Nov. 6th is Next Chapter of HB Mayor Joy Cooper vs. Aristides Pelecanos story

Below is a copy of an email that I sent on Monday to Bob Norman, columnist of the Broward Palm Beach Post New Times and the widely-read Daily Pulp blog.
See http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/ and http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/


I hadn't planned on posting it here, butsince his email address is just as odd as I'd been told it was by other local reporters, who say that their email to him frequently gets bounced back and forth, I decided this approach was better than anything else.

"Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
bobnorman@floridapulp.com "
_________________________
Monday Oct. 27th, 2008

Dear Mr. Norman:

I've kept this email in cold storage waiting to send it to you until I actually had the answer to my original questions of the Oct. 8th email before sending you the copy of the email below, since you were the first and only person in South Florida -to my knowledge- to chronicle the appalling situation last year with Hallandale Beach resident Aristides Pelecanos and the animus that Mayor Joy Cooper clearly has developed for him.

There's news on that front, which is that last Sunday, the city, thru Director of Development Services Richard Cannone, published a notice in the Herald advertising the November 6th public meeting at 6 p.m. of the city's Unsafe Structure Board at the City Commission Chambers, where Mr. Pelecanos is one of three parties that are appearing that night.


I originally sent the Oct. 8th email below to a few dozen people in the Hallandale Beach and Broward County area, along with a few up in Tallahassee, all of whom are desirous of seeing some positive reform and changes take place in this city, and have it brought firmly into the 21st Century, which is not the case now.
I chose to send it (to them) on October 8th, one year to the day your story originally came out.

I've sent it now to you, notwithstanding your criticism of my blog in your column of Sept. 25 http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/2008/09/mayor_joy_cooper_blows_up.php
because I felt it was quite unlikely that any other recipient of an email from Mayor Cooper regarding Mr. Pelecanos would think to share it with you.
Your story last year painted such an unfavorable portrait of Cooper in action, merely by relating the true facts of the case and letting readers judge for them self.


That's a common situation in this city, where the mayor is afraid NOT of crazy allegations, mis-statements of facts or even nasty innuendo, but rather of someone simply telling the public the truth, of supplying them demonstrable facts and trusting them to be able to make sense of it on their own, with perhaps a nudge or two.

That's how bad things have gotten here in Hallandale Beach in the year 2008.

On October 15th, I witnessed this in person again at the HB City Commission meeting, where Cooper and City Manager Mike Good completely mis-characterized what happened earlier in the day up in Hollywood at their City Commission meeting, where the second reading was held on the Beach One Resort hotel on A1A and Hallandale Beach Blvd., on the border of the two neighboring communities.

This despite the fact that you can see the digital tape of what transpired on Hollywood's website.
http://www.hollywoodfl.org/Media/Archives/ccm101508/ccm101508_Indexed.pdf

(Not that the Herald covered the story, failing to have reporters at either City Commission meetings, so they were completely in the dark about what happened The Herald hasn't had a reporter attend an HB City Commission meeting since June.)

In case of Mr. Pelecanos, Cooper could've simply shown some common sense and do what the system was set up to do, but once again, as she and Comm. Dotty Ross did months ago with the tumult abd controversy surrounding the HB Police/Fire Pension Board, where, rather than listen to the reasonable concerns of HB residents and officers from both the HB Police and the HB Fire/Rescue, who spoke out against her efforts with both conviction and anger -and who urged her not to let her own bias come into play- she did what she always wanted.
As usual.

She was the driving force behind the decision to hire outside legal counsel to tell her and her cronies on the Commission exactly what they wanted to hear, costing city taxpayers an amount that's been estimated over $10,000 in completely un-necessary legal expenses.
For personal pique and spite so it would seem, because the predictable result came quicker than she expected: the State of Florida told her NO!


A high-and-tight fastball thrown right under her chin to brush her off the plate.

All that un-necessary melodrama, personal invective and expense simply because Mayor Cooper allowed her personal bias and desire to trump common sense, and simply let someone other than a Commissioner to serve.


As if Cooper and Ross's absence from that Police/Fire Pension Board, which almost always votes unanimously, would truly be missed!
So much time, money and energy, plus all the turmoil, for what?

For personal reasons having nothing to do with the proper running of the group.

Sadly, since I returned to South Florida, that's been par for the course for her, since it often seems as if Mayor Cooper is channeling Humphrey Bogart's role as Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, with Cooper and Ross's spot on the Pension Board serving much the same role as those missing strawberries from the ship's galley, which so consumed Queeg.

See http://www.tcm.com/video/videoPlayer/?cid=16993&titleId=25162 and
http://www.tcm.com/video/videoPlayer/?cid=9898&titleId=25162 and it's almost comical to compare the excuses that Captain Queeg uses to explain everything away with those of Mayor Cooper and City Manager Good and his staff.

The problems and screw-ups are never their responsibility, but someone else's.

Cooper's over-size ego and desire to have her finger in every aspect of governance of this small town has resulted in the current reign of ruin, where longstanding, self-evident problems are never properly dealt with, even something as simple as, well, getting the lights that shine on the City Hall sign fixed.

It's now four-and-a half years and counting.
Yes, LONGER than the U.S. involvement in World War II.
How do you like that for an fact-based anecdote, Mr. Norman?


I snapped this daytime photo of the sign above on Sept. 17th, the latest of several I've snapped over the past two years to clearly "illuminate" the problem.

Things are now pitch black PLUS.

For at least the past two weeks, every single public parking lot light next to the HB City Hall and the HB Police Dept. HQ has been out, as well as those next to the HB Cultural Center, where Early Voting has been taking place, and will 'til Sunday afternoon.
I've snapped many photos of it and video as well, which appear on my blog.

So. conservatively speaking, how many times in over four-and-a-half years do you think the Mayor, the City Manager and all of the individual city employees saw that City Hall sign inoperable?
A conservative guess would be thousands of times, right?

Of course, the city sign on U.S.-1 north of the Aventura line still hasn't been fixed during the same amount of time.

Closer to home, or HB City Hall itself, the safety light closest to City Hall''s east-side public parking and their own security camera has been out since late January or so, even BEFORE the city's security camera was ever installed -just a few feet away.

Now, logically you'd think that would matter to the city, esp. the Hallandale Beach Police Dept. next door, and they'd want the most lighting possible in the public parking lot or near their security camera showing that public lot -NOPE!
The HB Police Dept. just continues to ignore the problem even as their own side of the building, to the south, has FOUR count-em FOUR security cameras within about thirty feet of one another.

Yes, the security cameras that HB taxpayers paid for which have NO warning or informed consent signs anywhere near them at City Hall and the HB Cultural Center behind it, as is common in most government buildings in the country in the year 2008.
Nope, zero signs!

Above, a photo from October 2nd showing to the right, the public parking lot light that
hasn't worked for at least eight months, and to the left, the security camera attached to the
underside of the overhang.

And did I mention the fact that some members of the HB City Commission had to be told of Tallahassee's decision by local news reporters calling them for comment, days after the decision was made AND the city already knew the result, because Mayor Cooper, City Attorney David Jove and City Manager Mike Good weren't especially keen to say they'd lost.
Bullies and sore losers, what a powerful combination!

Since you don't seem to know this, Mr. Norman, when Tallahassee said no to Mayor Cooper, the first place anyone could hear the news and read the official correspondence itself was not the Miami Herald or the South Florida Sun-Sentinel or even local TV talking heads, but rather my humble little imperfect blog, Hallandale Beach Blog. on April 3rd:
Tallahassee Rules Against Mayor Cooper and Comm. Ross
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/tallahassee-rules-against-mayor-cooper.html

While that's clearly a very sad reflection on a whole host of issues re journalism and passive local news coverage in South Florida in the year 2008, it doesn't change the fact that I was the first person to make the news public.

It doesn't mean that I'm always right, of course, but it does tend to show that contrary to your recent blog comments, my blog is generally comprised of a little bit more information than just 'personal opinions' as you described it.

By the way, per your post on William Ayers, on 9/11, I got off the D.C. Metro at the Metro Station just past 8:30 a.m., went up the elevator and put my Walkman on to re-join the Howard Stern Show, which I'd been listening to on my daily morning walk from my home to the Ballston Metro station.

Once in D.C., I took the elevator that comes up next to the Olsson's Bookstore and walked the few blocks to my consulting job at a law office on Pennsylvania Ave. It was across the street from DOJ and the FBI HQ, and the last thing I'd read on the ride in from my place in Arlington was the William Ayers piece in the NYT.

If United #93 had used The Mall as its flight path into the U.S. Capitol building, as many have surmised, I'd have been able to see the approach from my floor, high above the street, and if it had gone into the White House, I'd have heard it from four blocks away.
As it was, from our large porch, we could see the smoke far past the Old Post Office across the street, and over at The Pentagon.

If the national media had made a reasonably serious effort to interview Ayers last year and get the whole story in mind-numbing detail, this whole issue would be old news, but when he said no thanks, they said, "Okay, we give up."
There were no Barbara Walters or Diane Sawyer full-court presses to get
Ayers and pin him down.

And so, instead, here we are.

________________________________
Wednesday October 8th, 2008

3:00 p.m.

Dear Michael:

A couple of hours before last night's tepid and poorly-conducted HB CandidateForum, while I was writing on my blog about the sort of questions I hoped wouldbe asked of the candidates to elicit some insight into their thinking -as opposedto the silly ones that were actually asked!- I received this completely randomand un-expected email from Mayor Cooper, which I suspect I was not supposedto receive.

(Or maybe I was? She's so dis-organized it's hard to tell at times.)

As opposed to the mayor's crazy out-of-the-blue, post-midnight email screed to us a few weeks back, the one where she criticized us and took us to task,for, among other things, simply wanting to get together with others in the community who want to change the longstanding dysfunctional culture of cronyism and secrecy here in Hallandale Beach, as if she had some sort of royal veto power over citizens like you and I and the First Amendment.

(Per my previous comments to you, I'll finally be posting her email to us on my Hallandale Beach Blog site soon, and I'll dissect it with some vigor.
I also plan to run more photographic proof from around the city of her 'reign of ruin' that simply can't be refuted.)

If you look closely, you'll see that it is the same AOL email address that Mayor Cooper uses for her revisionist tracts/Commission accomplishments(!) that the South Florida Sun Times foolishly runs as if they were true, in lieu of, well, simply sending someone to cover HB's twice-a-month Commission meetings and reporting on it like a real newspaper.

Call me old-fashioned, but she really shouldn't use personal, non-official email to discuss pending city action, esp. one where she has evinced a very strong personal bias, since it leaves her and the city's taxpayers open to all sorts of legal consequences.

And just to drive home the point of how dis-organized Mayor Cooper is, the email references Mr. Aristides Pelecanos, whose name the mayor mis-spells as "Peliconas."

Wow, for a guy whom she personally has it in for, you'd think she'd know how to spell his name by now.

After Bob Norman of the Broward Palm Beach New Times recently cited my blog post on the mayor's absurd over-reaction to Comm. London showing some fortitude, and refusing to back down on his assertions that City Manager Good and his office had once again refused to provide docs in a timely fashion so that he could review them prior to a vote -in this case, the final 2009 HB City Budget- I reminded you and many others in the community of the devastating Norman column last summer on Mayor Cooper's all-out attempt to make Mr. Pelecanos a former resident of HB.

And in case you forgot, Mayor Cooper all but admits that she wants Mr. Pelecanos in foreclosure. Such a delight, our mayor!

--------------------------------------------------------http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/2007-08-23/news/storming-the-castle/#Comments

Broward-Palm Beach New Times

Storming the Castle

Hallandale Beach and a Broward judge are trying to drive a man from his home

By Bob Norman

published: August 23, 2007

In Florida, the old adage about a man's home being his castle isn't just talk. It's the law.It's almost Holy Writ...

-----------------------------------------------

Yesterday on my blog, HB candidate forum tonight; Yet another bad idea
promoted by Mayor Joy Cooper; some odds and ends, or
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/hb-candidate-forum-tonight-yet-another.html

I revisited the whole issue of Comm. London's comments, and show why I knowthey're true: because I was there when he asked for the docs and have photographicprooof that I was there. The individual that the mayor is emailing here wrote the following on The BPBNew Times website following the publication of the Norman story:

"Complete B.S. Mr. Norman never investigated any "so called" facts.
Never contacted the Golden Isles Homeowner's Association and never spoke to Mr. Pelecanos neighbors.

A journalist should investigate the story and all facts before publishing it.
A surprising revelation for a seasoned journalist like Mr.Norman.Comment by alex berkovich from Hallandale Beach on Oct 8th, 2007, 21:44 pm "

Obviously, since you live in that immediate area and are actually on the GIA, as the Secretary, you'd have a better idea than me of what is actually afoot here, as I have never met this Berkovich person before and frankly, don't even know if they're a HE or a SHE, as it were. http://www.drberkovich.com/

Is Alex Berkovich the husband of the dentist?

In any case, since I know that your honesty and insistence on high a degree of basic fairness must be a real thorn in Mayor Cooper's continuing attempt to muscle the GIA the way she tries to roll other myriad groups in the city, I thought I'd send this along and ask you what you think is going on here.

Frankly, I'd be lying If I didn't say that the whole issue with Mr. Pelecanos sounds like a story that was tailor-made for John Stossel of ABC News 20/20, who loves running segments exposing out-of-control govt. officials trying to use their official power for spiteful or personal reasons and vendettas, as most assuredly seems to be the case here with Mayor Cooper and Mr. Pelecanos.

After reading the email, I checked the City of HB website that you and I and everyone else in the city has been complaining about forever, because of its insipid and secretive nature, to see if they now have information on the webpage for the Community Advisory Committee, formerly Code Enforcement board, that you serve on, as referenced below by the City Clerk's office:
http://www.hallandalebeach.org/index.asp?NID=90

Shocker: blank page!

Once again, the perfect metaphor for life in Hallandale Beach under Mayor Joy Cooper and CM Mike Good in the year 2008.

By the way, at last night's candidate event, I honestly thought that Arturo O' Neill and Carlos Simmons did a very good job of outlining their strong desire to see the city make a clean break from the recent sorry past, and change the city's reputation for breeding a corrupt and corrosive culture at City Hall that repels and repulses HB citizens from participating, or feeling like they can have a say in what happens.

They both spoke clearly and specifically about replacing it with a customer-friendly City Hall culture that insists on accountability, transparency and attention-to-detail, even if that costs some long entrenched people their jobs.

That was very encouraging to hear after listening to the usual pablum from the other candidates!

I have continued to make local residents -and reporters I've spoken to!- aware of the great website you recently started full of facts, graphs and videos to bring to light some of the more disturbing aspects of the city's governance under the current Joy & Mike regime. http://www.changehallandale.com/

I think the spot-on comparison you draw between HB and Hollywood and how much money HB spends on salaries in the City Manager's office for a city over three-times smaller than Hollywood is particularly devastating.

As for the the Dotty Ross video you recently added to the site, having been there when Pastor Sanders was selected 3-1 to be an interim Commissioner just minutes after news of the then-upcoming Schiller resignation, with no advance notice to the public, well, it just makes her words and behavior all the more troubling, yet entirely emblematic of her last four years as a puppet of Mayor Cooper.

