DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Let's be real about this: The Daytona Beach News-Journal justifies the Waverly Media investigation led by outside counsel Jonathan Kaney, Jr., for one reason, and one reason only: Its bottom line in advertising revenue. The advertising the county does with Halifax Media, the ownership of the News-Journal, is the dirty little secret Volusia County keeps under wraps.
The bottom line is, the County Council gave unprecedented powers to Kaney its own charter didn't provide for: The power of subpoena and using it to interview witnesses in private.
Circuit Judge Raul Zambrano earlier this month rightfully ruled the county did not have the authority to grant Kaney subpoena powers and just as important, it also didn't have the right to carry out interviews outside the public sessions of the council meetings.
The News-Journal insisted in an editorial published Saturday and headlined, "Council should put Waverly behind it," that "The judge reiterated that the council was 'well within its realm' to hire Kaney to conduct the investigation. However, it could not delegate to him a power it did not have -- 'the inherent power to subpoena private citizens for purposes of a general inquiry.'"
The News-Journal continued in part, "Although the State Attorney’s Office already had been conducting a criminal investigation of the Waverly matter, the county needed its own inquiry to discover if any influence-peddling might have occurred between the company, which held the county contract to place advertising on bus benches, and certain council members and candidates for council seats."
First, it's a given that the county had no legal right to give Kaney subpoena powers. The county's own attorney, Daniel Eckert, made that abundantly clear. But he was neutralized 13 months ago in a 4-3 vote by the "Gang of Four -- Doug Daniels of Ormond Beach, Deb Denys of New Smyrna Beach, term-limited Pat Northey of Deltona and Pat Patterson of DeLand -- over County Chair Jason Davis of Edgewater, Joshua Wagner of Daytona Beach and Joyce Cusack, the at-large representative from DeLand.
Second, as the News-Journal pointed out in its own editorial, the Office of State Attorney R.J. Larizza was conducting its own investigation of Waverly, and anything in the ay of influence peddling woul have surfacved from the criminal probe, but the investigation ultimately determined there was no criminal wrongdoing by candidates for office -- either as newcomers, seeking re-election or vying for a different office.
The entire Waverly probe -- both by the County Council and the State Attorney's Office were proven to be norhing more than shams.
For example, when Kanry was getting pressured to complete his task, having gone well beyond the orgional time frame, suddenly Larizza's Office released its findings. That was back in September.
And it gave Kaney information he didn't otherwise aquire or develop on his own to try; this as he tried to paint a picture of conspiracies by the likes of private power attorney Ted Doran, himself a candidate for county chair who finished last in the 2012 election cycle promary and out of the running, and his lw partner, Wagner, who easily won re-election in 2012, with the help of in-kind of free advertising from Waverly and its principals, Jim Sotolongo and Ramara Garrett.
To this day, Larizza has not explained the timing of the release of the SAO report on Waverly, some 20,000 pages. This reeks.
So does the hiring of Kaney in the first place at the urging of Daniels to his Gang of Four colleagues on the dais backin November 2013.