Friday April 9th, 2010 An email that I sent out this afternoon said...
Over the past few days I've been playing around with the videotapes I recorded of the Feb. 25th Broward Planning Council meeting and the March 23rd Broward County Commission meeting on the Diplomat LAC proposal, trying to edit out the dead time before and after each speaker commented, with special attention given to Joe Kessel testifying without declaring his particular status as an agent of HB City Hall.
Unfortunately, I can't share them here as I'd like to because Gmail's limit on attachments
is 25MB and they're 139 MB, so please go to my YouTube page where I have -FINALLY-uploaded the first of many dozens of videos to come on this issue, and the many others
I've written about in the past: meetings of the Broward Ethics Comm., Broward
Legislative Delegation, Johnson Street RFP for Hollywood Beach, the Hollywood
and HB City Commission/CRA meetings, et al.
http://www.youtube.com/user/HallandaleBeachBlog
Trust me, when you see how professional and thorough the recent Hollywood Citizen Budget meeting I attended was, with Dept. Heads, not the City Manager, discussing their dept.in great detail and showing all the pertinent facts and figures, including number of
employees, and answering citizens questions in an honest and forthright fashion, and compare it to the woefully inexact and dismissive solo performances we've seen of HB City Manager Mike Good in the recent HB Quadrant Dog & Pony shows, you'll see a glimpse of how things ought to be done here: Professionally.
Henceforth, Hallandale Beach City Hall will no longer be able to deny the existence of
longstanding problems that you and I and everyone else in the world -but them!- can see clearly: serial apathy, incompetency, rude and unprofessional behavior and self- evident corruption at 400 S. Federal Highway.
The whole world will be watching.
Well, at least the part in our corner of the world that cares or is curious about good government and checks and balances!
The reporters and editors who've heretofore commiserated but never actually done
anything to bring to light publicly the many matters that we've had to deal with for years,
will now find themselves in a most familiar place: on the outside looking in.
Where they already are now.
They will be standing there with all the other South Florida reporters and editors whoNEVER could be bothered to actually show-up and see for themselves how systematically anti-democratic and corrupt the crew at HB City Hall is.
Never bothered to respond to any of the myriad emails or phone calls that you and I have sent over the years about what was going on.
Never seem inclined to find out how an entrenched culture of corruption could develop here where HB city employees would think it's normal or appropriate to try to physically prevent citizens like me from attending a publicly-noticed meeting at City Hall for 15 minutes, until they canceled it right before yours truly finally got there -thanks to the assistance of Comm. London- as happened to me just last month?
Did Assistant City Manager Mark Antonio, he of the $150k-plus salary, and a member
of the Evaluation Committee that was meeting that day try to explain to me when he saw me
there, why the meeting was suddenly canceled once they knew I was trying to get to the meeting?
More to the point, did he even attempt to explain why I, the only citizen trying to attend the meeting, was physically prevented by city employees from getting to the meeting?
No, he did not.
Instead, Antonio just scurried back to his office like a petulant child, actually yelling at
Comm. London, as he hurried to his bunkerof an office, safe from the reasonable questions
of a citizen taxpayer.
That my friends, is the low moral and professional caliber of people currently working at Hallandale Beach City Hall -and he's one of the persons in charge.
Now multiply that unprofessional attitude dozens of times.
It explains an awful lot here, doesn't it?
But it turns out, for the most part, with the exception of a few individual reporters who've
taken the time to try to understand the context and nuance of the upside-down world of HB,
we don't really need print and TV reporters to validate our legitimate concerns, after all.
We knew that all the time, of course, but it needs to be said publicly, so you can get used to it.
When you can independently make the information public and widely-known to those who are actually concerned, who needs the South Florida media gatekeepers?
Not me.
I'm no longer going to jump through their hoops or send up a flare to try to get their attention
about what's going on here.
With video and photos of the problems at your own fingertips, if you feel like it, you can share them with all your well-informed and concerned friends and ask them what they think, and make your concerns or comments public.
Chances are, your friends noticed the problem, too -last week or last month or last year- just like you.
And like you and me, wondered why HB City Hall, once again, consciously chooses to ignore it or not fix it correctly, as if it would somehow fix itself.
(Some of you have already commented to me previously that my getting my YouTube Channel up-and-running is NOT good news for anti-reform and anti-transparency City Commission candidates William "Bill" Julian and Alexander Lewy, since both are deathly afraid of facts and sunshine.
Yes, that's true, as you'll soon see, or for that matter, any candidate in this area who puts their personal ambitions above the interests of the greater community.)
True story: Last Thursday, April 1st, I went over to HB City Hall to look at the Public
Notice board to see if they were trying to sneak something thru like what I mentioned earlier.
Naturally, I looked at the printed calendar of advisory board meetings.
The calendar posted was for March, so I mentioned it to a city employee there and
suggested they put up the one for April.
Late yesterday afternoon, April 8th, I wentover there again.
Guess which month they had posted?
Correct -March 2010.
Like you expected differently?
I'll have the photos and video up later on my blog.
Not surprisingly, given what I'd been hinting for weeks in my emails and what has now become common knowledge, in part thru Thomas Francis' posts in his popular Juice blog at the NewTimes, my first uploaded video is of Joe Kessel, in this case before the Broward Planning Council on February 25th.
In his mind, Kessel's going to Carolina...
See also:
Open Government: idling in the drivewayhttp://blog.
Blog posts from The Juice are in chronological order
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.
Hallandale City Manager Under Fire for Payments to Real Estate Agent
By Thomas Francis, Monday, Apr. 5 2010 @ 11:12AM
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.
Broward
Hallandale Mayor Knew of City's Controversial Contract With Real Estate Agent
By Thomas Francis, Tuesday, Apr. 6 2010 @ 2:33PM
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.
Broward
Realtor Being Paid by Hallandale May Have Had Role in Controversial Loan to Pornographer
By Thomas Francis, Thursday, Apr. 8 2010 @ 4:50PM
No comments:
Post a Comment