-----------------------------------------------------
---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: JoyCooper@aol.com

Date: Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 2:36 PM

Subject: Fwd: Code Enforcement Advisory Committee Minutes (Community Advisory)

To: alex@drberkovich.com

FYI. I was reading these and was concerned that Mike is speaking with the NIP as if he is our representative for GIA? I know we are all working hard to make our area better. This needs to be addressed a the next board meeting. Also the Peliconas house on Holiday Drive will be scheduled for Unsafe structures within 3-4 week. There has to be 2 public notices and certified notice. I was also informed by the city attorney that they could appeal the unsafe structure ruling in the courts. We will see.

The system really protects the homeowner at all costs. Joy

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: "Jones, Chinta"

To: "Cooper, Joy" , "Good, Mike" , "Julian, William", "London, Keith", "Rafols, Nydia M", "Ross, Dotty", "Sanders, Anthony"

Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2008 11:45:13 -0400

Subject: RE: Code Enforcement Advisory Committee Minutes (Community Advisory)
CITY OF HALLANDALE BEACH, FLORIDA

MEMORANDUM

DATE: October 6, 2008

TO: D. Mike Good, City Manager

FROM: E. Dent McGough, City Clerk

SUBJECT: Code Enforcement Advisory Committee Minutes For your review, please find attached copies of the minutes for the Code Enforcement Advisory Board (now known as the Community Advisory Committee) Meetings held in May and June 2008.

Please transmit to the City Commission per procedure.

REVIEWED:

_______________________________ __________________

D. Mike Good, City Manager Date ______APPROVED ______DENIED ______HOLD FOR DISCUSSION COMMENTS: __________________________________________________ EDM/cj

Attachment(s):2 Chinta Jones AOA II/City ClerkCity of Hallandale beach 400 South Federal HwyHallandale Beach, FL 33009 Tel. 954.457.1340 Fax.954.457.1342

Email: cjones@hallandalebeachfl.gov

2 attachments —

Download all attachments Code Enforcement Minutes May 2008.pdf118K View as HTML

Download Code Enforcement Jun 08.pdf124K View as HTML Download

re SFRTA Transit Workshop in Miami-Dade on Nov. 14

Above is the information I've previously mentioned about the upcoming SFRTA/Tri-Rail Workshop in Miami-Dade County on Friday November 14th at the Miami-Dade Expressway office located at 3790 N.W. 21st Street, across the street from Tri-Rail’s Miami Airport Tri-Rail Station.

Workshops are scheduled to begin in the Boardroom at 8:30 a.m. and end around 12:30, and parking is available at the Tri-Rail lot across the street.

Information is available online at http://www.tri-rail.com/announcements.htm.

RSVP at (954) 788-7958

At the August 22 meeting of the SFRTA Governing Board, the professional staff was directed to plan transit workshops this fall in each of the three counties, to be followed by a "Regional Transit Summit" in January or February. The Palm Beach workshop has already been held.

The thought is that the workshops and summit will help build public momentum and support for transit in advance of the legislative session in Tallahassee.


I've already made some suggestions to some folks involved about being sure to schedule it at a time when the pols aren't too distracted by other events going on in the state where they hope to cop invites or comps to to attend, like the Daytona 500 on February 15th, the BCS Title game on January 8th, especially if the Gators are involved in the latter, as I still think they may against Texas, or, the Super Bowl in Tampa on February 1st. http://www.tampabaysuperbowl.com/

I expect that Gabriel and the folks at Transit Miami http://www.transitmiami.com/ will have a lot more to say about the workshop in Miami as the date draws near, but I did want to remind you all for the second time here that it is going to be happening within the next three weeks, so mark your calendars.

As I've expressed here more than a few times, I really wish that a TM-like grass roots organization had existed when I was growing-up down here to give the general public a lot more of a voice and a counter-weight to some of the bad decisions that were already being made regarding the Metrorail's future, since the Tri-Rail would make even more sense now if some of the places my friends and I then frequented, had possibilities of being integrated into a larger regional transit network.


When I'd come home from IU during the summer, and wanted to be able to get around sensibly and quickly, and not forever be in traffic jams on S. Dixie Highway, when I was living down near The Falls, I'd have gladly spent a few hours a week at an office somewhere, say near Dadeland or South Miami, working on strategy and outreach to make sure that the future routes in the county would be based on common sense, natural boundaries and social networking, to create more places where South Florida could interact in a relaxed atmosphere.


You know, at a minimum, be able to ride a transit system with a Metro that actually (and originally) connected MIA to the downtown area and the business/legal districts or sports arenas and stadiums, as is common sense in most other communities, but NOT the natural order of things down here.


Now that so many people who live down here have no knowledge of what the county's Metrorail was supposed to be like, or the original promises for expansion, it's easy to think that the area's inherent political apathy and backwardness were the principal reason the stations were placed where they were, rather than purely political, ethnic and labor-based decisions, back before there were single-member districts on the Dade County Commission.


Almost 13 months ago, on September 25th, back in simpler times, before the Herald's Larry Lebowitz opened so many people's eyes here with his week-long series by connecting the dots on past negligence and incompetency in Miami having real world consequences for this area's growth and sprawl, there was a Miami-Dade County Citizens Advisory Committee meeting titled "Orange Line, Phase II, North Corridor Metrorail Extension Preliminary Engineering Phase."

See http://www.miamidade.gov/transit/corridor/n_corridor/n_meeting_schedule.asp and http://www.bizjournals.com/southflorida/stories/2007/09/10/daily39.html


Map of Orange Line is at: http://www.loopconsulting.com/projects/mdt/images/Map.jpg


That, of course, was the very line that was supposed to be finished in 2012 and, once finished, allow U-M students to get on the Metrorail near campus and go straight to the stadium formerly known as JRS, but which I've taken to calling Chez Huizenga for short.



(It's like the way people like me, i.e. traditionalists who know something about Dolphin owner Joe Robbie's many fights with the City of Miami in general and with Miami City Manager Cesar Odio in particular, who dared Robbie to leave -which I've described in my blog- still call the stadium in North Dade, Joe Robbie Stadium. Intentionally, to draw a distinction between what it originally represented, resolve and relief for Dolphin fans, and what it has become under Wayne Huizenga -a three-ring circus.)


NOT that this helpful bit of info about the Metrorail was EVER mentioned in any of the Herald or Sun-Sentinel articles or editorials before the move from the Orange Bowl was officially announced last year by U-M President Donna Shalala, nor mentioned by the local TV talking heads on the 6 and 11 o'clock news.

Maybe if the Daily Business Review had mentioned it, they'd have said so, since the local TV folks seem to really love stealing their material without attribution, where that seemed to be especially pronounced at WFOR, News4.


Thirteen months from now, I wonder what sort of things we will all know and accept as common knowledge about this area and the pols who are making such short-sighted transit decisions for the community's future growth.
Gist for another series for Larry?

This is, if nothing else, a target-rich environment!

In case you somehow missed it originally, after months of mind-numbing research, Larry gave
readers an exhaustive and cringe-worthy 'inside' look at Miami-Dade Transit issues, in his excellent front page series, one of the best the Herald has had.

With the help of interactive multi-media http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/transit/ he reveals in minute detail the hows and whys of the myriad broken promises made to voters and riders over the years, and connects-the-dots on the corruption, cronyism and political sleight-of-hand that have found such fertile ground here, even while transparency and accountability have not.

Sort of like so many promises and deadlines I've heard in Hallandale Beach since arriving here that have fallen by the wayside.

Orioles woes; Boston Red Sox to get new spring home in Fort Myers -a mini Fenway?

Orioles woes; Red Sox to get new spring home in Fort Myers -a mini Fenway?
The classic cartoon Oriole of my South Florida youth, when "the Oriole Way" meant being the best.

World Series - Boog Powell, Elrod Hendricks, Brooks Robinson, Oct. 19, 1970

Baseball 1971 - Power Personified, Baltimore's Boog Powell, April 12, 1971

World Series - Frank Robinson, Oct. 18, 1971

Some Oriole souvenirs thru the years.
____________________________

Slightly expanded version of an email I sent today to the fabulous Sports Junkies, the dominant sports radio program in Washington, D.C., about the Orioles leaving Fort Lauderdale and the Red Sox making even more money my moving their spring training circus to a mini-Fenway Park in Fort Myers. I listened to them from their humble beginnings years ago to their days of dominance.

http://www.junksweb.com/main.shtml

Of course they podcast, how do you suppose I listen to them now?http://www.junkiesradio.com/audio.shtml

____________________________

The past few weeks I've taken notice of all the folks on Florida's West Coast who've been ripping the general idea of the Orioles moving there, here- http://search.news-press.com/sp?aff=1172&keywords=Orioles&skin=100 and at other places, saying that the O's are clearly a second-tier team who'll draw less (enthusiastic) fans who'll spend less money in the area during spring training than their accent-heavy NE cousins from Massachusetts.
As if simply being a loyal Orioles fan was not enough of a burden itself!

But now, it looks like the Red Sox will be getting new digs in Fort Myers, especially one modeled on Fenway Park -ka-ching!!
It's a case of the rich getting richer, a veritable license to print $$$$

Meanwhile, the Orioles...

All of these months later, to my mind, there has yet to be a definitive story in local South Florida media about how Broward County, the City of Ft. Lauderdale and local Congressional representatives were all asleep at the wheel, and completely botched the Ft. Lauderdale Stadium situation with the Orioles, thru excessive procrastination and lack of attention to detail.
La plus ca change...

As someone who has followed this from the beginning, the Broward County Commission has yet to demand public answers from their own employees involved in the deal, much less from Greater Ft. Lauderdale CVB head Nicki Grossman, a former Broward County Commissioner, who was the local person who spearheaded (bulldozed?) the agreement which has collapsed.
The only good part of it collapsing is that tax dollars that will NOT be going to help subsidize Peter Angelos, pere et fils & Company's future profits/inheritance.

And if you read the details below, you'll see that the Red Sox reportedly will pay a half-million dollars a year in rent at the new facility, while based on past published reports locally, the O's have been paying a paltry $120,000 a year.

As you guys will recall me mentioning in past emails over the years while up in Arlington County and then down here, I'm a lifetime Oriole fan who grew-up in South Florida going to at least 6-8 O's spring training games every year at Miami Stadium in the early-mid '70's as a kid with my friends and family during the team's glory days.

I listened to their ballgames on WGBS AM-710 (pre-Radio Mambi) while Chuck Thompson provided the play-by-play accounts of those great players and teams, whose roster I knew backwards and forwards.

I'd even catch a bus after school from the 163rd Street Shopping Center to go out to the then-Biscayne College to watch the O's minor leagers that John Steadman might've mention in a newspaper column. Then I went to about 20-25 games a year at Camden Yards when I lived in the D.C. area for 15 years.

Since moving back to South Florida, I've watched their games on MASN via DirecTV when I can, loved their spring training programming on weekends, even while the Marlins were, typically, so clueless in their marketing that not ONE single Marlin spring training game was televised into South Florida, while I could catch a couple of games of other teams every March weekend on the various regional Fox Sports Network channels.
Thus, if I were to see the Marlins at all, it'd be on the Cardinal's TV network.

So, all that said, I've long lamented the fact that once the Yankees, Braves and Expos fled the South Florida area, the Orioles were at a decided competitive dis-advantage because of being so far away from other teams' spring training bases and stadiums, and NOT having their minor leaguers actually on-site, they spend more time traveling around the state on buses than any other MLB team in FL during spring training.
Though its clearly lack of talent not sluggishness that accounts for the O's woes once the season actually starts!

Though I've personally liked the proximity of seeing them play every spring since I moved back to the area in late 2003, I was against the 2006 Orioles deal IF it meant destroying the City of Fort Lauderdale's Lockhart Stadium, to my mind, the single best amateur sports facility down here, where I grew-up going to Ft. Lauderdale Strikers NASL games when those were always fun and exciting, esp. against the Tampa Bay Rowdies, which were legendary fun among my circle of friends.

The record is pretty clear the city, county and Congressman Ron Klein didn't exactly do their proper due diligence and keep their attention properly focused on the FAA's legitimate concerns about the true valuation of the land, so it wasn't a sweetheart deal that short-changed taxpayers.

It seems to me based on what I already do know that there's still quite a lot of information that has never seen the light of day on this matter, which gets to -shocker!- how generally poor the local news coverage on this subject has been here, other than Sarah Talalay's work at the Sun-Sentinel http://blogs.trb.com/sports/custom/business/blog/ local news coverage being the central point of my letter (and subsequent blog post) yesterday to the Herald's ombudsman.
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/decreasing-value-of-miami-herald.html
And Talalay can't do everyone else's job PLUS her own, you know?

I still have all the docs, drawing and renderings of the proposed Orioles facility in FTL that the Orioles gave Broward County, stored-up on my computer.
At some point after the World Series and Election Day is over, I'll finally post them all on my blogs for everyone to see, and comment on some of the other factors at play here that I believe have led to this coming spring training down here being a real disaster.

While up at the stadium this past spring, where I'd have the proposed stadium drawings and specs handy, I spoke to lots of Oriole fans who made the trip south -some of whom were regular listeners of yours!- who said almost without exception, that they would NOT come down here again, even if the Orioles did play at FTL in March to finish out their contract, which is what they're currently planning on doing.
And that was seven months ago...

Part of me actually wishes the city and county would send the Orioles a letter saying don't bother coming down, there's a mysterious structural defect at the stadium that threatens public safety that can't possibly be fixed in time, so why don't they just plan on headin' out to the Cactus League in Arizona somewhere and play at some junior college facility while Vero Beach fixes up Dodgertown to their oh-so exacting specs.
I'd really, really love that.

Trust me, like all the other many botched things in South Florida involving local government, there are plenty of (ir)responsible parties at fault here, many of whom have thus far escaped their deserved proper scrutiny.

_____________________________

http://www.news-press.com/article/20081028/SPORTS/810280398/1075

October 28, 2008
Lee County commissioners approve Red Sox agreementAgreement calls for 30-year deal, Fenway Park replica

By Glenn Miller
• View the Lee County-Red Sox draft agreement
______________________________

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20081017/ARTICLE/810170352/2050/SPORTS?Title=Orioles_option_inspires_ire
Orioles option inspires ire
By Roger Drouin
October 17, 2008

SARASOTA - Balking at the $70 million price of building a new spring training stadium for the Boston Red Sox, some city and county commissioners say the Baltimore Orioles are a much cheaper alternative.

____________________________

South Florida Sun-Sentinel

VERO'S BASEBALL TALKS MAY WRAP UP SOON

Ed Bierschenk, Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers

September 21, 2008

Negotiations with the team to replace the Los Angeles Dodgers may be nearing a conclusion - possibly this week.

But officials are still skittish about naming the team, which sources said is the Baltimore Orioles , in fear of upsetting them, so they won't verify they are dealing with the Orioles for the former spring training home of the Dodgers.

The Orioles have held spring training at Fort Lauderdale Stadium for 13 years.

But the team's future in Fort Lauderdale was put in doubt after the Federal Aviation Administration denied the city's request to be exempt from a $1.3 million annual payment for the upkeep of Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport in order to keep hosting spring training at the adjacent stadium.

