Above, Hallandale Beach City Hall Municipal Complex. October 3, 2011 photo by South Beach HoosierThough the Rasmussen Reports poll results below are from a national poll, the voter sentiment I detect in my travels around Broward County and South Florida indicate it's even worse around here, esp. as it applies to myopic spending policies that we feel in our collective wallets and purses.
Especially in Hallandale Beach.
That's bad news for Joy Cooper's Rubber Stamp Crew in Hallandale Beach that never paid attention before the recent audit that showed conclusively, with damning proof, how financially irresponsible and negligent they have been for YEARS, completely failing their oversight responsibility to taxpayers and residents, while at the same time, quite literally, giving City Managers Mike Good and Mark A. Antonio carte blanche with respect to spending decisions, even while having no actual plans in place for what they were doing.
Not just nothing available online on the city's website, nothing on paper anywhere in the entire Hallandale Beach City Hall complex for you to read and make sense of.
The MARCUM LLP audit, Draft:
Audit report shows missing records and disarray in Hallandale Beach’s redevelopment agency
http://www.browardbulldog.org/2011/09/audit-report-shows-missing-records-and-disarray-in-hallandale-beach%E2%80%99s-redevelopment-agency/My September 23rd, 2011 response here on the blog to the draft of the audit findings of the city was titled, re Draft copy of Marcum Rachlin's audit of the City of Hallandale Beach; the entrenched anti-Sunshine, anti-taxpayer culture at HB City Hall
Over-and-over for years they have done the same thing, so where are the tangible, positive results they can point to, millions of dollars later?
At this point, as my friend Mike Butler of Change Hallandale fame has been saying for quite awhile, we ought to be able to see some visible signs of where those millions of tax dollars went, right?
So where are they?
As of today, we still have large parts of the largest park in the city, Peter Bluesten Park, that is unsafe for adults and children at night because of the city's sheer neglect and lack of proper maintenance, something those of you who care will soon be able to see on my blog, complete with photos and video, that show it's been like this for well over TWO YEARS.
And HB City Hall has known all about it.
This park is only located two blocks from HB City Hall, and yet it seems like in the mind of City Manager Mark Antonio, it's out of sight, out of mind.
He's wrong -yet again.
It's not.
(And yes, in case you forgot me mentioning it here on the blog in the past, that's the very same HB city park that for well over a year DIDN'T properly deploy the recycling bins the city taxpayers have already paid tens of thousands of dollars for, and for this same time period, the city intentionally placed regular-sized garbage/recycling bins outside of the emergency exit for the main park building located there, a fact that you could see as soon as you walked thru the north gate.
Sure, because that's the kind of common sense you want to see from people working with and supervising small children.
People who will argue with you and say that they know best when they clearly don't.)
Yet this same Cooper Crew -Cooper, Dotty Ross, Anthony A. Sanders and Alexander Lewy-that has repeatedly shown that it CAN'T properly maintain what they already have, wants to spend -borrow from the reserve fund- millions more for a park on U.S.-1 where the current Main Post Office is located?
Most of you know how much I've spoken in the past at the myriad public meetings and on my blog about the needs to dramatically improve the city parks and beach, and to introduce more sports/social programs for the very HB adults that are already paying for them, as well as how I've taken Antonio and Cooper at City Commission meetings to task for all manner of things with respect to the dreadful physical & aesthetic conditions of the public parks & beach they are responsible for.
That said, is this really the time to let these same demonstrably irresponsible people make such an important decision, and continue their edifice complex fixation?
Hallandale Beach Government Pays Millions to U.S. Post Office in Yet Another Land Deal
Hallandale Beach ready to buy more land, this time a post office site for about $9 million
Personally, I'd rather wait until after newly-elected people with genuine dedication to notions of financial accountability are transparency are firmly in place at HB City Hall after the election 51 weeks from Tuesday.
People who understand that sound public policy that is meaningful is about making hard choices sometimes, NOT simply continuing a terrible policy of paying for things from a fund that's rapidly being depleted by folks with no common sense or vision.
I mean who buys properties before you have a sound plan in place for what you're going to do with them?
The same people who overpay for properties and then lets their cronies use them for one dollar.
One dollar?
Let me quote myself from that September 23rd post:
That the City of Hallandale Beach has purchased SO much land is troubling enough, esp. since they have so often overpaid for it. But the fact that they have done so WITHOUT an actual City Commission-approved written strategy or plan that makes sense or shows some awareness of the logical consequences of what they are doing -a plan that taxpayers could read- is very, very troubling indeed, since it makes you wonder why some people's land is bought and others is not, even when the latter's might make more sense to some positive public policy.
To cite but one obvious example of this strange process, consider the land that was purchased by the city for more than it was apparently worth that was owned by present-day Hallandale Beach Commissioner Anthony A. Sanders and his wife.That purchase literally seemed to fly thru the city's bureaucracy, because it was, apparently, so key to some grand plan of the city.
Well, what exactly was THAT plan?Why all the urgency?Why the need to over-pay for the property?And now, three years later, the reality for HB taxpayers is that the city rents the property they claimed at the time was so important, to someone for one dollar a month.One dollar.Why?
Where is the logic and common sense in any of this, and why WON'T/CAN'T the City Manager, the Mayor or the City Commission logically explain this episode three years after the fact?What's the plan?Me, I don't think there is an actual plan.
Hallandale Beach takes a bath on land deals; properties for redevelopment sit idle for years
If you didn't already know, the person commenting above on some of the websites as "AMWakeUpCall" is HB's self-appointed political commissar, Andrew Markoff.
Almost everyone receiving this email knows what he's all about, but on the chance that this SW HB resident appointed to the Charter Review Comm. by Mayor Cooper is unknown to you, please see my June 13, 2010 post titled, quite accurately,
My upcoming post on Hallandale Beach's self-appointed Political Commissar Andrew Markoff may have words that hurt his feelings -if any. Oh, dear!
In the end, I decided not to follow-up on this post since I realized that talking about all the dozens of hours I spent talking to him about this city and area a few years ago, taking him around to see things for himself that he'd never noticed while living here, even going up to Hollywood City Comm. meetings so he could see how they did things, in short, to connect-the-dots, would seem self-serving and petty.
It was enough that I sounded the alarm and let people who are interested in learning from my own mistake know that when it comes to Andrew Markoff, no good deed of theirs goes unpunished.
See also:
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From: Rasmussen Reports Date: Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 10:37 AM Subject: 60% Favor Considering Spending Cuts in Every Government Program
Sunday, November 13, 2011Most Americans continue to believe everything should be on the table when it comes to federal spending cuts.
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