Remember Bobby Scott, the single Representative who voted against the Adam Walsh Act?
Now Chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, Representative Scott will hold the first legislative hearing on the Adam Walsh Act.
More details tomorrow on what you can do....but if I'm grabbed by alien sometime between now and then, hang on to this...
DATE: TUESDAY, MARCH 10, 2009
PLACE: Capitol Hill, 2141 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C.
TIME: 2:00 p.m.
Live video webcast available on the Committee's website here.
And if you just cannot wait, read more over at Constitutional Fights-Repeal the Adam Walsh Act Laws!
I'm not certain what's going on over at the Miami Herald, but the last few months, the paper has actually been worth bringing up online to read. Whatever is happening, keep it up.
Bringing me to MH columnist Fred Grimm. And Ron Book.
Froggers who follow my ramblings know that Mr. Book is forever financially secure as a successful Florida lobbyist. He is--as we say--connected to the max and because of that, has used his power to lobby a devastating personal blow to an extreme legislative level, influencing lawmakers--again successfully--to support child protection laws based on dated research.
If that's not enough, back at home, Book has managed to hold positions of local power to ensure compliance with personally important passed laws. Currently, he serves as chair of the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust.
The mission of the Trust is simple. To Eliminate Homelessness in Miami-Dade County.
Unfortunately, Mr. Book seems to think that mission is inapplicable to a group required to register as sex offenders camped out under the Julia Tuttle Causeway--living under the span due to the inability to find affordable housing in Miami--due to city/county residency restrictions that overlap state law, actions which Mr. Book supported and which obviously contradict in his current focus on the homeless.
The Herald's Mr. Grimm calls out Book in his column, provided below in its entirety as such great opinion pieces have a tendency to disappear from our online world.
"If those people aren't employable, if they don't have financial resources, that's an issue of their criminal convictions. There are people convicted for other offenses who have similar difficulty finding housing.''
In the bowels of the Julia Tuttle Causeway, an ever-growing number of community outcasts live amid the putrescence of a shocking community failure.No fresh water. No toilets. No trash dumpster. And no indication, after two years watching a public disgrace metastasize into a public health hazard, that the $41 million-a-year Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust would intervene.
Wednesday afternoon, I called and left a message for Homeless Trust Director David Raymond. The call was returned by the ubiquitous Ron Book.
Book, among his many incarnations, serves as chairman of the Homeless Trust. But the colony of sex offenders beneath the bridge were essentially forced into homelessness by a burst of overlapping city and county residency restrictions championed by this same Ron Book.
Book, the most powerful lobbyist in South Florida, pushed for sex-offender restrictions in town after town. When Book pushes a city commission, he gets results.
LAWS DEFENDED
I wanted to know why the Homeless Trust hasn't provided a few basic necessities for a homeless camp. It was the wrong Book to ask. He launched into a defense of the laws that put them there. And he claimed that the restrictions leave three areas in the county not yet off limits for sex offenders.
But Greta Plessinger of the Florida Department of Corrections said those areas just aren't affordable. ``The bottom line is that we've been working with the offenders, but we haven't been able to find a legal place for them to live that they can afford.''
Book countered, ``If those people aren't employable, if they don't have financial resources, that's an issue of their criminal convictions. There are people convicted for other offenses who have similar difficulty finding housing.''
Except other convicts aren't forced to live under a bridge.
The colony has burgeoned to 48 men, living in tents, scrap-wood shacks, rusting campers, the back seats of cars. Thirty-three are on probation, most after serving prison terms. The others are forced to live there because, under Florida law, ''sex offender'' becomes a life-long designation.
Plessinger said that residency laws intended to protect the public have the perverse effect of making ex-sex offenders more difficult for DOC to monitor. ``We're concerned that it's more dangerous. That homeless sex offenders are more likely to abscond.''
WHY NO TRASH DUMPSTER?
Most social scientists, and studies by corrections officials in Minnesota and Colorado, have come to the same conclusion. But the wisdom of residency laws was beside the point. All I wanted to know was why the Homeless Trust, which has done so much heroic work for Miami's transient population, hasn't at least provided a trash dumpster for the Tuttle outcasts.
Book said no. He has a policy against providing services (such as outdoor feedings) that enable the homeless to remain adrift. Except laws that Book championed preclude ex-sex offenders from entering a homeless shelter.
The men have been banished to a dank permanent netherworld that Book, as much as anyone, helped create. Shouldn't the trust do something?
''You should pose that question to the Department of Corrections,'' Book insisted. ``They put those people there.''