Vero Beach City Councilman Bill Fish, other City Council members and Indian River County commissioners all signed confidentiality deals that have prevented them from relating details of the negotiations, which involve both the stadium and the adjacent land once occupied by Dodgertown Golf Course.

Indian River County Administrator Joe Baird said he hopes something can be finalized next week, but City Manager Jim Gabbard wasn't willing to go that far.

"Hopefully, we will have some good news in the not-too-distant future. We are working hard to get a deal as quickly as possible," said Gabbard, who declined to comment on a report that the city sent its latest proposal to the team.

The Orioles declined to comment.

City and county officials held a lengthy meeting with team officials in late July.

Earlier that month, Baird said he and the team had gone through three draft agreements outlining plans for Dodgertown.

Sources said the plans for the complex could include a youth baseball academy for the former golf course site.

__________________________

In case anyone is curious, as may be noticeable up at the top in my letter, though I'm a very big sports fan, here and at parent blog South Beach Hoosier I've often lamented the fact that

despite the amount of tax money involved, how often financial numbers offered up by folks like Nicki Grossman of the Greater Ft. Lauderdale CVB as proof of the financial impact on the area of hosting events, like the Super Bowl, BCS Championship or the Orioles staying in Ft. Lauderdale for spring training were/are never put up to anything even resembling basic fact-checking scrutiny, much less, oh, forensic accounting. The local media just reports them as facts.

South Florida sports legend Hank Goldberg often spoke about this subject on his much-missed WQAM show as well, but the numbers proferred by the Orioles in relation to their 2006 deal, and passed off as legit estimates, were especially curious and over-the-top to my way of thinking.

Previous blog posts of mine mentioning the Orioles in some manner include:

Wednesday, February 27, 2008 O's Woes: Your Saturday Stupidity Didn't Go Un-noticed!

Thursday, December 27, 2007 Dolphins' media/PR folks cluelessness with Parcells presser is s.o.p.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007 Washington Post's eternal problem with female sportswriters

Wednesday, May 23, 2007 Nick Saban the Interloper

Saturday, April 7, 2007 Baltimore Sun: Comcast puts in O's as sub for C-SPAN2

Thursday, March 15, 2007 Orange Bowl, Miami CRA funds & Marlins Stadium

Tuesday, February 13, 2007 Déjà vu with the Florida Marlins' Miguel Cabrera

Some of my favorite blogs and links include the following:

Baseball -Ballpark Digest by Kevin Reichard in Minneapolis -Great source for info on what's going on in MLB and the Minors!

Baseball -Ballparks of Baseball -Interesting site for following updates and developments in MLB ballparks past and present

Baseball -Baltimore Orioles -Orioles Hangout Forum

Baseball -Baltimore Orioles blog - "roch around the clock" by Roch Kubatko of Baltimore Sun

Baseball -Baltimore Orioles blog -Oriole Magic! by MVN

Baseball -Baltimore Orioles blog -Roar from 34 -A Baltimore Orioles Blog; "A heaping dose of nostalgia, picked straight from Earl's tomato patch. Chill before serving."

Baseball -Baltimore Orioles homepage of the Baltimore Sun

Baseball -Baltimore Orioles homepage of the Washington Post

Baseball -Baseball Posse -Rabid baseball fans who know no borders!

Baseball -Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports. Formerly of The Sporting News & the Baltimore Sun. Smart, funny and personable, with a treasure trove of knowledge in his brain!

Baseball -Mel Antonen of USA Today

Baseball -Phil Wood of MASN-TV and the Baltimore Examiner -Columns by the closest thing Washington/Baltimore has to a baseball savant. If Phil doesn't know, nobody knows!

Baseball -Tim Kurkjian of ESPN

Baseball- Richard Justice of Houston Chronicle. The national baseball writer pens columns of insight, wit and whimsy!

Decreasing value of Miami Herald endorsements: Herald ignores a city, yet blithely gives its' endorsement

Below is the email that I wrote and sent earlier out this afternoon to Edward Schumacher-Matos, the Miami Herald's once-in-a-while Ombudsman.
I had lots of cc's and bcc's on that, including lots of names of TV and print reporters and elected officials I interact with, both locally and national, who have an interest in accurate, timely and responsible reporting of news in government.

I've had a letter like this in mind for quite some time and when there was nothing printed over the weekend to dissuade me, out it went.
_____________________________________
October 27th, 2008
re Decreasing value of Miami Herald endorsements: Herald ignores a city, yet blithely gives its' endorsement

Dear Mr. Schumacher-Matos:

Having grown-up in South Florida with the Miami Herald from the late 60's thru the late '70's, and being intimately involved with many national, state and local elections in Dade County, including
many hectic 24/7 months spent as the day-to-day State Campaign coordinator under Mike Abrams for Gary Hart's winning 1984 Florida Presidential Primary upset victory, I can still recall a time and place when the endorsement of the Herald was something of tangible and intrinsic value.

Value not only to the endorsed political candidate and their supporters, but also to open-minded voters and other media as well, and not just those in South Florida, but nationally, because that endorsement was NOT one that could be easily dismissed with a wave of a hand as a case of
institutional party bias or cozy business/professional cronyism, as was/is true with many too many newspapers across the country, including, perhaps most famously, The Chicago Tribune, a fact I fully realized but still didn't like when I lived in the Chicago area for a few years.

After I left North Miami Beach in the Fall of 1979 for life at Indiana University in Bloomington, and consistently voted absentee from there 'til 1983, despite my personally knowing many of the Miami-area politicians who were running in Dade County -as well as their families- my Mom in NMB would STILL cut out the Herald's list of endorsements in the Sunday paper and mail it first thing Monday morning so I'd get it.
Just to be sure, she'd call the next night with her own analysis of the various Herald picks, and we'd compare notes just in case I was going to send the absentee ballot back before getting her letter with the Herald's picks.

(I had a mail subscription to the afternoon Miami News while at IU, but the 3-4 day delay was clearly problematic as far as following local news from afar in those pre-Internet days, as you might well recall.)

So, all that said, for me personally, nothing quite illustrates the depths to which the Herald has sunken in more recent times then their strange endorsement last Saturday for the two seats on the Hallandale Beach City Commission, because that's where I happen to live now.

Not because of which candidates the paper's chosen to endorse, per se, based on the seven candidates making a group house-call on the Herald's Pembroke Pines office on Oct. 14th, but rather because the newspaper itself has seemingly made the conscious editorial decision to NOT send a reporter to cover Hallandale Beach's twice-monthly, often contentious City Commission meetings since June.

And that June meeting was covered by the Herald largely because it was a Joint Meeting with the City of Hollywood, which almost always gets a Herald reporter assigned to cover their City Commission and CRA meetings, as well as those involving Bernard Zyscovich and his positive constructive ideas for reshaping Downtown Hollywood.
Since I actually attend them, I'm in a position to say so.

(Well, almost always covers, since the Herald NEVER reported on the City of Hollywood's unanimous 5-0 approval on October 15th -at the second hearing- on the application of FORTUNE International's four-year effort to construct an iconic 41-story Beach One Resort hotel on State Road A1A and Hallandale Beach Blvd., right on the city's border with Hallandale Beach.
In fact, the Herald has yet to run a single photo of the area itself, or even an artist's rendering of the building, designed by world-renowned architect Carlos A. Ott, which could very likely become a Hollywood landmark for decades to come at the entrance to Hollywood on the beach.
Not to worry, though, I have a photo of it on my blog, with a link to all the hotel specs at Hollywood's website.)

And the Herald has maintained this position towards HB even though big news was being made there which has broad and long-term policy and process implications for all the citizens and residents of the city, of which the following are but the more obvious ones that the Herald has been completely AWOL on:

1.) In early August, a new interim commissioner, Anthony A. Sanders, one of the two Herald-endorsed candidates, was initially selected NOT elected by three of the five commissioners less than fifteen minutes after Comm, Fran Schiller's letter of resignation was read by City Manager Mike Good.

This was done despite the fact that the resignation would not become official until WEEKS LATER, with a regularly scheduled Commission meeting still coming up BEFORE that effective date of resignation on Aug. 29th, which would have afforded the city plenty of time for its citizens to be fully engaged in the process, NOT the orchestrated behind-the-scenes effort by the mayor and city manager to hand-pick a member.

I personally like and admire Pastor Sanders and was the very last person to actually speak with him before he and his wife Jessica left the previous City Commission's meeting, and could've supported the idea of his selection IF it had simply taken place according to the city's own established procedures -and in the Sunshine with appropriate public notice.

I would've even been open to the idea of supporting him and voting for him, because it disgusts me that this city which calls itself "Progressive" has had such an antiquated system of representation, which allows power to be concentrated in the hands of one geographic part of the city, east of the FEC railroad tracks, instead of one where there is equal opportunity to participate and be heard on the issues.
Myself, I'd prefer a system involving district seats plus at-large seats.

But sadly the process in Hallandale Beach that night WASN'T in the Sunshine, and in the interim, Comm. Sanders has adopted a tone that clearly suggests he believes he's entitled to the Commissioner position because of his many very commendable efforts in the city in the past, which rubs me and many other civic-minded HB residents who follow such things the wrong way.
And understandably so.

We want independent voices on the City Commission committed to reform, transparency and accountability, NOT puppets that rubber stamp.

Since you and the newspaper clearly don't know this fact, Mr. Schumacher-Matos, it's common knowledge that HB City Manager Mike Good actually wrote Comm. Schiller's resignation letter.
In fact, Schiller said as much that night, not that your readers would know that, since nobody from the paper was there.
(And so much for notions of separation-of-powers in a City Manager form of government, eh!)

That vetting process to fill the vacancy was wholly and substantially different from the process the city had previously insisted upon using to fill a vacancy less than 18 months before, with the resignation of Comm. Joe Gibbons upon his election to the State House in November of 2006.
Why throw out the city's existing procedures with WEEKS to go before Schiller's resignation was effective???
There's a question!

It's a question the Herald has never asked.

The only part about "the fix" that didn't quite work, this being HB and all, was Sanders being unaware that Mayor Joy Cooper would announce her selection of him -oh, I mean the Commission's!- on that particular night, as he was informed of the news via telephone by yet another HB Commission candidate, Alexander Lewy, an aide to Rep. Kendrick Meek, who was himself endorsed this week by the Sun-Sentinel.

I know this because a visibly-shaken Lewy was standing right next to me outside the City Hall chambers that night after the announcement, speaking to Pastor Sanders, while I was describing the whole un-democratic process on my cell phone to Herald editor Rory Clarke.
Lewy told me what he was doing, whom he was speaking to and what was being said to him.
Yes, there's no substitute for first-hand facts!

2.) Another curious issue unexamined by the Herald is the appraisal value of Sanders-owned property that the City of HB has long sought to purchase, with wildly fluctuating estimates.
And this week, you have the sorry spectacle of the city even paying for an ad -below- in a free local community rag that doesn't actively practice journalism -the South Florida Sun-Times, Oct. 23rd issue, page 13A- labeled Setting the Record Straight.

It has appraisal figures that are completely different -and much higher!- than ones cited publicly at the Oct. 15th City Commission meeting by Comm. Keith London.
He alone has sought to put some light on this matter by disclosing the names of the appraisers involved and the specific ID number attached to each estimate, so that city residents would know what's what with those very curious estimates.
The new figures cited in the city-paid ad seem completely unbelievable, given the location of the property and the current real estate market.

Is the city of HB actually bidding against itself for the property of Comm. Sanders and providing him a windfall profit?
Some people think so and the city's handling of the matter ought to raise some antennae among the media about why the process is unfolding the way it is if it's so innocent.

And look at the city's ad, a great deal of which is written like a political endorsement of him.
With taxpayer dollars!


If they'd had more time, the city might've even said that Anthony Sanders was born in a log cabin!

As bad as things are today in the newspaper world, in many if not most American cities, even mediocre newspapers recognize that story as one that at least warrants some independent investigation and reporting, to say nothing of a photo or two of the property, and a specific description of the city's future use for it, other than the vague abstract ideas of simply assembling contiguous properties for some project that never gets fully discussed publicly.
The Miami Herald has not written word one about this, with 8 days to go before Election Day.

3.) Another un-examined issue in the pages of the Herald is Hallandale Beach Mayor Joy Cooper's intemperate and embarrassing reaction to the Hollywood City Commission's unanimous approval of the Beach One Resort project, and the Hollywood Commission's unwillingness to ignore their own Commission procedures and create a bad precedent by allowing the City of HB to make a lengthy Power Point presentation that other interested citizens and parties could not legally make, even people who live nearby.

Cooper did this just a short time later at the HB City Commission meeting by threatening to begin (illegally) charging Florida citizens a fee to access the public beach at HB's North Beach, and publicly stated her desire to tie the hotel's developer up in knots thru extended litigation.
Did I mention that it was illegal to charge an access fee to a public beach?

4.) And did I mention that in his final remarks at the Hollywood meeting on the 15th, Beach One Resort attorney Joesph L. Herndon publicly stated that the City of HB was completely rejected in their request for $1.5 million dollars from the developer in exchange for, well, basically, just walking away and forgetting their problems?
Yeah, that's neighborly!
Nothing quite says 'Hello neighbor" like "Stick 'em up!"

Most reasonable people might think the above might be considered news, Mr. Schumacher-Matos

More recently, the Herald even ran a preposterous PR note masquerading as news on the City of HB being nominated for an award for excellence from the Florida League of Cities, being one of five nominees.
The story NEVER mentioned the fact that the city, or rather, four of the five HB Commissioners, nominated themself, which is, if nothing else, very convenient, don't you think? http://www.flcities.com/muni_awards.asp

They also used that same same sage wisdom to self-nominate in two other categories.
One was for Comm. Dotty Ross, while she's running for re-election, a fact she happily mentions in her campaign mailers, just as they clearly planned in advance.
What better way to try to rehabilitate someone with as ineffective and mediocre a record as Ross's than to nominate her for an award for "Excellence?"
It's fiendishly ingenious!

In case you forgot, last year Dotty Ross's record included violating Florida's Sunshine Laws by joining with two other Hallandale Beach Commissioners in secret over lunch to vote themselves a 300% salary increase, with no advance notice to the public about the item.
This year, that record has included voting for an ordinance which precludes the general HB public from serving on the Police-Fire Pension Board, and voting against something that's so common sense it's taken for granted in other South Florida cities in the year 2008 -placing the names of people serving on city advisory boards on the city's website with more information about the committee itself.

In an era of exciting new technology that allows for more direct connectivity between citizens and their government representatives than was ever possible, Dotty Ross is firmly anchored to the distant past, as she was against even allowing the City Manager's staff to study the idea of having the city-controlled cable-access channel offering programming other than the HB City Commission meetings and the once a month HB Planning & Zoning meeting, even though this would clearly allow greater direct citizen involvement and participation in public policy.

So instead, 99% of the time, the channel only shows bumpers of city information, over and over and over. Not exactly Must-See TV.

The City Commission also nominated City Manager Mike Good for an award, someone who has largely escaped serious scrutiny in the Herald and other South Florida media that would give reasonable people and media in other cities cause for concern: lack of positive results.
But guess who'll pay the expenses for that bogus field trip to and from Orlando for 4 of the 5 commissioners?
Yes, HB's already-beleaguered taxpayers, that's who.

