Above, Ann Murray, our completely unreliable elected representative to the Broward School Board.
Her devotion to her constituents -us- like her time priorities, are completely upside-down and unacceptable.
She works for us, not the other way around, yet she seems to be unaware of this particular working arrangement.
Perhaps she needs to be "educated."
To quote the ever-observant Mark Ambinder of The Atlantic Online, below, in his essay on D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who resigned this week after Mayor Adrian Fenty was defeated in his re-election bid:
"And -- she was accessible. She did not cloister herself, nor did she shy away from town hall meetings. She showed up and made her case. Parents could talk to her, although they might not have liked what she had to say."Well, at least Ben Gamla founder Peter Deutsch publicly admitted -a few times- to the SRO crowd of about 200-250 people at the HB Cultural Center Tuesday night what we in opposition to his proposed site in a single-family HB neighborhood have long suspected but heretofore been unable to prove.
If the City of hallandale Beach didn't require Deutsch to hold a "Community Meeting," he wouldn't hold one or talk to city residents.
Repeat after me - " He just doesn't care what YOU think."
If by YOU, I mean Hallandale Beach Residents.
I do.
Among the elected No-Shows at this meeting: Broward School Board members Ann Murray of District One, School Board Chair and At-Large member Jennifer Gottlieb, HB mayor Joy Cooper, and HB City Commissioners William "Bill" Julian, Anthony A. Sanders and Keith London.
London at least was next door, across the hallway, holding one of his regularly-scheduled monthly Resident Forum meetings with residents and interested guests, and had the event planned for that date long before Deutsch asked for that date, too.
(His next public meeting is Tuesday at 6 p.m. at the HB Cultural Center.)
London's the only HB commissioner who has regularly-scheduled monthly meetings with HB city residents and outsiders like Greenberg Traurig's Debbie Orshefsky have attended in the past, though her appearances were mostly for recon purposes in support of her client, the incompatible Diplomat LAC proposal which was later voted down by the Broward County
Commission.
And as anyone who has ever attended one knows, Mayor Cooper frequently crashes London's meetings too, -or sends her not-too-clever and transparent spies- when she feels like it, the most recent instance being the one held in mid-Sept. that City Manager Mark Antonio was at for about an hour, listening and answering questions about problems in the city
that the mayor foolishly insists don't exist, despite the fact that they are both numerous and self-evident to anyone paying the slightest attention.
That mid-September meeting was the one where Cooper reacted with a audible gasp when London responded cleverly in response to a resident's query about campaign contributions, as he spoke about the upcoming election, for which he is running for re-election -after Antonio left the room.
Cooper's gasp, which you can hear on the videotape I made of the meeting -which, for the record, are done largely so I don't forget something and don't have to write everything down and can just relax like everyone else- came when he mentioned that another HB city commission candidate, Cooper pet Alexander Lewy, who was sitting in the front row, just five feet away, had received contributions from both Cooper's husband and son-in-law.
About $1,500 between the two of them as I recall it now.
I will try to post that video here soon if I can, since the lighting in the small rooms is not always so great for recording purposes.
I am unable to go to the Broward School Board today for their 1 p.m. Ethics Policy Comm. meeting as I had originally planned, but I am going to find out in the next few days from the Broward Dept. of Elections how long we'd have to wait before, hypothetically, initiating a recall of Ann Murray, our dependably undependable No-Show of a School Board member, who acts like the HB part of her district is terra incognita, despite the fact that she lives in next-door Hollywood.
That's completely unacceptable.
I'll soon be filing a public records request at Broward School Board HQ to get Ann Murray's records and work schedule since getting into office, to see if, as everyone agrees, she has NEVER been at a public HB event that wasn't political or a fundraiser.
Like the meeting we made a point of being at on Tuesday night.
Murray not only couldn't bother, but never even responded to reminder emails sent to her last week about it by both Etty Sims and Csaba Kulin, the latter of whom's letter I ran here a few days ago.
Ann Murray just doesn't get it.
In a few months, we may well need to stage an intervention and help make Ann Murray's public invisibility act a permanent one, so that HB residents have a fully-functioning rep on the Broward School Board who is responsive and forthcoming, NOT impudent and thoroughly anti-social.
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I subscribe to Marc Ambinder's daily dispatches from The Atlantic Monthly Online in large part because he seems much more prescient than 99% of the political observers around.
I urge you to consider subscribing, too.
I was actually a subscriber to The Atlantic magazine for most of the 15 years I lived in Arlington County, VA, a little over three miles west of Georgetown, and kept the past issues stored in my garage in carefully labeled faux-wood paneled cardboard Banker Boxes.
Keeping The Atlantic company in the garage archives -with current ones upstairs- were, if I can remember the list: Harper's, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Maxim, The Washington Monthly, Esquire, The New Yorker, National Geographic Traveler, Conde Naste Traveler, Vanity Fair, Variety, Premiere, The Wilson Quarterly and some political, film and marketing trade journals that I received because of either my own personal interests or because some friends were involved with them as writers, editors or management.
Plus, of course, my favorite read, a newspaper, The New York Observer. which I first became familiar with in 1989, when I was up in New York City for my sister's wedding, and I discovered it while taking some personal time away from the family that weekend and walked on The West Side. I was immediately hooked -and still am. http://www.observer.com/
Make of that varied reading mix what you will, since it gives you some sense of my personality and interests, but the best part was that my part of the garage was -generally- like a pretty well-ordered and deep-pocketed law firm's library, with everything in its place.
You know, in case something unfortunate happened to the Newspaper and Current Periodicals Room at Library of Congress, long one of my haunts!
http://www.loc.gov/rr/news/
http://www.loc.gov/index.html
Marc Ambinder is the politics editor of The Atlantic. He has covered Washington for ABC News and the Hotline, and he is chief political consultant to CBS News.
Follow him on Twitter @marcambinderWhat's Next for Michelle Rhee?
Posted: 13 Oct 2010 02:01 PM PDT
Michelle Rhee has a plan.
Hours after she stepped out of the maelstrom that is the D.C. public schools system, her patron, Mayor Adrian Fenty, having been bounced out of office, she launched a Twitter feed and a website, teasing would-be followers to find out what she'll be doing next.
Rhee is a Grade-A edu-lebrity, and she's the perfect bureaucrat for the Reality Show age, when personal brands matter as much as ideas. Or when, at the very least, ideas don't succeed unless they've got good brands behind them.
Rhee is well-liked by the major educational philanthropy organizations, and though I Tweeted last night that she's probably headed to the Obama administration or to another school district, she could just as well become the public face of a major, well-funded campaign to promote her ideas about teachers, merit pay, and reform.
Read the rest of Ambinder's spot-on post at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/10/whats-next-for-michelle-rhee/64517/
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