http://www.oncefallen.com/juliatuttlecauseway.html
THE MAKING OF A BAD SEQUEL: THE JOURNEY TO BOOKVILLE II
"I've seen Third World countries with parks better than this." – Paul Anderson, Shorecrest community resident, in response to a community pocket park designed to prevent registrants from living in the community
It should come as no surprise that the remaining registrants were skeptical of the assistance offered by Miami–Dade County Homeless Trust advocate Ron Book, the very man who created the JTC camp through his laws. Over the years, Book was seen as the central figure behind the creation of the camp that mockingly bore his name sake. Book was even heckled during a community meeting formed over concerns of the dispersal of the JTC registrants across the county. If the general public had reason to be concerned, the registrants had even more reason to be concerned for their well-being.
Ron book received $1 million to provide temporary housing to the displaced registrants, but less than three months later, the displaced registrants were facing eviction from their temporary housing. About 20 faced eviction within a single month of displacement. Despite efforts to prevent clustering, two clusters of displaced registrants formed, one at a trailer park in Allapattah, the other in a secluded area in the Shorecrest community. A number of former JTC camp registrants were even temporarily housed in the parking lot of the Florida Department of Corrections.
Ron Book claims he didn't know about conditions until last week. Maybe it is because that SOB and his bimbo daughter had never been to the camp in FIVE LONG YEARS. When Once Fallen went to the camp on separate occasions last year, he posted about the conditions at the camp, INCLUDING VIDEO! This blog also posted pics from the camp. And, as noted in the Book's phony court case against Once Fallen, the Books read this blog religiously.
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/miami-dade-homeless-trust-wants-to-close-hialeah-sex-offender-camp-9611195
Two Weeks After New Times Story, Ron Book Wants to Close Sex Offender Camp Near Hialeah
ISABELLA GOMES | AUGUST 24, 2017 | 9:09AM
For nearly three years, county officials and police in Miami-Dade failed to respond as a tent city of sex offenders grew along train tracks near Hialeah. The squalid camp is just the latest consequence of a 2005 county law that banned sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of any school, daycare center, or park, effectively banishing them into homelessness under highway overpasses and the Julia Tuttle Causeway until they were forced into this remote industrial corner. More than 300 offenders are now registered in the area — living without running water, electricity, or plumbing.
Furious local businesses and property owners have repeatedly begged the county to do something, but their grievances fell on deaf ears. That is, until this past Monday.
About two weeks after New Times published an in-depth story about the deplorable conditions in the growing encampment, calling it a "sanitation and security nightmare," Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust workers, city officials, and police officers visited the site. Now they've announced a new campaign they claim will finally find housing for the long-transient sex offenders.
Among those supporting the move is Homeless Trust chairman Ron Book and his daughter, state Sen. Lauren Book, who both visited the camp after New Times' story was published. Book, whose day job is an über-influential lobbyist, has long backed the county's harsh restrictions on sex offender housing. And when New Times contacted him earlier this month, he argued that "the Constitution doesn't guarantee where you can live when you break the law." At the time, he insisted he had no intention of reexamining or changing the county's rules, asserting that "it's not a question of will [sex offenders] reoffend; it's a question of when."
So has Book changed his tune? "This has got to close," he said of the camp Monday in an interview with the Miami Herald.
The lobbyist insists that, in fact, nothing has changed. Book says the county is simply allocating resources to the sex offenders for temporary rental assistance, such as first month's rent and security deposits. But he says that service has always been available to the offenders and blames them for lacking the initiative to arrange proper housing.
So why is the county finally stepping in now? "It's become a health hazard and a health emergency," Book says. Even though he had no response when New Times asked him about the tent city's sanitary risks two weeks ago, Book claims, "I was only notified a week ago. Before that, nobody ever said this was a health crisis."
He admits local property owners have filed complaints over the years but argues that the taxpayer-funded Homeless Trust "[doesn't] operate based on people complaining." Instead, Book states that the role of the Trust is to "provide assistance equally to the homeless" but that it is "not [his] job to find housing for sex predators and offenders."
Because offenders are prohibited from living in most subsidized federal housing and homeless shelters due to the restriction, it is their responsibility "to avail themselves to other funding paths for housing," Book says. "It's not a free lunch."