The idea of HB nominating itself for "Excellence" is personally galling to me precisely because I have been going to all those meetings the Herald has consciously chosen to skip out on.
I have paid attention, taken copious notes and asked questions of others in the chambers and around the city, plus done some independent investigation about some matters that has caused the mayor, among others, to get quite angry.

Galling, because of the self-evidently poor way the city has been run for years, that, among many other things I could cite for you here today on Oct. 27th, is, that last night was at least the 15th straight night in a row that the PUBLIC parking lot adjacent to HB City Hall and the HB Police Dept. HQ has been pitch black at night.
And the west side of the HB Cultural Center, where Early Voting has been taking place and will continue 'till Sunday.

FIFTEEN NIGHTS IN A ROW!
That's a rather novel take on public safety don't you think?

All those hundreds and hundreds of police officers in police cars who've cruised in and out of that public area over the past weeks have been channeling Sgt. Schultz from Hogan's Heroes -they "see nothing!"
And that total includes the public parking lot lights that are next to the numerous HB Police Dept.-controlled security cameras. The ones without Warning/informed consent signs.
They still "see nothing!"

So what exactly was the point of taxpayers paying for so many security cameras if Cooper and Good's City Hall can't properly maintain the lighting right next to them?

Sure Mayor Cooper and the City Commission should've noticed it when they walked out of their meeting on Oct. 15th, since their reserved parking spaces in the public parking lot are right near the Police Dept. HQ, and that parking lot was also pitch black that night, too.
(That was likely the fourth night in a row they were out then.)

But to see the problem, Mr. Schumacher-Matos, they'd have to want to see it and then do something about it, right?
They don't.

It could hardly be more obvious to anyone who's paying attention that from the perspective of Messers Cooper and Good, nothing must be allowed to rock the status quo at HB City Hall, because so much of it is built on lies, self-deception, self-promotion and mis-statements of facts to the public, and one small move could bring down the whole mountain.

AVALANCHE!

If you had curious and enterprising reporters here, you'd already know that.

As it happens, the same unsafe pitch black conditions hold true at the intersection across the street from HB City Hall on S.E. 3rd Street at U.S.-1/South Federal Highway, the U.S.-1 entrance to Gulfstream Park Racing & Casino, the city's largest single private employer.
(Actually, that also includes the immediate block north and south, as well as the internally lit green street signs, the latter of which have been out for well over 3 1/2 years.)

That whole stretch of U.S.-1 is like one giant -yes- BLACK HOLE, thru which government
accountability and common sense have no effect whatsoever.
How myopic do they have to be to not see what's right in front of them?

Honestly, do you really think that kind of sheer incompetency would be tolerated, much less allowed to continue for weeks and months on end, IF it happened in front of the cash cow that is the Seminole Hard Rock? No.
Or even the less successful Bank Atlantic Center? I don't.

Nope, someone whose fingerprints are as connected to so many bad ideas, poor results, missed dealines and obfuscation as City Manager Mike Good would've long ago been held accountable, and told that if there were not immediate positive changes, especially in matters involving public safety, he'd be fired -for cause.
But not here.

Above, daytime photo from May 2008
The lights on the city's own City Hall sign haven't worked consistently in over FOUR-and-a-half years.
To give you some perspective on that, that's longer than the U.S. involvement in World War II.
Think about that!

Don't worry, Mr. Schumacher-Matos, despite the Herald having been too busy to cover even some of these matters, I've personally taken photographs and videos of the whole sorry and dangerous episode around HB City Hall to document for other area residents and visitors to take note of,

which you can access by simply going to my blog and looking at posts from the past several weeks.

The simple fact that the Herald would think to print an endorsement BEFORE the newspaper has EVER run a single story on the candidates in the race and the issues of interest to voters, while NOT having set foot in the city's Commission meetings since June, speaks volumes, and calls to mind all sorts of hoary cliches like 'cart before the horse' and so on.
But sadly, to me, it's all static, nonsense and feedback.

Call me old-fashioned, but I was under the general impression that the recent pact that the Herald, the Sun-Sentinel and The Palm Beach Post signed was done to facilitate MORE local news coverage, NOT LESS, but apparently I misunderstood the meaning of it all, since, indeed, the Herald's own actions for the past few months in my corner of South Florida belie any recognizable interest in furthering either public good or even basic aspects of journalism, like who, what, why, when, and where.
Or, the less well-known 6th W of basic reporting -"Why not?"

Maybe you should just consider raiding the news rooms of the ids at Indiana University in Bloomington and The Daily Northwestern at NU in Evanston, two perennially excellent incubators of curious news reporters that I've been familiar with over the years.
Then hire their smartest soon-to-graduate students and let 'em loose on Miami-Dade and Broward

Counties and see what happens when some eager and enthusiastic new blood is on the job, because despite a few very good apples in your bunch now, whose morale is quite low, the current status quo at the Herald is positively pathetic from a reader and news consumer's point of view.

Since no one else will tell you this, over the past year, the Herald has failed to have a reporter present at Hallandale Beach City Commission meetings for at least three of the four largest

proposed (and subsequently approved) development projects in the city, all on either U.S.-1 or Hallandale Beach Blvd., two of the largest thoroughfares in all of southern Broward County.

If a tree falls on a grid-locked road but the Herald never reports it, does it really make a sound?

Or, to paraphrase Robert Kennedy, some South Florida bloggers report on news that happens around them and ask "Why?" (Or, more likely here, "Still?")
The Miami Herald ignores things large and small taking place in their own backyard and says "Why Bother?"

Of course, that could finally change tonight if the Herald simply awoke from its long slumber and

decided to get re-engaged, and actually sent someone to cover tonight's HB Candidate's Debate

at the HB Cultural Center at 7 PM.
And afterwards, simply walked around and recorded what's self-evident and in "plain sight."
I'd like to think that were still possible, but given the Herald's recent track record, I won't hold my breath.

Mr. Schumacher-Matos, that's how it looks from my corner of South Florida today.

Obama's Black & White Cookies in Broward Lack Sufficient Salsa

Was going thru the latest campaign dispatches from our friends at the Central Florida Political Pulse blog of the Orlando Sentinel, and came across the following story on Obama's recent visit to the Deli Den on Sterling Road in next door Hollywood, Breaking news: Obama's off the bus again, posted by Jim Stratton on Oct 21, 2008 4:22:59 PM http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_politics/2008/10/breaking-news-o.html which compelled me to write a response on their website concerning both Black & White Cookies, ethnic voting trends and bad journalism as malpracticed in South Florida in the year 2008, topics which have been on my mind since at least the August primary.
Below is a slightly longer version of that post.
__________________________
Haven't been up to the Deli Den on Stirling Road in two years, but for my money, nobody- but-nobody ever made Black & White cookies as full of sugar-filled delight like the Wolfie's Deli Bakery connected to the Rascal House at NE 163rd Street & NE 14th Avenue in North Miami Beach, across the street from the old 163rd Street Shopping Center. http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/1998-08-13/restaurants/worth-the-wait/

I used to buy those cookies at least twice a week for myself and my friends while walking to my 7 A.M. class at NMB, when I knew we needed an extra bit of energy, especially after late-running Monday Night Football games, back before the VCR changed sleeping patterns of high school students. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Miami_Beach_Senior_High_School

Their kitchen's early morning cooking was like an olafactory alarm bell set for 6 A.M, that enveloped the whole neighborhood with the sweet smell of delicious goodies that were now fresh and available. Not unlike the way the Kentucky Fried Chicken on NE 15th Avenue did in the afternoon on the way home, making it impossible to walk home without thinking of chicken.

Though I lived four blocks south of there on NE 159th Street, on windy days that smell would come wafting down the street and hit me like a hammer the moment I stepped out of the house, as I made my way to JFK Junior High or North Miami Beach Senior High School, and I know it had the same effect on other neighborhood kids.


Though I and the other kids who lined-up inside Wolfie's to place our order would always say we'd wait 'till we got to school to start munching them, I'd usually give in to tempation and start munching while I was walking thru the empty 163rd Street Shopping Center on my way to school, somewhere just past the front of the Burdine's I worked at, along the side of the two-story J.C. Penney's and then down the steps of the back of Penney's and thru the massive parking lot/bus Dade bus depot on the NW corner of the shopping center, across the street from the two schools I was at from 1973-'79.

I think I could still walk that route with my eyes closed if it were there, so many thousands of times times did I walk that route to school, sporting events, plays and concerts.



Even as the national MSM, Miami Herald, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Miami-based local TV continue their chronic mis-adventures in political mis-representation and LCD reporting, they NEVER ask pointed questions of well-known Broward political leaders like Dem honcho and lobbyist Mitch Caesar, on why Broward Jewish Dems in their condo strongholds CONSISTENTLY refuse to vote and support well-qualified Hispanic-surnamed candidates, as if it's not completely predictable that this'll result in bad social and political consequences for everyone here in Broward in the future.

I've heard Caesar say that Hispanics were supposed to a "growth target" for Broward Dems, but you sure don't make yourself more attractive when you just wink at this troubling voting trend, as if nobody else around notices it.
We do.


Maybe it's yet another manifestation of how truly sorry the South Florida media is down here in the year 2008, that the reporters, editors and news directors are much more afraid of losing access to him and his pithy comments, than they are to subjecting him to the sort of tough questioning they'd give anyone else, especially a businessman.


Meanwhile, the Central Florida Political Pulse continues "keeping it real" by taking names and calling 'em as they see 'em.



Frankly, I get more honest insight from their daily CFPP blog posts on the myriad ups and downs all over the state, than anything the Herald, Sun-Sentinel or local TV mis-reports, since they continue to treat Central Florida and the rest of the state with the worst kind of know-it-all attitude, witness their positively dreadful reporting on the Second Amendment, guns & Walt Disney World story, or their lack of reporting on the many political problems associated with creating a smart, useful and well-managed Central Florida commuter train, along with the CSX Corp. and Trial Lawyers angle tossed in for good measure.


(To refresh yourself on that issue, see my July 3rd post, Where's the Disney story in the Miami Herald?
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/wheres-disney-story-in-miami-herald.html and the Orlando Sentinel story that got to the heart of the matter, Walt Disney World fires back on guns at work by Scott Powers and Jason Garcia
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/orl-disneyguns0308jul03,0,197883.story

The Herald's first story was an AP dispatch on July 3rd, followed by a superficial six-sentence AP follow-up on July 9th about WDW firing an employee. It wasn't until July 11th, eight days after the story broke, that an actual Herald reporter -Marc Caputo- wrote anything about the story. Disney's gun stance draws fire - Walt Disney World said its employees are exempt from a law that lets workers keep guns in their cars.
So that's how the state's largest newspaper covers the largest private employer in the state!)


For all of South Florida's often valid complaints about the parochial, shallow and and simplistic way the national media misreports the positive and negative realities of social and political life in South Florida to the rest of the nation and the world, their two largest newspapers do their own dwindling number of readers no favors by treating the rest of the state as a neverending source of "oddities" to be mocked, forever painting it with the same broad, stereotype-heavy brush full of condescendsion that their own columnists decry when the focus is on us.



Thank goodness for the Central Florida Political Pulse!http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_politics/

Cleavage Grows Larger b/w City of Hallandale Beach and Hollywood After Beach One Resort Approved

My comments follow the article.
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www.sun-sentinel.com/community/news/hallandale/sfl-flbbeach1020sboct20,0,1304132.story
South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com
Plan for 41-story hotel divides Hollywood, Hallandale Beach officials
By Ihosvani Rodriguez
October 20, 2008


Hollywood
The neighbors are at it again.

Relations between Hollywood officials and their southern counterparts in Hallandale Beach are once again strained, this time by a proposed 41-story beach hotel immediately north of the cities' common line.

This feud might even end up in court.

In a rare unanimous vote, Hollywood officials on Wednesday passed a zoning change that allows developers to move forward with Beach One Resort at the northeast corner of South Ocean Drive and Hallandale Beach Boulevard.

The vote happened to the chagrin of, and after pleas from, Mayor Joy Cooper and others from Hallandale Beach in the audience.
Cooper joined her city manager in complaining that the hotel would be too tall and would bring more congestion, especially in front of an adjacent fire station.

But Hollywood commissioners, usually known for their bickering, appeared giddy at the prospect of adding a world-class hotel to an area already chockablock with luxurious condos and tourist resorts.

The 477-room hotel is expected to rake $1.2 million a year into the city's coffers.

Shortly after the Hollywood vote, Hallandale Beach officials hurriedly voted to file a lawsuit against their neighbors by Nov. 13.

"We have to be cordial, but we also have to champion our cities," Cooper said Friday.

Only months ago, the commissions met jointly to discuss issues affecting both cities. The sides complimented each other and promised to work together.

But on Wednesday, Hollywood officials killed an attempt by Hallandale Beach City Manager Michael Good to give a presentation of his city's concerns. During Wednesday's meeting, Commissioner Fran Russo said Hallandale Beach has ignored Hollywood's concerns about traffic related to development plans at Gulfstream Park and nearby casinos.

"What did Hallandale Beach give us?" she asked. "Nothing."

Commissioner Richard Blattner said he once tried getting the cities to share public safety facilities and services, but that he was "given the coldest shoulder I've ever received."

Mayor Peter Bober tried to ease tensions.

"There are tough times ahead and the economy is going south and crime is going north," Bober said. "There are a number of issues we have to work on together, whether we like it or not, and it's important we be civil to each other."

Reader comments at: http://www.topix.net/forum/source/south-florida-sun-sentinel/T6QE94US7CE5UAOH4
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This article only reaffirms my long-held belief about Ihosvani Rodriguez, and I stand by my generally negative opinion of him and his incredible lack of curiosity.

He may well be the least curious reporter I've seen in thirty years, based solely on what he's written about events that he and I have both attended.

While you can't mention everything, of course, his stories seem to barely reach the minimum threshold, and of course, there's always the Sun-Sentinel website where he could add more context and nuance. He doesn't.


For instance, you want some facts not mentioned in his version of events above?

How about the fact that according to Joesph L. Herndon, the attorney of record for developer FORTUNE International, among the three items that the developer refused to negotiate was simply forking over $1.5 million dollars to the City of Hallandale Beach for them to simply fold up their tent -and complaints- and walk away. http://www.fortuneinternationalrealty.com/Fortune/Default.aspx

You may better recognize that particular tactic as attempted extortion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extortion

Honestly, after four years of working towards an agreement with the City of Hollywood, and producing a truly amazing design by Carlos Ott, the developer has enough problems without playing the role of an ATM machine or personal piggy bank for a city government like HB, which
can't properly run, manage their own affairs, maintain or plan their own facilities without embarrassing -thou predictable- results.

[My upcoming blog post later today or Wednesday about Hallandale Beach DPW Director William M. Brant and his department's continuing dreadful performance since he took over, should prove to be a real eye-opener for many, as it'll completely connect the dots for so many self-evident things I've been railing about here.

