of the Circuit 6 Juvenile Justice Board will participate at Board meetings. The current notice of the April 30, 2007 meeting of the Circuit 6 Juvenile Justice Board excludes five of the seven members appointed to the Board by the Pinellas County Juvenile Justice Council (Pinellas County JJC). According to Rick Davison (Deputy Secretary, Department of Juvenile Justice) Calvin Harris instructed DJJ to send the March 29, 2007 notice using a list that excluded most of the members appointed to the Board by the Pinellas County JJC. I emailed Harris, twice, instructing him to have DJJ resend the announcement to ALL Board members. Harris has not replied. This is the Calvin Harris who, on January 22, 2007, opened the Board's first quarterly meeting of the year with this decree, "[The Pinellas County Juvenile Justice Council] is not recognized as the council and we are forming… a juvenile justice council." This culmination of unprovoked assaults on the Council is an outrage! But, it is not unexpected given Harris' attacks on the Pinellas County JJC at every Board meeting since January, 2006. The Board's business, according to Florida law, is to provide advice and direction to the Department of Juvenile Justice. It is not the Board's business that Harris abolish a juvenile justice county council. This harassment must stop and it will when you, the statutory members of the Board, and officers of the court, uphold the law. It is your professional duty to act as the moral and legal authority to put an end to the illegal dictates of Calvin Harris. The Circuit 6 Juvenile Justice Board has 17 members. Florida Statute 985.664 (7) requires that three Board members be the Sixth Judicial Circuit's Chief Judge, Public Defender, and State Attorney or their designees. The juvenile justice county councils in the Circuit appoint the remaining 14 members: seven from the Pasco County Juvenile Justice Council (Pasco County JJC) and seven from the Pinellas County Juvenile Justice Council (Pinellas County JJC). Both county councils have been in existence for years. The Pinellas County JJC elected me as its Chair on December 29, 2005. I attended my first quarterly meeting of the Circuit 6 Juvenile Justice Board, as a Board Member, on January 30, 2006. Calvin Harris, then Chair of the Board, and an appointee of the Pinellas County JJC, greeted me with this threat: "We don't have any control over the [Pinellas County Juvenile Justice] Council, but if it does not represent DJJ then we will ask that it be abolished." As Board Chair, Harris reinforced this threat at each Board meeting throughout the year. At no time did Harris provide statutory authority to make such threats or produce any facts to justify his demonizing of the Council. Rather, he denied the Pinellas County JJC's representative the opportunity to speak; allowed the Board's Vice Chair, Paul McClintock, to defame a member of the Pinellas County JJC, a student, by labeling him a "school-shooter type"; told a school teacher in the audience to "shut up"; and dismissed the Board's bylaws as "just a piece of paper". The other Board members remained silent. On October 17, 2006, the Pasco County JJC appointed Pinellas County Commissioner Calvin Harris to the Circuit 6 Juvenile Justice Board. At the time, Harris was an appointee to the Board from the Pinellas County JJC. At the same meeting, the Pasco County JJC appointed to the Board two other current members of the Board from the Pinellas County JJC: Pinellas County Commissioner Ken Welch and Pinellas County resident Martha Lenderman. With that Pasco County JJC election, Harris, Welch and Lenderman became the only Board members to hold simultaneous appointments from two juvenile justice county councils. On October 26, 2006, the Pinellas County JJC elected its appointments to the Board. It did not reappoint Harris, Welch, and Lenderman. An email was sent to you, the statutory members of the Board and to the Department of Juvenile Justice that listed the Pinellas County JJC's appointees. This brings me to January 22, 2007, the Board's first meeting of 2007. Calvin Harris assumed the position of Chair and renewed his attack on the Pinellas County JJC with this opening statement: "Dave Plyer was uh notified by state DJJ last week that his group is not recognized as the council and we are forming, we are forming, we are in the process of forming, a juvenile justice council. And so the old, the old Board is still in effect until the new Board, the new council, is formed, which means that Dave Plyer is a member of this Board but the other people that were appointed by that Council are not official members of this Board and they will not be seated."