Even so, many county officials, such as Commissioner Xavier Suarez, insist there must be a better legislative solution to deal with the tent city. In a 2014 interview, Suarez told New Times: "That we restrict where [offenders] can live and not provide any facilities for them isn't human or logical."
Regardless, Book says the county will soon announce a deadline to shut down the encampment, essentially evicting the sex offenders once again.
Where will they go when this tent city is closed? That's up to them, Book says.
Here's the earlier Miami Herald report. Note the pic of Lauren Book bringing paperwork to "assist" the man in the wheelchair. I'd like to point out that Derek Logue of OnceFallen.com had contacted the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust earlier this year to seek help and go one response letter. After receiving that response, they were told about the current situation and further inquiries went unanswered.
On to the Miami Herald now:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article168569977.html
Tent camp of homeless sex offenders near Hialeah ‘has got to close,’ county says
BY DOUGLAS HANKS
dhanks@miamiherald.com
AUGUST 22, 2017 6:48 AM
Seven years after Miami-Dade County shut down a camp housing about 100 homeless sex offenders under a bridge in Miami, it’s now trying to deal with an encampment on the outskirts of Hialeah that has almost three times as many people registered to live there.
Police and social workers on Monday night visited the roughly 30 tents set up near warehouses that sit by railroad tracks outside Hialeah’s city limits, the legally registered homes of almost 300 people convicted of sex offenses against minors and barred from living within 2,500 feet of schools, parks, daycare centers and other places where children congregate.
“This has got to close,” said Ronald Book, the powerful head of Miami-Dade’s homeless board who has also lobbied for the county’s tough residency restrictions on sex offenders. “The complaints have continued to grow and grow and grow.”
The encampment, in the area for about three years, stands as the latest replacement for the one under the Julia Tuttle Causeway in Miami that brought global attention to the county’s restrictions on homeless sexual offenders. More than 100 sex offenders lived in the encampment, some delivered there by probation officers after the convicts couldn’t find another place to legally reside.
Book said that about 270 offenders are registered as living in the tent village outside Hialeah, sitting on either side of the 3500 block of Northwest 71st Street. There is no electricity, running water or bathroom facilities, leading to complaints of human waste being tossed roadside and around the warehouses whose fences front the tents. Others use bathrooms at a Walmart and a Walgreens about a mile away.
Claudia Marie Baker, 58, who said she spent nine years in prison on child-pornography charges, has lived in a tent there for about a year. “My sister has five different real-estate people looking for places for me,” said Baker, who said she was convicted as a man, Gregory Baker. “Every place they picked, it was too close.”
The 2,500-foot restriction is far tougher than Florida’s 1,000-foot rule but matches the limit for some local governments across the country, including Lake County near Orlando and Pasco County north of Tampa. In dense Miami-Dade, hemmed in by the Everglades and the Atlantic Ocean, the 2,500-foot rule eliminates wide swaths of Miami-Dade’s housing stock as an option. The county also bars sex offenders from homeless shelters where families are housed, making most of the tax-funded emergency housing off-limits, too.
Miami-Dade adopted the 2,500-foot limit in 2010 after the Tuttle controversy, replacing a patchwork of city laws that generally had the same distance in their sex-offender restrictions.
The renewed focus on a replacement tent camp also revives attention to Book’s unusual role at the center of both issues: a volunteer board chairman who serves as the county’s de facto homeless director, and a top crusader for Miami-Dade cracking down on the same sexual offenders left homeless by the residency rules he helped enact. One of the most powerful lobbyists in both Miami-Dade and the state of Florida, his position landed him at the center of the Julia Tuttle controversy, with some tent residents naming the encampment Bookville.
Book’s daughter, Lauren Book, was the victim of sex abuse at the hands of the family’s nanny, and the experience propelled both Books into becoming advocates for tougher penalties for sex crimes against minors. Lauren Book, 32, started a foundation dedicated to the cause and then won a state Senate seat last year as a Democrat representing Broward County.
In 2010, when county commissioners were considering the proposed 2,500-foot limit for sex offenders, both Books spoke in favor of the rule. That day, commissioners not only voted to pass the legislation but also renamed it the Lauren Book Child Safety Ordinance.