The photos I'll post as evidence to buttress my points are really quite compelling, and you'll finally see a hint of what I've been hoarding for months for just such a moment as this.
To drop them on his head like a ton of bricks when he refuses to exercise good judgment and management, and instead does little to change the endemic culture of incompetency and cronyism
that is the norm of HB city employees, to the detriment of the minority who are hard-working.
Sorry, that's just not acceptable anymore and neither is threatening public safety by either his stubborness, incompetency or unwillingness to open his eyes.

Trust me, when you see why that post is being written, you'll realize how laughable it is that the members of the City of Hallandale Beach City Commission nominated itself for an 'award of excellence' from the terribly un-objective Florida League of Cities, along with noms for City Manager Mike Good and Comm. Dotty Ross. http://www.flcities.com/muni_awards.asp

Making public news of the latter's nomination prior to her re-election effort, given how truly painful and embarrassing her last term and voting record has been for all concerned -not least, HB citizens interested in genuine reform and accountability- is nothing but a cold-blooded attempt to pull Ross across the finish line one last time, and cement Mayor Cooper's armada of puppets on the commission who are willing to do her bidding without any argument.]

Returning to the facts and issues that were not mentioned, what can you say other than appalling about the City of Hallandale Beach NOT following or respecting Hollywood's written rules of procedure, especially those relating to the requirements necessary to gain status as an intervenor in the matter, with all the legal rights that accrue to that position, like being able to cross-examine
others, for instance.

Yet when HB City Manager Mike Good showed up at HB City Hall early that evening after arriving
from Hollywood's meeting, he was heard to say to anyone within earshot, in this case, longtime HB political activist and HB Commissioner candidate Julie Hamlin -who related this anecdote to me in person- something along the lines of "Guess who was against US at the Hollywood meeting? The usual people."


Hmm-m..."the usual people."
Oh, I think I know whom he means there, and I suspect many of you may have an idea on that, too.
I'm one of them.


To my mind, Hollywood Vice-Mayor Richard Blattner really delivered the most telling punch in the quickly-getting-testy tête-à-tête when he recounted that "THE coldest shoulder" that he's ever gotten representing Hollywood was from the HB City Hall crew of ten years ago, when they treated his entreaties and questions about a matter that also affected Hollywood like he was an interloper,
or some third-rate party favor that they didn't want to hold onto as a keepsake and merely tossed into the garbage can on their way out.

Blattner was a nobody worthy of concern or respect as far as Hallandale Beach was then concerned. (Shocker! Dotty Ross was on that HB City Commission, too.)
His comments towards the end of the back-and-forth were a real punch in the gut to the whole pathetic charade that HB had tried to perpetrate on an unsuspecting public.


Also never explained by Good in either Hollywood or later in his rants against the City of Hollywood at the HB City Commission meeting, much less, NEVER seemingly asked by Rodriguez of Good below:

Why was HB Fire Chief Daniel Sullivan -a good guy in general but NOT without his faults, esp. excessive procrastination, not accepting constructive criticism or responding quickly to problems- was NEVER notified by Good's office about the myriad meetings that were being held.

Whatever else you may think about the project, it certainly WASN'T Hollywood City Manager Cameron Benson or Beach One Resort project attorney Herndon's job to decide whom the city of HB would have present at whatever meetings were held, right?

(At this point, aren't you the least bit curious to find out who WAS there for HB, and whether they even work for HB any longer? I am.)

As all the cool kids on MTV's The Hills might say: "Dude look in the mirror! It's your fault."
(Okay, so I have a bit of a thing for LC, but is that so bad? I love her funny phone commercial)

Or, as the sublime headline of popular Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Riemer had it Monday:
It's not my fault that I'm to blame for all this
http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/bal-te.reimer20oct20,0,796965.column

Eight years ago on a July 8th, in another incident he was forced to respond to, the Herald reported: "Regardless of what happened, he's responsible for his actions." Good said. "He's going to be held accountable."

Yes, easier said than done.
Especially by you, the person who is being paid close to $250K in salary and benefits to manage a city of only 4.4 miles.

But as many of us have learned the hard way, accepting responsibility for their collective actions and mis-steps has never been the strong suit of either Cooper or Good, as we've seen when measuring their words to their actions, as well as those of city employees who are supposed to work for us, not against us.

The proof of that is all around us everyday as we walk, drive and bike around the city and see the results of all the broken promises, missed deadlines and below-average planning and coordination.
Could those crummy, expensive results staring back at us all be the result of (the so-called) "mis-communication" at HB City Hall?
In a word: no!

Mis-communication?

Mis-communication is when I ask one of you guys to meet me at Starbucks after the Dolphins or Hurricanes game on TV to talk about the campaigns or current events, and you stroll in about 35 minutes late like the character being described in Carly Simon's song, You're So Vain, and you say, "Oh, sorry, I got busy..."

No, Mayor Joy Cooper, City Manager Mike Good and City Attorney David Jove NOT
doing their due diligence in advance of their ill-advised effort, to actually know the Hollywood rules in advance, or not having something on paper about definitely being allowed to speak or give a Power Point presentation, and thinking they were just going to buffalo Mayor Bober and the Hollywood Commission and get special treatment in front of THEIR own citizens, well, that's just sheer incompetency and mismanagement.
That's the HB M.O. in a nutshell, my friends.

The fact that people in the chambers near me were actually giggling when Mayor Cooper, City Manager Good and Development Services Director Richard Cannone spoke with their 'forked tongues,' should give you some idea of how embarrassing a performance it was to watch
from beginning to end.

Tell me, if this presentation of theirs was so powerful and persuasive, why didn't they actually videotape it in advance, just in case, and put it on their own city's backward website for HB residents to see, and then email them or the links to the various interested parties, so they'd know with certainty the city's supposed objections based on facts.
Oh, that's right, HB's antiquated website doesn't allow you to watch anything.

That Rodriguez didn't even mention Mayor Cooper's wild threats to charge a fee to access the public beach -North Beach- near the Beach One Resort property, something she has neither the legal power or authority to do, is, of course, par for the course for him.

But I mentioned it last week because I thought you ought to know the facts.

That sort of desperate attempt by Cooper to lash out and threaten retaliation because of yher own failures is exactly the sort of thing that should've been the sub-header of the story.


Rodriguez might've also cared to enlighten everyone with the news that it was left to unethical, money-hungry HB Commisioner William Julian to reach the nadir of oratory by condescendingly chiding Comm. Keith London for, if you can believe this, having actually attended that second reading in Hollywood -as well as the first reading on October 1st, the second of three meetings, where London was the only HB elected official there- and speaking his mind as a citizen, with Julian saying something about London deserving a star for going, like he was some sort of kindergartner.
Wow! And the hits just keep on comin'!

This from a clown like Julian who never attended any of the three public meetings, just like his fellow puppets, Comm. Dotty Ross and truly disappointing and stoic Comm. Anthony Sanders, both of whom sat on the dais -and their hands- like bumps on a log, saying nothing of any real consequence while all this was going on for hours.

Just when you think the level of representation and discourse here can't get any lower or more embarrassing, you have someone like Julian who didn't attend any of those public meetings four miles away, criticizing someone who does.

That's the sorry but accurate snapshot of Hallandale Beach, Florida two weeks before Election Day 2008.
That's why I'm voting for Arturo O'Neill and Carlos Simmons for Hallandale Beach City Commission on Election Day.

As LBJ's ads said so well and simply in 1964, "The stakes are too high for you to stay at home."
Exactly!
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Hey, so guess which southeast Broward city's public parking lot next to their Police Dept. and City Hall was pitch black again for at least the eighth consecutive night in a row?
(Though probably much longer.)

I'll give you one guess: it's two words.

Beach One Resort's Approval in Hollywood Provokes Wrath and Harsh Words at Hallandale Beach City Commission

Wanting to respond to what I witnessed firsthand on Wednesday afternoon in Hollywood, and then later that evening in Hallandale Beach, at their respective City Commission meetings, where the number-one topic was Hollywood and their unanimous 5-0 approval of the Beach One Resort project on A1A, I sent the following as an email to some folks in Hallandale Beach, Broward County and up in Tallahassee, who are concerned with what's going on here.

(And news media personalities and outlets throughout the state, who have already evinced to me a certain interest in the strange doings hereabouts.)

Especially since both the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Miami Herald utterly failed to connect the dots on this story as they should've.

I guess that's the logical downside to their so-so attendance at Broward city commission meetings and reporting of local news, since there hasn't been a Herald reporter actually present at a HB Commission meeting since at least June, for the joint meeting with Hollywood that Breanne Gilpatrick covered.

The Herald not only failed to write about either city's Wednesday Commission meeting in the paper on Thursday, but botched the job from the start when they covered the first reading in Hollywood on Beach One Resort on October 1st, failing to run a single illustration or rendering of the hotel that everyone, even critics, agrees is beautiful, thanks to the design by architect Carlos Ott.

This is a longer version of the original email, along with with new updated information and URL links.

September 17, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier

Things reached a new low(!), if possible, when crazy threats were uttered by Mayor Joy Cooper about actually charging the public to access the North Beach of Hallandale Beach, which is right next to.... why yes, the City of Hollywood and the Beach One Resort.
Does this bully of a mayor have no scruples left?

Is there nothing she won't say or do or threaten in order to get her way?

But then I recall that twice this summer, despite a unanimous HB Planning & Zoning Board vote approving it, she twice voted against an Assisted Living Facility (ALF) application, even though the applicant had already complied with all existing requirements up to that point in the process.

Mayor Cooper's unconscionable -and frankly, creepy- attitude, especially given the clear and bipartisan public policy intent of the legislature in crafting the law, caused me to unexpectedly get out of my seat in the Chambers and remind the Commission that the vote they cast would speak volumes for the community, one that's full of older residents, and have unintended negative effects for the city if they foolishly followed the mayor's lead.

Fortunately for everyone concerned, especially the future residents of the ALF, Mayor Cooper was the lone vote opposing the applicant in a 4-1 vote.

Lesson learned? She's capable of anything under the sun.

June 25, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier


Above, the iconic Hallandale Beach Water Tower on A1A and Hallandale Beach Blvd., is dwarfed by the three towers of The Related Company's development, The Beach Club.


Pay to use the very public beach the city currently does such an abysmally poor job of keeping clean and maintaining, where they can't even enforce their own code enforcement rules because of the rampant cronyism and corruption thereabouts?



Where even months later, after not being there for years, HB's DPW can't manage to consistently put enough clearly marked BLUE recycling bins on the beach where the public can use them, instead of either hiding them or leaving them in places where the public wouldn't think to look?


The bins are paid for by taxpayers and are there for the public's benefit, to actually be convenient and used, not to be hidden so that DPW employees can do the least amount of work, as has been the case for MONTHS.

The public beach where, as I mentioned at budget meetings months ago, the city uses garbage receptacles without lids at the windiest place in the city? Yes!



Right, because on-duty lifeguards really need one more thing to do than concentrate on their job -cleaning up debris from strong winds or garbage overflows.



The public beach where the Hallandale Beach Police Dept. currently never patrols on a regular basis, even on busy three-day holiday weekends, leaving the burden largely to beleaguered (contractor) lifeguards? Yes!

September 22, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier

An everyday sight for anyone who goes to North Beach in Hallandale Beach as often as myself
is seeing the staff from The Beachside Cafe nonchalantly tossing a myriad of things on top of,
into and below the plants that are supposed to be protected and left alone, including heavy garbage bags, heavy plastic storage containers and cardboard with all sorts of liquids on them.

And as you can see above, they are constantly putting cleaning supplies full of toxic chemicals
outside on the public sidewalk, and those liquids go directly into the ground.

You know, where the birds above are?

I first told Corrine Yoder of HB Code Enforcement about this behavior in person at HB City Hall
in May of 2007, and referenced the encounter on this blog in my June 14, 2007 post titled,

A Chilly Reception at HB City Hall: "Are you a reporter?
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/rude-reception-at-hb-city-hall-are-you.html

This behavior at this location has been going on for 3-4 years, as long as this bldg. has existed, and people at HB City Hall know about it and do nothing.

Not surprisingly, given the strong connection the owners of The Beachside Cafe have to HB City Hall, I'm not aware of any HB City Commission meeting that has ever taken place where the longtime behavior of this facility has been adequately addressed publicly.

Why not?

Next week I'll be taking a look at the city's lease with The Beachside Cafe, and inquire as to a whole slew of curious if not downright questionable behavior that has taken place there over the recent past, much of it involving public parking.

And, needless to say, I've already got the photos to prove it.

September 6, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier

Above, the beach access for emergency vehicles to the left, usually full of debris, while to the right are the city-owned dumpsters on Surf Road for city lessee The Beachside Cafe, which has been missing code required decorative fencing for YEARS.

And I know with certainty that they toss glass bottles and aluminum cans that could be recycled into the dumpster, because I've seen it -and heard it- many times.

And snapped photos of them doing it, even though there's almost always a DPW recycling bin next to the dumpster.

Just as with the prior photo above, I first told Corrine Yoder about this at City Hall in May of 2007.
You can see the logical results of my having gone thru proper HB City Hall channels for yourself.

Hmm-m..
I forgot, when exactly did the Florida Constitution change and allow cities to charge citizens
of this state, much less, residents of that city, a fee to access the public's own beach?
I must've missed that memo!

October 3, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier
Above, Hollywood's public notice sign on the slit-fence on State Road A1A surrounding the Beach One Resort property, with HB Water Tower and HB Fire/Rescue Station #600 to south.

If only there was some way to see what really happened in Hollywood and not just take
my word for it.

Oh wait, there already is.

You can see the wriiten docs at: http://www.hollywoodfl.org/docdepotcache/00000/814/PO-2008-20.PDF and http://www.hollywoodfl.org/docdepotcache/00000/814/R-2008-327.PDF
and see the video of exactly what transpired in Hollywood on their excellent website at http://www.hollywoodfl.org/Media/Archives/ccm101508/ccm101508_Indexed.pdf and judge for yourself.

It's just THAT version of events is NOT the one that Mayor Cooper and City Manager Good were particularly interested in sharing Wednesday night with HB residents in person or via cable TV, as they told one fantastical and indignant story after another of the myriad depredations they say were inflicted upon them and their City Hall Crew by their mean-spirited and un-cooperative neighbors to the north, Hollywood.

The only thing missing from their stories was "Once upon a time..." plus the usual assortment of princes and princesses.

Earlier Thursday afternoon, I received an update from Comm. Keith London regarding last night's chaotic HB City Commission meeting, and draw your attention to this item which I've actually been concerned with for awhile, and wrote down when he cited the specific figures from the dais, even as City Manager Good stood directly over his shoulder, and Mayor Cooper publicly belittled his attempts to get to the heart of the matter, which she and the rest of the Commission clearly did NOT want to do:

I inquired as to the status of the three (3) appraisals the City Manager (Mike Good) agreed to provide to the City Commission before purchasing property from Commissioner Sanders at 501 NW 1st Avenue, Hallandle, FL.
The appraisal information is as follows:

LB Slater Appraisal #13057 $147,000

LB Slater Appraisal #13057a $147,000

Butterfield Appraisal #8785 $275,000

Broward County Property Appraiser Value $146,360

I proposed a motion to eliminate out the Butterfield Appraisal.
I did NOT receive a second to my motion. What could be the justification of the City Manager (Mike Good) entertaining the Butterfield Appraisal?

