Looking west from the Atlantic Ocean and the beach towards the Hallandale Beach Water Tower, Fire/Rescue station, North Beach Community Center.October 26, 2010 photo by South Beach Hoosier.
Below is the email that I sent out this morning to my well-informed grapevine after finally deciding to comment on this BrowardPalmBeach NewTimes article of yesterday. It'll be interesting to see if any other reporters FINALLY show-up on Tuesday to grill Mayor Cooper or City Manager Antonio about this longstanding scandal.
In any case, on Monday I plan to invite the State Attorney's Office to attend.
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BrowardPalmBeach NewTimes
Hallandale Beach's North Beach Facility Might Finally Open, After Four Years
By Stefan Kamph, Fri., Jan. 21 2011 @ 6:36AM
Mike Butler is facing an uphill battle. He's the blogger and gadfly of record in Hallandale Beach (the 40,000-citizen heel of the Broward boot), and he's the one who calls out the city for spending through its reserve funds, paying its city manager nearly half a million bucks a year, and leaving the beach in suboptimal conditions.
Read the rest of the post at:
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.
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Here's what I posted above:
To paraphrase a sports maxim, Hallandale Beach City Hall can't stop Change Hallandale and Hallandale Beach Blog, they can only hope to contain them.
And they will FAIL at that.
The biggest problem that the status quo Cooper Crew have is that while my friend Michael and I and many other concerned HB residents are entirely forthright, transparent and public about the sort of city we'd like HB to be, and equally clear about the sort of accountable public policy that we believe ought to prevail here -which, at at a minimum, is a dollar's worth of service/product for a dollar's worth of taxpayer's funds, plus some innovation with common sense instead of the longstanding secrecy and duplicity- history has shown us that the Cooper Crew is deathly afraid to share PUBLIC information in a timely fashion and debate the issues based on facts in public forums -without their completely controlling the forum or the microphone.
Plus, they have shown over-and-over again that they can't ever admit being wrong about something, and are equally unwilling to admit that other people actually have good ideas, too.
Friday afternoon at 4 p.m, about 45 hours AFTER HB City Manager Mark Antonio said at Comm. London's 'Resident Forum' that the (taxpayer-funded faux newspaper) South Florida Sun-Times was City Hall's main avenue for informing residents -despite the fact that nobody actually reads it because it's nothing but PR and propaganda- I swung by the North Beach Community Center with a copy of that laughable rag.
I walked around the area as I have so many countless dozens of times and took notes -and photos and video.
Here's what I found: One smallish banner hanging on the side of the Fire Station facing NOT the passing traffic on State Road A1A, but rather facing south towards The Beach Club and residents leaving that condo complex.
There were ZERO signs on the doors of the Community Center bldg. itself, ZERO sandwich boards advertising it on the beach or on the A1A sidewalks.
There were ZERO of the city's electronic message boards that are ALWAYS seen on U.S.-1 and Hallandale Beach Blvd. two weeks before the city's overly-aggressive PAL has something THEY want to promote.
(Why exactly does PAL have special rules that allow them to do whatever they want? Nobody ever wants to say why they get special privileges in this city.)
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Looking east from State Road A1A/South Ocean Drive & Hallandale Beach Blvd, Hallandale Beach, FL. July 3, 2009 photo by South Beach Hoosier.As for the faux newspaper that Mark Antonio said would have word about Tuesday afternoon's public unveiling, almost 42 months after it was given to the city for FREE on August 3rd, 2007, the event that only two of the concerned residents at London's meeting had even heard about prior to Antonio mentioning it there, well, they had ZERO words about it in the last issue before the event.
Not wanting to be hasty, I gave a copy of it to a friend to read and asked him to carefully double-check and see if he saw a single word about Tuesday's event at the North Beach bldg. NOPE!
There was NOTHING there.
Typical!
That's the anomie-centric HB City Hall Crew in a nutshell: unable to even mange to get a word in edgewise about their little spectacle in the fake newspaper that THEY themselves keep alive thru HB taxpayer-subsidies.
How absurd!
Video of City Manager Antonio's remarks at Comm. London's Wednesday night meeting, along with photos and video from Friday of the North Beach Community Center will be on my blog on Sunday, where I already have dozens of photos of its neglect over the past three-and-a-half years, along with numerous blog posts about its longstanding mismanagement.
http://www.
Many of them ask the basic question that NEVER is answered: Why have mayor Joy Cooper and past and current city managers adamantly refused to hold a city-wide forum where citizen taxpayers of this city could weigh-in on what THEY want that building to be for?
That discussion should've taken place YEARS AGO!
Nobody has a problem with the city to make revenue from renting the place out on weekends, as I've mentioned at numerous budget meetings, but what taxpayers DON'T want is for it to continue to be off-limits to them Monday thru Friday, and used exclusively, as it has been, as a warehouse for the city's office chairs, and a beach-side clubhouse for PAL and other City Hall cronies, as my past photos on the blog have shown.
That public facility doesn't belong to them, it belongs to all of us.
By the way, Hallandale Beach City Hall DID finally 'fix' the large water fountain located in front of the North Beach bldg. and the Fire Station last month.
It only took the city 16 months to get water into the fountain.
Congrats!
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