[See note on last page.] Calvin Harris justified his dictate with a motion, passed on September 18, 2006, to form "an advisory council to give us advice." That motion did not empower Calvin Harris, or anyone else, to declare that the Board would no longer recognize the Pinellas County JJC. In fact, the Board has no statutory authority to do so. Nevertheless, Calvin Harris told those Board Members, recently appointed by the Pinellas County JJC, "You can be in the audience, but you will not be seated as part of the Board." Those members protested. In response, Harris ordered Pinellas County Sheriff's Deputy Cunningham to "escort these people" from the Board table. Deputy Cunningham rose and began to carry out Harris' instruction. However, the Deputy stopped when shown the list of Circuit 6 Juvenile Justice Board members compiled by the Department of Juvenile Justice on January 19, 2007. At that point, frustrated, Calvin Harris may have finally explained his contempt for the Pinellas County JJC. He said, "See, now this is what got us into problems before. That with the Council we allowed a group to just say that they were the Council and drive everybody else away and change the rules. And nobody said anything." True to form, Calvin Harris offered no details, no examples, just scorn. To that distorted view of the Pinellas County JJC, I present the following facts. First, Calvin Harris says, "…this is what got us into problems…" but never identifies "us" or the "problems." Next, despite what Calvin Harris says, no "group" was ever "allowed" to "just say that they were the Council." The Pinellas County JJC, like the Pasco County JJC, has existed for years. On December 8, 2005, at the close of the Pinellas County JJC's last public meeting of 2005, all four of its elected officers resigned without any advance notice. The next day, I did what any member of the Council is empowered to do; I scheduled a special meeting of the Council and notified all the Council members. The stated purpose of the meeting was to elect Council officers. The Council met on December 29, 2005, and elected its four officers. The Council's bylaws describe the process via Robert's Rules of Order. I detailed the process in an email to all Pinellas County JJC Members on December 24, 2005. To continue, the Council did not "drive everybody else away," as Calvin Harris said. The Pinellas County JJC passed a motion, at its November 17, 2005 meeting, to change meeting start times from 9:00 am to 6:30 pm beginning January 2006. The purpose of the time change was to make Council meetings more accessible to the public. The result has been that those members, whose government employers allowed them to attend meetings during business hours, stopped coming. On the other hand, more students and parents, who could not take time from school or work to meet during business hours, began to attend Council meetings. In both cases, attendance, or lack of it, is by choice; not intimidation. What are we to make of Calvin Harris' paralyzing dislike of the Pinellas County Juvenile Justice Council? Is it that he believes that the parents and youth who make up the Council are not worthy to be members of the Pinellas County JJC? Or, does he dislike evening meetings because the public is more likely to attend? The Pinellas County Juvenile Justice Council conducts its business in the "sunshine." It conducts its business according to FS 985.664, its Bylaws and Robert's Rules of Order. Its documents are readily available to the public at the Council's website: PinellasJJC.org. The Pinellas County Juvenile Justice Council acts based on these principles: • The majority rules, but the rights of the minority
are protected. I conclude with the belief that you, as officers of the court, have a moral, ethical, and professional duty to put an end to the unfounded attacks by Calvin Harris and let the Council conduct its business according to its rules, its principles and its members. Dave Plyer, Chair Note: The notification that Calvin Harris referenced during the January 22, 2007 meeting of the Board, was a letter, addressed to Dave Plyer (Chair of the Pinellas County JJC), that Harris sent to DJJ on Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners stationery. Harris arranged to have a copy of that letter hand delivered to Plyer by Greg Johnson, then DJJ's Assistant Secretary for Prevention. Johnson handed the letter to Plyer at DJJ's Circuit Board and County Council Chairs' quarterly meeting on January 9, 2007. Harris never mailed the original letter to Plyer. As Harris explained to Plyer, at the January 22, 2007 meeting of the Board, "I wanted to make sure that you didn't deny receiving it. That's why we had it hand-delivered to you." |
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