That's a very good question Comm. London asks, one which is certainly worthy of a very good answer, don't you think?

So why can't City Manager Mike Good and his staff adequately answer that question and so many others fully and publicly at HB City Commission meetings?

More troubling to me as a citizen of this city, given the current financial situation the city says it's in, is why none of the other HB City Commissioners seconded this common sense motion by Comm. London, and why are they even considering the possibility of paying a sitting interim HB Commissioner -running for election for the first time- an unwarranted $130,000 of taxpayers funds?

As has usually been the case with this Hallandale Beach City Hall crew since I first returned to South Florida from the Washington D.C. area in late 2003, their continuing pattern of obfuscation, misbehavior and questionable ethical conduct raise more questions than it answers.

Not so coincidentally, these same three HB commissioners who didn't want to second that motion of Comm. London -Ross, Sanders and Julian- are the very same three who couldn't be bothered to make the ten-minute drive up to Hollywood Wednesday for the matter that Cooper and Good apparently considered a veritable red alert. London was there.

As it happens, none of the same three attended ANY of the previous two public hearings in Hollywood that have been held within the past month on the project.
I should know -I went to all three meetings.

If you haven't already seen it yet, a good place to start digging for some answers on what's going on at HB City Hall, especially re financial issues, is http://www.changehallandale.com/

It's a website started recently by a smart and savvy friend of mine who shares our common interest in seeing reform, accountability and transparency in Hallandale Beach government.

Finally.

The sooner the better!

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This afternoon I spoke with the person behind the Change Hallandale website on the telephone about another matter altogether.

After talking for about 15 minutes, he mentioned that following another HB resident's email relating to the above made the rounds Friday night -which I received- wherein this email writer had complained about a problem he'd had with the site's email function, my friend followed-up with the ISP and discovered that even his own messges to his own site weren't going through.

The ISP fixed the email problem, and he responded to the person who complained.

And what do you know, he actually got a new email today at the site.

It was an email from Mayor Joy Cooper where she wrote just one word: COWARD.

As if you didn't already know everything you needed to know about her style of operation, hadn;t seen and heard enough stories about thin-skinned ego, she goes ahead and throws another log on that roaring fire as to how she reacts to even the slightest bit of criticism.

You may use the phrase, "It's a free country."

But for Joy Cooper, it really isn't.

In Hallandale Beach, Joy Cooper believes it's her way or the highway!

I've mentioned it here before but compare the self-evident differences in style and substance and

what actually gets accomplished at Hallandale Beach City Commission meetings and those in Hollywood.

Especially now that Mayor Bober has taken the nastiness out of their deliberations on the dais by substituting basic fairness and reasonableness, even when he is on the losing side of a vote, as happened on the WSG project for the SE corner of Young Circle.

No threats, no recriminations.

Plus, because Mayor Bober attempts to give every commissioner ample opportunity to speak on every agenda item, doesn't cut them off in their questions or questioing of city staff, and, unlike in HB, demands complete answers from staff and not evasions, the tension is gone that has hovered over Hollywood City Hall for years.

That he won't tolerate staff not providing info to Commissioners in a timely fashion for their review goes a long way towards promoting comity and civility.

One other big difference in how things are handled is that he doesn't feel the need to constantly

provide a running commentary, and comment thru ad lib after each commissioner or speaker comments, as happens constantly here with Mayor Cooper, which is one of the reasons the HB City Commission meetings drag out forever and are constantly behind schedule, as I mentioned as recently as my discussion of Wednesday night's HB meeting.

Nearly three hours of their talking and still no Public Participation?

That sort of time management led me to leave the meeting to catch the debate at home.

The hope that Mayor Cooper is open to changing her behavior and tactics is a fundamental misunderstanding of human behavior in general, and her's in particular.

She can't suddenly change her spots -she is what she is.

Hoping, as some in the community do, that she'll see the light and suddenly change is no strategy at all for getting more reform and accountability, and neither is getting people involved or elected whom I personally perceive as parts of the larger problem (puzzle) involved, for the very same reasons as were true of the mayor.

They are the way they are, and show no desire to be open to changes and reform.

Especially an 82-year old woman running for re-election like Dotty Ross, who, even at this late date, still can't point to a single policy issue before the HB Commission the past four years where she successfully challenged the mayor or city manager on principle, by arguing her case so forcefully and persuasively with facts and concrete examples to buttress her points.

It has never happened!!!

Or, on the flip side, someone inexperienced like Alexander Lewy, whom I think is a pretty good guy generally speaking, but perhaps a bit prone to telling audiences exactly what they want to hear, as many inexperienced pols are, especially one who is a liaison to ethnic communities as his current job.

At least based on what I have personally seen, Lewy has never publicly questioned Cooper or Good's continued bad judgment or propensity for secretiveness even once, and the recent parking kerfuffle on Golden Isles hardly qualifies as public policy debate, since nobody thought it was a good idea except people at City Hall.

He might still do so, but from my perspective, it's getting a little late in the game for him to be something other than a young pol angling for the chance to make this Commission position a stepping-stone.

Where does Lewy or Ross or Anthony Sanders stand on the question of Police Chief Magill's egregious conduct and behavior, which was criminal in my mind, and his future as chief?

Here you have a man in Magill who consciously attempted to use his position to frame two innocent people, two Police officers, and continually lied about what he was doing to his boss, costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in settlements and associated costs, and even more to its tattered reputation?

That whole subject has STILL never come up at a HB City Commission meeting with Cooper and Good in charge.

Well, it's pretty easy to guess, isn't it, considering their silence on the matter the past year?

They don't want to make waves, but waves are exactly what need to be made now to wash away the longstanding cronyism, incompetency and sense of entitlement that is rampant at Hallandale Beach City Hall.

If this were a city that is self-evidently well-run like Coral Springs, the luxury of having 'bumps on a log' would be a different scenario, but we aren't, we're talking about Hallandale Beach, and it is in severe trouble.

This city is light years from being in Coral Springs' class of governance, regardless of Cooper and Good's self-serving moves to have the city, Ross and Good nominated for a FL LOC award for excellence, a topic that I will likely deal with in more depth on Sunday.

I simply don't want to replace one group of puppets on a string with another group that over a period of months has shown no real awareness of the severity of the problems this city faces in uncertain economic times, where tough decisions will need to be made, not deferred.

Frankly, I want much more than that right now.

I want to see positive, dynamic changes and reform so this city will stop being a regional punch line and laughingstock that scares prospective businesses and residents away with their weird City Hall machinations and adversarial attitudes towards residents and businesses alike.

The current Joy Cooper/Dotty Ross/William Julian roadmap leads to a dead end, folks, let's not pretend otherwise.

Their continuing poor choices and (ethical) lapses in judgment have gotten us to this current point, and THAT should be enough warning for anyone who is paying serious attention, and who aspires for this city to be much better than it currently is now.

For that reason I'll be voting for Arturo O'Neill and Carlos Simmons on Election Day November 4th for City Commission, and urge you to take your vote seriously and do the same.

(See www.Arturo-Oneill.com for more infromation.)

If you don't, you'll wake up on the morning of November 5th to find the same HB City Hall Crew mentality, just with new faces.

Do you really want more of the same?

Not me.

Lights Out -AGAIN!- at HB City Hall; Anger at City of Hollywood!

Good grief!!!
It was "Lights Out" -AGAIN!- at the Hallandale Beach Municipal Complex Wednesday night.

I'll have more to say about this later on Thursday, as part of a look at the continuing pattern of supervisory neglect at Hallandale Beach City Hall, via an open letter to Hallandale Beach DPW Director William M. Brant, PA, who, to my mind, has a lot to account for these days.

As I've stated here previously, Brant is clearly a very smart man, an opinion I first shared with a
microphone in my hand at a public day-long citywide meeting last spring.
He may well be THE smartest person in all of City Hall, per se, but that will count for very little with me and many other HB residents, especially come Election Day, unless he gets a MUCH better handle soon on his Dept.
Specifically, matters that don't involve water, reverse osmosis, rainwater barrels and the like, because quite frankly, the city is an absolute mess and looks like an eyesore and Brant's DPW is in the middle of it all.
How does he NOT see it?

I'm talking about massive amounts of broken parking lot lights on city properties that linger for months or years without remediation, broken or missing city signage for equal periods of time, city-owned barricades that are left to rust and rot on city streets, sidewalks -and in bushes along main drags- for months and years at a time.
Trust me, Hallandale Beach Blvd. from I-95 to A1A is full of them, as my photos will make clear.

Just compare the different sides of the intersection of Pembroke Road and S. 21st Avenue on the city's border and compare the sides of curbs in Hollywood and the mess in Hallandale Beach, as I did yesterday while waiting at a red light.
All in plain sight.

And perhaps most troubling for him due to the unfortunate metaphors, city street lights in front of and around City Hall that have been out for weeks and which always seem to go out right before elections, causing me and many other people interested in reform to vote against incumbents who can't keep the light's on, the bare minimum to expect in a city.
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I arrived at Wednesday night's Hallandale Beach City Commission meeting around 6:45 p.m., with the meeting already well underway, having been scheduled to start at 5 p.m.

I arrived straight from the important City Commission meeting up at Hollywood City Hall, where I spent the entire afternoon listening and participating in the discussion of the future of the Beach One Resort project designed by Carlos Ott, which I'd vocally supported as the last public participant to speak on the matter.

Once in the HB Chambers, I watched in anger and amazement for about two hours and fifteen minutes as Mayor Joy Cooper and City Manager Mike Good proceeded to describe an afternoon in a parallel universe that was very different from the one we'd all been at earlier.

Their parallel universe was one where, in their words, the city of Hollywood "didn't show [them]
professional courtesy" and allow them to do what they wanted and intended.
My universe had been the one at a packed Hollywood Chambers, the one where Hollywood Mayor Peter Bober bent over backwards to be fair and civil to folks from the City of Hallandale Beach, even giving them slightly more time to speak than they deserved, given that they were so very unconvincing in their arguments, perhaps, because it was so transparently untrue.

Mine was one where, as usual, Comm. Keith London was honest and spoke his mind, this time as a HB citizen who'd done his homework, having attended the first hearing two weeks ago on the first. (I know that because he sat in the same exact row as me on October 1st.)

In fact, London was the ONLY Hallandale Beach commissioner who was motivated enough to make the ten-minute drive up and see for himself what was going on with the important project, something that, for whatever reason, Dotty Ross, William Julian and Anthony Sanders had no interest in or time for.

Have I mentioned here lately that I really, really hate laziness in a public official?
Almost more than lack of ethical scruples.

Have you noticed, that seems to be a recurring theme with those three particular commissioners: a real lack of energy, curiosity or willingness to make the slightest effort to be better informed.

It's no wonder they open wide and swallow whole the answers they get spoon-fed from the City Manager's staff, without ever asking a hard or even slightly probing question that would elecit more information for the public.

In the end, London was neither for or against the project, instead counseling the Hollywood Commission to simply use their best judgment, which is only fair, since it's NOT as if Hallandale Beach's City Hall cared one whit about the ripple effects of The Mardi Gras, The Village of Gulfstream or The Beach Club towers on Hollywood.
Nope, they sure didn't, which made former Hollywood Mayor Mara Giulianti understandably angry at the time.

This time, though, the shoe was on the other foot, which is why Cooper and Good seemed to be almost hysterical at times in spinning tales about what had happened.
(I saw former Mayor Mara enter the Commission Chambers around 4:25 p.m., the first hearing I've personally attended where I saw her since her re-election defeat by Peter Bober.)

It was hard to figure out what made the Hallandale Beach City Hall Crew angrier:

a.) Mayor Bober's basic fairness and unwillingness to break his own city's rules and create a bad precedent, just to make HB happy when they showed up en masse at the last minute.
b.) Bober not allowing the city to become an intervenor at the last minute like they wanted, since they didn't follow the proper Hollywood procedures, usually a couple of days advance warning; Hallandale Beach itself requires three days warning.
c.) Bober not allowing the HB City Hall team to just swoop in and make their points via a lengthy Power Point presentation to be led by Richard Cannone, the HB Development Director, whom I've generally cut slack to in the past -until recently- because he's clearly a smart guy in a sea of dummies and droids at city hall, which has got to be enormously frustrating.
I've been there!

I'll discuss the whole Beach One Resort matter soon in a separate blog post, along with the photos and facts I've previously promised, plus some info you won't find anywhere else.

I got so frustrated by what I heard said early on in HB, and Ross, Julian and Sanders seemingly hypnotized reaction to these fantastical stories of Cooper and Good, that I signed up with the City Clerk to make some comments during "Public Participation."
I should've known better.
When that still hadn't happened by 8:55 p.m., hours after the meeting started, I'd had enough, and left to go home and catch the last presidential debate between McCain and Obama.

And that's when things really got interesting!

I left the Commission Chambers with Arturo O'Neill, one of the two HB City Commission candidates I'm supporting on November 4th, and a fellow North Miami Beach Senior High grad.

Once outside, I promptly walked him around the City Hall Municipal Complex, reiterating the obvious from my recent posts about the lack of public safety and accompanying lack of accountability by either DPW or the HB Police Dept.

It only made more stark to him the city's chronic inability to provide basic public safety competency even around their own headquarters.
He wants to change that culture and hold people accountable, even if others on the commission won't, no matter what happens.

Just as was true on Sunday night and Monday night, every single city public parking lot light in the complex was completely out, on both the U.S.-1/South Federal Highway side and the S.E. 5th Street side.

Which is to say, where anyone attending the Hallandale Beach City Commission meeting we'd been at, anyone needing to get to the Hallandale Beach Police Dept. would park, and walk thru a pitch black parking lot.
Something I'd have definitely mentioned if I'd ever gotten the chance, with Mr. Brant in the Green Room.

Public safety?
No, despite all the rhetoric that was uttered up in Hollywood for public consumption as justification for HB's concern, it's clear thru the preponderance of the evidence that the HB City Hall Crew prefers public safety as a 'talking point,' an idea, NOT a reality.

I'll connect the dots on that topic later Thursday and it won't be pretty for some of the people responsible, since there will be more eyes than usual seeing my post from now on.

October 15, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier.
Arturo O'Neill under the eastside city security camera, right near the city parking lot light that's been out since at least February -before the camera was installed.

You'd think the Hallandale Beach Police Dept. would want the best possible video feed, oui?
But then over a year after they were first approved, City Manager Mike Good still doesn't have an operational policy for the security cameras to show the public or the City Commission to allay their legitimate concerns.


October 15, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier.
A pitch black parking lot is not an inviting prospect at any time, especially after a HB City Commission meeting that was long on hot air and short on, yes -wait for it- ILLUMINATION.

October 15, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier.
"And the flag was still there..."
That black parking lot behind Arturo is the one closest to the Hallandale Beach Police Dept. HQ.

How would you like to have to go there to report something upsetting, and have to worry about your safety in the Police parking lot?
That's the reality!

October 15, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier.
Here, Arturo stands next to the HB Sign that with the exception of a handful of days two weeks ago, has been out for over four-and-a-half years. Really.

