Homeowners protest outside St. Joe meeting

[Joanne98]

Arion and Debbie Ward bought a lot from The St. Joe Paper Co. in the late 1980s and built what they thought was their 3,400-square-foot dream house. But several years later they started to notice cracks in the ceiling and heard birds in the rafters.

The couple is among seven families living on the same street in Port St. Joe who claim in a lawsuit that the company intentionally sold them home sites that had been a dump site for the St. Joe Paper Mill and that the homes, as a result, are now sinking into the ground.

Armed with signs that read “Greed feeds the corporation/starves the people,” “Houses on wet sod/St. Joe is a fraud” and “St. Joe sells sinking sand to single moms,” about 40 protestors assembled Tuesday outside St. Joe’s headquarters on Riverside Avenue. The protesters included residents and their families, along with their attorneys and representatives from the Consumer Federation of the Southeast and the Florida Alliance for Retired Americans. Inside the building about 40 company executives, board members and shareholders attended the annual shareholders meeting.

Arion Ward, an African-American who worked at the paper mill when he and his wife purchased the lot but now works at nearby Tyndall Air Force Base, said he originally inquired about lots located in the Mill View community that were in predominantly white neighborhoods. He said he was told that the only lots available were on Bay Street, where the dumping had occurred decades earlier, and in a predominantly black neighborhood.

The Ward family, which also includes two grown children no longer living at home and one who is, still lives on Bay Street because there is no place else to go.

“All our money is just going down, flushed down the toilet,” Debbie Ward said of the home, which she said needs constant maintenance.

The seven families filed suit in Gulf County Circuit Court in 2004, claiming the company deceived them when it sold them wetlands lots that are now sinking and breaking apart, rendering them unsafe and uninhabitable, according to the families’ attorney, Tallahassee-based Benjamin Crump.

St. Joe’s attorney recently filed a motion for summary judgement that the judge hasn’t ruled on, and while Crump said the families are still hoping for a trial, they are also still hoping to resolve the issue with the company, which was why they decided to protest during the shareholders meeting. Crump said this is actually the families second trip to Jacksonville. They tried to meet with St. Joe President and CEO Britt Greene last year, but were denied a face-to-face meeting.

The Bay Street families’ lawsuit isn’t St. Joe’s only legal battle in Port St. Joe. According to the Port St. Joe newspaper, The Star, a class action suit also filed in 2004 includes more than 300 plaintiffs who are current and former residents of the community and concerns about 400 pieces of property. That suit, which is unresolved, alleges that soil contaminated with arsenic in the Mill View community has made several of the residents sick.

The St. Joe Paper Co. began paper mill operations in Port St. Joe in the late 1930s and over the next few decades filled a wetlands area west of the paper mill with paper mill waste that included tree bark, boiler ash, lime grit and slag. In the mid-1950s the company created the 100-acre Mill View subdivision on top of some of the filled area. The community originally housed mill workers.

http://www.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/stories/2009/05/11/daily24.html