Both Books were on hand Monday night, too, when the county invited media to cover the launch of outreach efforts at the tent encampment. After darkness fell on the tent camp in Miami-Dade, Sen. Book described the squalid village as part of a problem that requires some sort of legislative fix.
“I think the local law has caused unintended consequences,” she said. “You’re seeing it.”
Her father dismissed a suggestion that the tents standing nearly a decade after the Julia Tuttle controversy revealed a flaw in Miami-Dade’s approach.
“There are places [they] can live. You’ve got to go find those places,” he said in a telephone interview before the visit. “What sex offenders want to do is blame everybody else for the problem. They want to blame the laws and the residency restrictions.”
Gail Colletta, leader of an advocacy group pushing for changes in Florida’s residency requirements, said Miami-Dade captures the political hysteria over paroled offenders. Because most victims of childhood sexual abuse know their abusers, Colletta argued that the extreme measures governments take to keep offenders away from schools and parks don’t prevent crime but do lead to inhumane conditions like tent cities.
“Practically nobody is getting this right,” said Colletta, president of the Florida Action Committee, who described herself as the mother of a grown son who served prison time for possession of child pornography. “They’re all hung up on this false sense of security.”
The county shut down the Tuttle encampment in 2010, and Book said the homeless agency placed the more than 100 residents in private apartments and other residences outside of shelters and in compliance with the 2,500-foot limit. Monday’s deployment was designed to start a similar process, with the county offering to help with rental subsidies and placement to get the tent residents to move. The action followed a New Times story profiling the tent village in early August.
There have been other encampments in Miami since the Tuttle one closed, including one in Miami that lasted until 2012 when the city created a tiny park that triggered the 2,500-foot restriction. Book said that any former Tuttle residents living in the Hialeah encampment would have lost a prior home because Miami-Dade had determined that each registered Tuttle offender had found a place to live.
Miami-Dade’s restrictions on where sexual offenders live largely survived a suit by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2014, which was filed for anonymous plaintiffs that a lawyer said Monday were living in tents near Hialeah at the time. A federal judge rejected the bulk of the ACLU’s complaint that the local law constituted unfair punishment, but the nonprofit is appealing whether the county can enforce restrictions on offenders convicted before the law went into effect.
Jeff Hearne, a Miami lawyer working on the case, said the county rules create the problem that Miami-Dade spent Monday night trying to solve.
“It’s our position that forcing people into homelessness is punitive,” Hearne said.
Because probation rules require sex offenders to sleep at the addresses where they’re registered, he said, many tent residents could afford to live elsewhere if they were allowed to do so.
“Many of them have places they can go to,” he said. “They have family members who have homes that can keep them there. Many of them have rooms they rent to keep personal belongings. But at night, they’re forced to go out and sleep in tents.”
The county shut down the Tuttle encampment in 2010, and Book said the homeless agency placed the more than 100 residents in private apartments and other residences outside of shelters and in compliance with the 2,500-foot limit. Monday’s deployment was designed to start a similar process, with the county offering to help with rental subsidies and placement to get the tent residents to move. The action followed a New Times story profiling the tent village in early August.
There have been other encampments in Miami since the Tuttle one closed, including one in Miami that lasted until 2012 when the city created a tiny park that triggered the 2,500-foot restriction. Book said that any former Tuttle residents living in the Hialeah encampment would have lost a prior home because Miami-Dade had determined that each registered Tuttle offender had found a place to live.
Miami-Dade’s restrictions on where sexual offenders live largely survived a suit by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2014, which was filed for anonymous plaintiffs that a lawyer said Monday were living in tents near Hialeah at the time. A federal judge rejected the bulk of the ACLU’s complaint that the local law constituted unfair punishment, but the nonprofit is appealing whether the county can enforce restrictions on offenders convicted before the law went into effect.
Jeff Hearne, a Miami lawyer working on the case, said the county rules create the problem that Miami-Dade spent Monday night trying to solve.
“It’s our position that forcing people into homelessness is punitive,” Hearne said.
Because probation rules require sex offenders to sleep at the addresses where they’re registered, he said, many tent residents could afford to live elsewhere if they were allowed to do so.