Who could make this stuff up?

October 15, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier.
Notice how Arturo's portfolio writing pad blends into the background?
All the photos above were taken with a flash, otherwise, you'd never have seen anything.

Special thanks to Arturo O'Neill for being a good sport and agreeing to be in these photos that I really think speak volumes about how poorly the City of Hallandale Beach is managed and maintained.

Lessons for SoFla? Central Florida's Little Commuter Rail that Could

Tuesday October 14th, 2008 4:00 PM

Just got back from running some errands, checked my email and saw this interesting item in my daily Central Florida Political Pulse email about a subject I was following fairly closely months ago -the proposed commuter rail in Central Florida.


I wrote in this space about some of the issues at play back in the spring, and mentioned some very insightful stories that were being written around the state about the subject, of which Aaron Deslatte's May 20th Special Report in the parent Orlando Sentinel, Cash & Threats: How trial lawyers wielded new power to help block commuter rail, was the most powerful in showing the forces at work to build it or kill it.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/topic/orl-csx2008may20,0,3131646.story


In broad strokes, in my opinion, it's a case of well-meaning transit types and common sense business groups in favor of regionalism vs. smart, articulate and powerfully-placed NIMBYs who are used to getting their way, playing all the angles, hoping to get something of value for their possible acquiescence.
Plus, the human drama that is trial lawyers and lobbyists rattling every one's cages in order to drum up bu$ine$$.

Another point of dispute which makes this so divisive is the very parochial and, in my opinion, ultimately self-defeating effort by Orange County to "Big Foot" everyone else in the area by capping their contribution to the commuter rail effort, but not allowing suburban areas to do the same thing, leaving those particular communities to wonder if they'll get swamped financially in the future, even while most of the system infrastructure is located inside Orange County.


Probably the only way to deal with the suburban concerns is to do everything in stages, so that the core of Orlando doesn't have a viable system years before their neighbors have anything, even though that's usually not a course of action I'd be in favor of.


The parent Orlando Sentinel's archives on this subject are very helpful,
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_politics/commuter_rail/index.html and http://www.orlandosentinel.com/topic/economy-business-finance/csx-corporation-ORCRP004186.topic?pacode=orlnews and are full of facts, graphs and charts that paint a picture of a scene we know all too well down here: What's in it for me?

I should also mention that some -NOT ALL!- of the older reader comments in their archives contain a great deal of savvy insight from people who clearly know what they're talking about.

In that sense, it's much smarter than the reader comments we usually read down here, full of off-topic tangents, personal knocks against other reader comments, and the predictable, "Well, back in New York, we...."



The woman in the center of things, State Sen. Paula Dockery, is someone with real tangible power, yet the Herald and Sun-Sentinel's reporters in Tallahassee rarely mention her in the paper down here, but she has a real Zelig-like knack for always being where the action is.

Back in 1997, Dockery was one of the six State Reps on the losing end of a 7-6 vote in the House Finance & Tax Committee to give Wayne Huizenga $2 million a year in tax rebates for the next 30 years, $60 million in all, to improve the stadium I'll always think of as JRS, making him the first person in the state to get a second bite at that same tasty tax rebate apple, which he first devoured four years earlier, wearing his Marlins colors.
Yep, $120 million given to a billionaire that could've been used for something better for the region or society as a whole


(That's another dubious Ron Book lobbying success story that I didn't hear about at the time it happened while living up in Washington. That's Mr. Ronald L. Book PA to you!
His client list takes up a full two pages of the current list of Legislative lobbyists in Tallahassee. http://www.leg.state.fl.us/data/lobbyist/Reports/Lobbyist_LEG_2008.pdf )


A couple of recent editorials and endorsements in the Orlando Sentinel makes clear that their Editorial Board is making support for commuter rail in Central Florida a predicate for the paper's support in the future, much more forcefully than local South Florida newspapers are.
The Sentinel's editorial on the commuter rail issue from three weeks ago, below, is, in a word, delicious!


Today, they followed-up by making this argument in one of their endorsements for the FL State Legislature: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/orl-ed30208sep30,0,1517562.story


House District 32
Democrat Tony Sasso won a special election in this district earlier this year. Now he's running for a full, two-year term.

Mr. Sasso, a former Cocoa Beach commissioner, works for a union as a ship inspector. He lists better growth management among his priorities. But on one of the best ways to discourage sprawl in Central Florida -- commuter rail -- he is reluctant to make a commitment.

He expresses some of the same misgivings about lawsuits and union participation that opponents in the Legislature cited when they killed the deal.

His Republican opponent, Steve Crisafulli of Merritt Island, is a farmer and businessman with deep roots in his community. He understands the urgency of utilizing Brevard County's skilled workforce after the shuttle retires, and of developing the economic potential of the medical city now sprouting in east Orange County.

Mr. Crisafulli's also a staunch advocate for commuter rail, touting its environmental benefits. He gets the nod over Mr. Sasso in District 32.
______________________________________________________________
www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/orl-ed24108sep24,0,2828287.story
Orlando Sentinel
EDITORIAL
We think: Saboteurs shouldn't determine commuter rail's future
September 24, 2008

When selfish interests try to block what a community wants and is poised to get -- like commuter rail -- they resort to deception and intimidation.


That's what Lakeland state Sen. Paula Dockery did in April, falsely telling those who'd listen that they could intercept more than $300 million earmarked for commuter rail; falsely telling them the trains would run so slowly few would want to ride them; and joining with trial lawyers who threatened to unseat lawmakers supporting commuter rail.


Those tactics are unlikely to work a second time for the senator, when better-informed legislators next consider the issue.


Winter Park Commissioner Beth Dillaha looked this month like a disciple of Ms. Dockery as she tried to derail the project in her city, which is slated to host one of 17 stations along the 61-mile rail line. Fortunately, Winter Park wasn't duped.


Ms. Dillaha opposed commuter rail before joining the commission in January. This time, she argued the necessity of Winter Park renegotiating its agreement with Orange County to host a station.


She said costs were out of control, even though the city doesn't have to pay a dime to operate the trains until 2017. And even though the city may never have to -- should officials find a new revenue stream to pay for rail.


The bulk of Winter Park's commuter-rail station also is getting funded by Washington.


No matter to Ms. Dillaha. She claimed residents also didn't know what they were getting into even though they and the commission had voted to help fund commuter rail and site the station.


Unfortunately for Ms. Dillaha, the law also got in her way. Winter Park's attorney said the city probably can't renegotiate its agreement with Orange County.


Fortunately for Central Floridians, officials representing their interests -- the community's real leaders -- are working to get commuter rail rolling. Station designs should be finished by May.

Housing, retail and commercial space are being negotiated around stations in DeLand and DeBary, near Florida Hospital and Orlando Regional Medical Center, and by Osceola Parkway.


And bus routes connecting the stations to the airport, International Drive and other locations are being planned.


Fortunately for Central Floridians, most officials appreciate how environmentally friendly commuter trains can boost the economy and relieve its traffic headaches -- and they're willing or already working to make them happen. That should help keep any selfish interests from sabotaging them, no matter how many times they might try.


Reader comments on this editorial are at: http://www.topix.net/forum/source/orlando-sentinel/TALLS004U6TDDE60C
______________________________________________________________
Central Florida Political Pulse
The Little Commuter Rail that Could?
Aaron Deslatte on Oct 14, 2008 6:46:03 AM

The train that would carry commuters to and from work in Central Florida has a CEO who makes $176.96 an hour and an almost $300,000 marketing plan.
But it still lacks final approval -- and that can only come from the state Legislature, which said no earlier this year.
Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer hopes to rectify that potentially fatal shortcoming by leading lobbying efforts of lawmakers as they prepare for next year's session.


To read the rest of the post, see http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_politics/2008/10/the-little-comm.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/politics/orl-commuter1408oct14,0,1521323.story
Orlando Sentinel
On Dyer's to-do list: Win over rail resisters
Dan Tracy
Sentinel Staff Writer
October 14, 2008

The train that would carry commuters to and from work in Central Florida has a CEO who makes $176.96 an hour and an almost $300,000 marketing plan.


But it still lacks final approval -- and that can only come from the state Legislature, which said no earlier this year.Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer hopes to rectify that potentially fatal shortcoming by leading lobbying efforts of lawmakers as they prepare for next year's session.


He has even launched his own brand of personal diplomacy. Twice in recent weeks Dyer has sipped cocktails at University of Florida football games with Lakeland Sen. Paula Dockery, who helped derail the train plan last year.


Dyer concedes Dockery has not dropped her opposition to the $1.2 billion project, but said, "there's cordial communication." Dockery was out of state and could not be reached, an aide said.


"This is one of those things where you can't not be successful. So you can't stop," Dyer said.


Another key opponent is Julie Townsend, executive director of the Downtown Lakeland Partnership in Polk County. Like Dockery, Townsend wants to stop commuter rail because of the extra freight trains that will be rerouted into her city.


CSX, which owns the rail lines, estimates four more trains will be headed to Lakeland to avoid conflicts with the planned commuter rail. That would jump the daily traffic from about 16 to 20 trains, including Amtrak runs.


Townsend said Lakeland could handle 20 trains a day, but she is worried even more of them -- possibly an additional 30 or more -- could be headed the city's way because companies looking to avoid high fuel costs may switch from shipping products by trucks to rail.


"We are required to accept this fate and take a hit for the team," Townsend said.


Even with those misgivings, she said Lakeland could support commuter rail if CSX would promise to limit the future number of trains in the city to 20. CSX will not make that deal, said spokesman Gary Sease, because it does not want to stifle possible growth.


But Dyer is hoping to change more minds than those of Dockery and people living in Lakeland.


He has instructed city-hired lobbyists, including the powerful Tallahassee firm Southern Strategies, to persuade the Legislature to sign off on insurance for the train that was denied when the session ended in May. Without insurance, the train cannot operate.


Though Dyer declined to specifically outline any lobbying strategies, there is little doubt he will be targeting trial lawyers.


They are against commuter rail because the state wants to limit awards to people who might be injured or killed if the planned train were involved in an accident. The state already has a similar insurance deal in place with a commuter-rail system it operates in South Florida.


Paul Jess, general counsel for the Florida Justice Association in Tallahassee, said he has had little contact with proponents of commuter rail about what might happen during next year's session.


"I've not heard of any movement . . . [but] there's always opportunities for reasonable people to get together to talk about these issues," Jess said.


Business leaders also are writing letters to commuter-rail supporter Gov. Charlie Crist to encourage him to help win votes in the Legislature, which convenes again in March.


Fortunately for Dyer and commuter rail, they have time to work on their opponents in the state House and Senate. In the meantime, the planning for the system has moved ahead.


The board overseeing commuter rail signed a contract with consulting firm PB Americas to hire Pete Turrell as chief executive officer of what would be a 61-mile system.


Turrell of Tampa, is a former Amtrak executive who also has run rail companies overseas.

PB will be paid $179.09 an hour for his services, and the company is slated for annual raises of about $5 an hour through 2016. His hours likely will start out low and grow if the train is approved.


The commuter board, made up of elected and transportation officials from Central Florida, also has hired myregion.org, an arm of the Central Florida Partnership, a business group spun off from the Orlando Regional Chamber of Commerce.


Myregion.org will be paid nearly $300,000 to commission public surveys and conduct focus-group studies on how to promote the train and come up with a logo and color scheme.


The train would run from DeLand in Volusia County through Orlando to Poinciana in Osceola County. The first leg, including a stop in Orlando, could be complete by 2011.


Officials already have spent more than $41 million on the undertaking. They expect to spend another $52 million this year, largely for property around stations and to design rail cars, signals and stations. Half would come from federal funds, and the other 50 percent would be split evenly between state and local sources.


"This [commuter rail] hits just about every positive thing you can think of," Dyer said.

"Every piece of it is the right thing to do for Florida."


Dan Tracy can be reached at dtracy@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5444.


Reader coments are at: http://www.topix.net/forum/source/orlando-sentinel/TH27F589OSSV65DJ0

Hallandale Beach Fails Public & Public Safety -Again!

March 25, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier
Above, my place of solace, reading and contemplation at North Beach, Hallandale Beach, FL.
Sadly, the city of Hallandale Beach does a terrible job of keeping it clean, performing proper maintenance or even enforcing their own existing laws and rules.

As to the 'Police presence,' well, as most of the lifeguards can attest with barely contained disdain -regular beach visitors like myself being more vocal- the HB Police are indeed a rare presence therebouts, even on the busiest of three-day holiday weekend afternoons.

The actual beach itself in Hallandale Beach really ought to be MUCH BETTER and CLEANER than it currently is, with so many eye-popping self-evident examples of broken, missing or beach elements in dis-repair, but the powers-that-be at HB City Hall can't be bothered to make changes.

They like the beach the way it is, crappy and poorly maintained as that is, which is perhaps a reflection of the fact that they're hardly ever seen over there.
And when they are there, they keep their eyes, ears and mouth shut tight to the myriad problems, one of the largest of which is the rampant cronyism and favoritism taking place there everyday.

Late Sunday afternoon, following the Dolphins 29-28 tough luck loss in Houston to the Texans, I spent a few hours over at North Beach, reading the Herald and the NY Post, writing some clever comments in my notepad and listening to the Dolphins post-game analysis on WQAM radio.

Afterwards, around 7 PM, I got caught in a downpour after leaving Publix, and still needed to grab something over at the "Venezuelan" Target in Aventura, south of Gulfstream Park, before The Amazing Race came on at 8 o'clock.

Now you might recall that I recently brought you the Breaking News that three weeks ago, on the night of Sept. 25th, the Hallandale Beach City Hall sign on the the corner of U.S.-1/ S. Federal Highway & S.E. 5th Street, long a personal bête noire of mine, had finally been properly lit for the first time in over four-and-a-half years.
Not so much a success story as a grudging and unforgettable reminder of how poorly this city is run and maintained.

Sunday night, on my way to the Target, I was dumbfounded to once again see that it was a lesson of one-step forward and two-steps back for the city.

At 7:25 PM I went by and saw that not only was the City Hall sign dark, but that every single City Hall parking lot light was completely out along the east and south side, i.e. S. Federal Hwy and S.E. 5th Street, including the area closest to the Hallandale Beach Police Dept. HQ entrance.
Now that's customer-friendly service, HB-style.

That's a total of roughly 10-12 lights, which includes the city parking lot light closest to the eastern (breezeway) City Hall public entrance, to which is mounted a security camera, a parking lot light that has been out since at least February, long before the city security camera was ever installed.

That, of course is the ultimate embarrassing ironic indignity of the City of Hallandale Beach's logic for you. They install a security camera near a public parking lot light that hadn't worked for months, they have such poor planning and lack of awareness that they never bother to fix it, all the while, you have HB police officers drive by it thousands and thousands of times over the intervening months.

Yet somehow, here at their own building, the HB Police Dept (and DPW) never ever quite notice all the parking lot lights that are out. Hmm-m... sounds more like the Keystone Kops!

Last night, after the Browns-Giants MNF game, I went over to do some recon and see if Sunday night was a sign of things past, or a one-time hiccup.
Once I arrived I should've guessed!

À la recherche du temps perdu" -Remembrance of things past!
It's once again "Back to the Future."

For residents and visitors alike, there are no mere coincidences in the City of Hallandale Beach, there is only the predictability of some future insult, injury, outrage and sign of gross incompetency by their so-called public servants, who consistently perform in a below-average manner.

Question: How many Hallandale Beach city employees does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: All of them -to ignore it!

On the way over there, I walked across the street to the Gulfstream Park side of U.S.-1 and took a photo of what I surveyed -complete darkness.

The double-tiered public street light on that corner has been out for months -much as it was leading up to the City Commission election in March of 2007- and because the street lights across the street on the Gulfstream side have either been removed or don't work, the entire block fronting Hallandale Beach City Hall and the HB Police Dept. HQ is pitch black.

As it happens, last Tuesday night, prior to the candidate forum at the HB Cultural Center, despite having a reserved parking space just feet from the HB Police HQ door, I witnessed Mayor Joy Cooper park her car in the favorite parking space of Comm. William Julian, on the road directly in front of the center, under a city parking lot light and city security camera.

I made a mental note to snap a shot of that scene upon my exit later in the evening, but when given the chance, there were simply too many city parking lot lights not working out there to make it worthwhile. I snapped two photos but both were far too dark to post here.

This includes, by the way, the city lights that are resident on the same sidewalk pole as the city security cameras in front of the building, pointing in both directions, towards the Cultural Center to the west and City Hall to the east.

June 11, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier.
Comm. William Julian's car during an an event at at the HB Cultural Center, for which I wrote the June 12th post, Dude, Where's Julian's Car?
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/dude-wheres-julians-car.html




His reserved parking space is right next to the mayor's on the south side of the City Hall Complex, NOT near the front of the HB Cultural Center, underneath a city security camera and parking light.

I guess it's just not safe enough for either Cooper or Julian, huh?
Imagine how the rest of us in the city feel.

October 13, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier

Between the Hallandale Beach City Hall and its Cultural Center to the west lies this sidewalk pole on which is mounted two of the city's HB Police Dept.-maintained security cameras.

This night, as with so many in the past, with nary a light to shine on the problem.

October 13, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier

Capturing my own ghostly silhouette in the dark alongside northbound U.S.-1, while doing blogger reconnaissance.

October 13, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier

Looking northwest at the Hallandale Beach City Hall and HB Police Dept. HQ from across the street of U.S.-1/South Federal Highway, in front of Gulfstream Park Racing & Casino.

The simple fact that there are no working street lights on the entire block nearest it means that you have now officially entered the black hole of Hallandale Beach. You have just gone back in time!

So where's the mounted U.S. Cavalry to keep you safe when you need them?

October 13, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier.

The American flag in the stiff night winds.

Is this really an American city in the year 2008?

October 13, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier

It's long been a riddle why the city preferred properly maintaining the lights on the empty side of the sign rather than the one that actually faces the road and residents/visitors alike.

Those lights in the background are ones that are next to the building, to light it up at night, many of which have been completely obstructed by plants for what seems like years.

Look at them during the day and you feel like getting a pair of shears yourself -and doing the job properly.

October 13, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier

Without a flash.

October 13, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier

Taken with my flash.

October 13, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier

Lights out for Hallandale Beach!

Sorry Mr. Edison!

Lights just don't work in Hallandale Beach.

October 13, 2008 photo/video by South Beach Hoosier

Hallandale Beach City Hall Complex Parking Lot is Pitch Black at Night

Camera starts on unlit Hallandale Beach City Hall Complex sign and pans right (to west) near what is the City Hall parking lot closest to the Hallandale Beach Police Dept. HQ, then pans further to the north, where the public entrance to City Hall offices and Commission Chambers are located, then the City Employee entrance, and then towards southbound U.S.-1.

re Journalism, Reporters as heroes in film, Blogs about Media Buyouts and Layoffs

1940 film classic His Girl Friday with dream team of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, a film which I've seen, conservatively, about four dozen times.
Info at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032599/
Trailer at: http://www.tcm.com/video/videoPlayer/?cid=102055&titleId=206

So, given that a story that I'm referencing below involves newspaper layoffs, guess I hardly need tell you there's a Medill angle to the story. http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/
I think there's a federal law to that effect now because of a provision inserted secretly into the financial bailout bill last week, requiring a Medill p.o.v. on any media story about newspaper layoffs.

(Local South Florida Medill grads include Evan Benn and Breanne Gilpatrick of the Herald, and Jordana Mishory of the Daily Business Review.)

Sorta like the one that requires all Florida media organizations to quote Susan McManus of USF ad nauseum. Or, in WIOD's case, twice an hour all day -as they did Tuesday.

Did you miss these recent McManus pearls of wisdom:

Undecideds could decide presidential race Florida Today, FL - Oct 5, 2008

"Obviously, they're the swing voters," University of South Florida political science professor Susan McManus said. "You've got two hurdles to jump with them ...

HIGHER SENIORITY: Older voters have clout Anderson Herald Bulletin, IN - Sep 27, 2008

“Despite the media’s focus on the youth vote, the most influential voters in the McCain-Obama

matchup are likely to have some gray hair,” said Susan McManus

So, am I wrong in saying that she has had every single demographic you can think of as the election game-changer?

McManus is the Bob Shrum of Pol. Sci profs turned analysts.
She's no Larry Sabato! !!!

See http://people.virginia.edu/~ljs/ and be sure to check out Larry J. Sabato's Crystal Ball, which features analyses of presidential elections, Senate, House and gubernatorial races: http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/

There's only one prescient political crystal ball in working order these days and Prof. Sabato has it.

Honestly, is everyone at WIOD a dopey Miami college student getting credit for those jokes they call regular newscasts? It sure seems that way. They run the same audio over and over and over...
They're positively unbearable, worse than ever.

Before you scroll down any farther, read this great blast-from-the-past from a TIME magazine cover story and guess when it was written:
"What's interesting about the current explosion of news is that it has not been accompanied by an equivalent increase in the amount of news gathering.
Over the past few years, in fact, cost cutting at the networks and many major newspapers has reduced the number of correspondents digging up stories around the country and the world."

The answer is at the bottom of this post.

Speaking of Medill, http://www.northwestern.edu/features/snapshots/ a place that I came to know and truly appreciate when I was living, learning and loving in Evanston, hard by Lake Michigan http://www.ugadm.northwestern.edu/pan/ and becoming friends with so many of their students, faculty and administrators, here's a site full of great media blogs that you might want to consider bookmarking for future use: http://blognetwork.poynter.org/media/

(To repeat what I wrote Tuesday: I watched the Dolphins' 1985 MNF win over the undefeated Bears wearing my Dolphins cap and the Bears mauling of the Patriots in the Super Bowl at the Norris Student Union at Northwestern with my friends at Medill and Kellogg, the same place I watched the Shuttle Challenger disaster live from the very beginning on ABC-TV.)

It's worse than sad, it's tragic really that none of the South Florida-based foundations has ever thought to have the good sense to fund anything approaching either the necessity, scope or quality of Medill Reports in order to keep the myriad bureaucrats on their toes: http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/govt/.

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/govt/aboutus.aspx

About Us
For the People…around Chicago is a project launched in the spring of 2008 by the Medill News Service to merge in depth reporting with social networking. For years, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism has reported on news and affairs through affiliations between Medill’s graduate journalism program and news organizations throughout the world. We still do that with a flourish through Medill Reports Chicago and Medill Reports Washington.
This project attempts to expand our universe, or more importantly, to create linkages beyond news organizations to groups that have a particular interest in an issue. That enables our stories to continue to be a part of the ongoing conversation about that issue. We cover stories that examine what’s working and what’s not around Chicago. We are well aware that news organizations, including Medill, tend to move on to the next issue, and then another one. Our work gets buried in the flow of continuing events, and those groups and individuals who stay with an issue can feel abandoned.

What we hope to do with this project is to become more connected with you; the network of groups and people who invest in particular issues. Any stories we cover are available to you to redistribute over the web, to republish in your newsletters or other material, to link to from your website, or to embed directly onto your site. Only one proviso; that you credit us with the stories so people know we’re involved. If you are an organization or individual or blog that cares about the issues we cover, let us know so we can link back to you to enhance the network.

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/washington/

It would be great to have Larry Lebowitz of the Herald as a field general and Gabriel at Transit Miami as his trusted aide-de-camp ready to unleash their smart, savvy eager beaver reporters at FDOT like a kamikaze squad, forcing the ever-elusive FDOT Secretary Stephanie Kopelousos to finally make a public appearance in South Florida where she's made to answer questions from actual taxpayers, not the industry/trade types, per her usual MO.

And when I think about what such a squad of eager reporters could've done to the Miami-Dade School Board years ago to ferret out the real facts on the $100K crowd that Rudy Crew sought to inoculate himself with, as well as hammer the sclerotic legion of bad teachers and cranky administrators, it literally my heart skips a beat.

By the way, after having missed it many times on Turner Classic Movies over the past 20 years, I finally caught 1952's The Captive City on TCM.

See http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=17060 and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044476/
It was great to once again see the under-appreciated John Forsythe, always so good in almost everything he was in, and a former baseball broadcaster, to boot, cast here as a small-town newspaper editor trying to battle organized crime getting its tentacles into everything he holds dear about his town, and later testifying at the Kefauver Hearings.
(Always wanted to say 'get their tentacles' in a sentence.)

Afterwards, with some time left on my videotape, as I was leaving for an errand, if you can believe this, per a recent conversation of many months ago with a reporter friend, I was almost able to tape Ace in the Hole for her right afterwards.
That's the great 1951 Kirk Douglas film, him as the world-weary once-promising reporter needing a fresh start, and lucking into a great story in a New Mexico cave-in and positively milking it dry -by hook or by crook. The first time I saw it was part of a double feature with Sweet Smell of Success at an art house, probably in Chicago.

Trailer at: http://www.tcm.com/video/videoPlayer/?cid=154055&titleId=613826 Warning: It's loud at the beginning!

http://www.tcm.com/video/videoPlayer/?cid=186689&titleId=613826

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=613826

When I got back home, the videotape had ended ten minutes before the film was over! Ugh!
I hate when that happens.

It replays on TCM at Tuesday 10/28/2008 10:00 PM , Friday 11/07/2008 2:30 PM , and Tuesday 12/09/2008 9:30 AM
Catch it if at all possible!

I still have it on another videotape somewhere, but that blew my idea of giving her a tape that had something like 3-4 really great newspaper/crime movies on them that she probably never saw in college, where she began her rise as a tough-talking, wise-cracking, crime-fighting/reporter with a nose for news at a school noted for turning out real journalists, not stenographers.

A real-life Hildy Johnson.

Finally, to reprise a story as old as crime and statistics, witness the logical result of fudging crime statistics, Baltimore-style -a murdered former councilman.

Shades of HOMICIDE: Life in The Street!

I found it while looking for results on Girls High School Field Hockey to see how my niece's excellent team, had done.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/baltimore_city/bal-md.ci.gun08oct08,0,206101.story
__________________________

Baltimore City Paper

October 8, 2008
Media Circus
Taking Things Personally Focusing On Personalities--and Their Bodies--in the Sun's New Look
by Martin L. Johnson

On Sept. 1, Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer published a column on Sarah Palin, the mercurial Republican candidate for vice president.

Published at the crescendo of the first wave of Palinmania, the column (tellingly titled "A Woman--But Why This Woman?") was highly critical of the Palin selection, which Reimer suggested was made to kowtow to special-interest groups on the right.

"I thought it was a natural topic for me," Reimer says in a phone interview. "She billed herself as a hockey mom, and I have billed myself as a soccer mom all these years. As the column clearly shows, I was very animated on the topic, personally and professionally."

But Reimer, who has been writing columns for the Sun for 16 years, wasn't ready for what happened next. The day after her column appeared, the Drudge Report, which gets close to 30 million site visits daily, linked to it as an example of media criticism of the Palin pick. Then the deluge started.

To see the rest of this story, which includes lots of info on http://www.tellzell.com/ , go to: http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=16827

--------------------------

Baltimore City Paper

September 2, 2008

Media Circus
Media Bias Blogs Tell the Story Behind Sun Buyouts and Changes

By Martin L. Johnson

The redesigned Baltimore Sun is more than just a pretty face. Even casual readers of the paper can't help but notice that sections have been cut and some of the paper's familiar bylines no longer appear.

But behind the scenes, journalists at the Sun and other papers owned by the Tribune Co. have launched an angry (if only online) revolt against staff layoffs, management decisions, and what they see as a wholesale dismantling of the Chicago-based company's newspapers.

To see the rest of the story, see: http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=16235

To see other great media stories like the above , go to the Media Circus archives at

http://www.citypaper.com/news/browse.asp?ColumnTitle=Media+Circus

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So my earlier question was to guess, more or less, when the following saw the light of day:

"What's interesting about the current explosion of news is that it has not been accompanied by an equivalent increase in the amount of news gathering. Over the past few years, in fact, cost cutting at the networks and many major newspapers has reduced the number of correspondents digging up stories around the country and the world."

The title featured the headline:

The News Wars

Print! Cable! The Internet!

We're being bombarded by information, gossip and commentary as never before. Is more news good news.

It's from TIME magazine of October 21, 1996

HB candidate forum tonight; Yet another bad idea promoted by Mayor Joy Cooper; some odds and ends

Just a reminder that tonight from 7:00-8:30 PM is the first of who knows how many forums and debates for Hallandale Beach candidates eager for your vote.
That gives you plenty of time to get home for the 9 PM debate b/w McCain and Obama.

Tonight's is at the HB Cultural Center, with tonight's event sponsored by the Hallandale Beach Civic Association, titled "Community Forum" to Meet the Candidates for Hallandale Beach City Commissioners."

If I had anything to do with it, this city would be looking at about 4-6 roving forums all over town in the month remaining before Nov. 4th, with plenty of advance promotion, so that HB Citizens could see fliers about it at Publix, Winn-Dixie, Starbucks, et al., DAYS BEFORE the event, so they could then make proper arrangements (re DVR/VCR/TiVo/babysitter) to actually attend themself, instead of relying on their friends and neighbors -and Hallandale Beach Blog- to tell them how it went after the fact, "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly."

I'd also make sure that you had either a NAME moderator or someone who is completely unaffected by whomever wins, and someone who really intends to grill the candidates in ways that they deserve and should be prepared to deal with, i.e. no softballs!
In other words, in ways that seem quite common to us on TV shows, films and on C-SPAN, but which never quite take hold firmly here in Hallandale Beach?

Force the candidates to stretch their minds a bit in front of us to get away from trite phrases and rote responses.
Be asked their opinion about specific past HB Commission votes, and future hypothetical events that will be important to the city's future.

Issues like the role of the CRA and what would you look for in a future HB CRA Director?

As to the Master Plan, what parts of the Master Plan did they like and dislike and what areas of it should be implemented first?

(Personally, I'm in favor of actual neighborhoods full of taxpayers getting the benefits first, NOT the area around HB City Hall, for the benefit of City Hall leaders and employees -and their edifice complex- and their pals and cronies.)

Based on the current facts and economic conditions, are you in favor of Forest City's request for millions of dollars