“Many of them have places they can go to,” he said. “They have family members who have homes that can keep them there. Many of them have rooms they rent to keep personal belongings. But at night, they’re forced to go out and sleep in tents.”
The county shut down the Tuttle encampment in 2010, and Book said the homeless agency placed the more than 100 residents in private apartments and other residences outside of shelters and in compliance with the 2,500-foot limit. Monday’s deployment was designed to start a similar process, with the county offering to help with rental subsidies and placement to get the tent residents to move. The action followed a New Times story profiling the tent village in early August.
There have been other encampments in Miami since the Tuttle one closed, including one in Miami that lasted until 2012 when the city created a tiny park that triggered the 2,500-foot restriction. Book said that any former Tuttle residents living in the Hialeah encampment would have lost a prior home because Miami-Dade had determined that each registered Tuttle offender had found a place to live.
Miami-Dade’s restrictions on where sexual offenders live largely survived a suit by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2014, which was filed for anonymous plaintiffs that a lawyer said Monday were living in tents near Hialeah at the time. A federal judge rejected the bulk of the ACLU’s complaint that the local law constituted unfair punishment, but the nonprofit is appealing whether the county can enforce restrictions on offenders convicted before the law went into effect.
Jeff Hearne, a Miami lawyer working on the case, said the county rules create the problem that Miami-Dade spent Monday night trying to solve.
“It’s our position that forcing people into homelessness is punitive,” Hearne said.
Because probation rules require sex offenders to sleep at the addresses where they’re registered, he said, many tent residents could afford to live elsewhere if they were allowed to do so.
“Many of them have places they can go to,” he said. “They have family members who have homes that can keep them there. Many of them have rooms they rent to keep personal belongings. But at night, they’re forced to go out and sleep in tents.”
The bottom line is that Ron Book created this mess, and swept it all under the rug. He continues to blame his victims for forcing them to live in squalor. Yet, the Miami-Dade council continues to rely on Book and the so-called "Homeless Trust." We have already seen how ineffective the Book crime family is at cleaning up messes they created.
I have a better idea. Force the Books to live at the camp. Take away Lauren's gaudy tour bus, daddy's multi-million dollar bank account, his fancy cars, and the millions in tax dollars going to the Lauren's Kids charity scam. Make the Books shit in a bucket, bathe themselves in a bucket, and eat donated stale donuts and sleep in a tent. How long could they last? They'rd be BEGGING for services! Ron Book already looks like a homeless bum in a suit. He'd fit right in. As for Lauren, well, since she doesn'y like to eat, she'll keep her figure, I suppose. But she won't have as much L'Oreal makeup to hide her blemishes or her shame for being such a scumbag. For good measure, drag Pepe Diaz out of the drunk tank and into the camp as well. Hell, drag out the entire Miami-Dade council for that matter!
Speaking of the Council, FAC was kind enough to publish the council members on their website, so it is reposted here:
| District 1 | Barbara J. Jordan | District1@MiamiDade.gov | 305-474-3011 |
| District 2 | Jean Monestime | District2@MiamiDade.gov | 305-694-2779 |
| District 3 | Audrey M. Edmonson | District3@MiamiDade.gov | 305-636-2331 |
| District 4 | Sally A. Heyman | District4@MiamiDade.gov | 305-787-5999 |
| District 5 | Bruno A. Barreiro | District5@MiamiDade.gov | 305-673-7743 |
| District 6 | Rebeca Sosa | District6@MiamiDade.gov | 305-267-6377 |
| District 7 | Xavier L. Suarez | District7@MiamiDade.gov | 305-694-3550 |
| District 8 | Daniella Levine Cava | District8@MiamiDade.gov | 305-378-6677 |
| District 9 | Dennis C. Moss | DennisMoss@MiamiDade.gov | 305-234-4938 |
| District 10 | Javier D. Souto | District10@MiamiDade.gov | 305-222-2116 |
| District 11 | Joe A. Martinez | District11@MiamiDade.gov | 305-552-1155 |
| District 12 | Jose “Pepe” Diaz | District12@MiamiDade.gov | 305-599-1200 |
| District 13 | Esteban L. Bovo, Jr. | District13@MiamiDade.gov | 305-820-8424 |
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