Bob Norman's blog post re red-light cameras in Hallandale Beach has drawn some very interesting comments worth checking-out by Csaba Kulin, Michael Mayo and Charlotte Greenbarg re Hallandale Beach Mayor Cooper's credibility. Or, rather the lack of her credibility.
Above, Hallandale Beach City Hall Municipal Complex, where the city's own records show a track record of Mayor Joy Cooper and the City Commission compromising public safety for increased revenue for them to spend. So where's Police Chief Dwayne Fluornoy in all of this? Missing-in-action! Thanks for nothing, Chief! August 5, 2012 photo by South Beach Hoosier. © 2012 Hallandale Beach Blog, All Rights Reserved
Bob Norman's blog post re red-light cameras in Hallandale Beach has drawn some very interesting comments worth checking-out by Csaba Kulin, Michael Mayo and Charlotte Greenbarg re Hallandale Beach Mayor Cooper's credibility. Or, rather the lack of her credibility.
Bob Norman's Blog
Studies: Red light cameras causing more accidents
Published On: Aug 27 2012 10:43:57 AM EDT
Updated On: Aug 27 2012 11:53:07 AM EDT
http://www.local10.com/news/blogs/bobnorman/Studies-Red-light-cameras-causing-more-accidents/-/3223354/16278442/-/3sgf1jz/-/index.html
My friend and fellow Hallandale Beach/Broward civic activist -and HB City Comm. candidate- Csbaba Kulin first told me about Mayor Joy Cooper's clear-cut lies to the Broward County Commission within minutes of her stating them at the time, since he knew -as we all do- that the Broward County Commission sitting in that room was obviously in no position to know whether or not HB actually had those countdown clocks at all or some HB intersections where a red-light camera existed at the time.
They took Mayor Cooper at her word.
Big mistake!!!
Csaba also had spoken with me and written me -and many of you reading this- about the idea of Broward County Traffic & Engineering slightly lengthening the time for the yellow light to allow drivers to completely get out of the those intersection before Comm. John Rodstrom first mentioned it last year at one of the Commission meetings, which, if I'm not mistaken(?), was one of the ones where American Traffic Solutions was trying to get the County to allow them to tap into the County's system, and the Comm.'s response to cities supporting ATS in this effort was, essentially, so what about our cut of the money for the access?
http://weblogs.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/broward/blog/2011/09/browards_rodstrom_ready_to_gra.html
Adding an additional second to the ITE minimum yellow yielded 53% reduction in violations, producing the greatest benefit of all the factors studied
-Texas Transportation Institute
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/02/243.asp
Isn't greater safety what we all want?
Yes, you'd think so, but unfortunately, the record-to-date shows that this has NOT been Mayor Cooper's priority, given her consistent three-year pattern of patronizing lies, mis-truths, innuendo and fallacious reasoning on this subject.
More revenue for the city has always been the carrot for her, and she didn't care what she had to say or do to get it.
And now, given the analytical report on HB red-light cameras that was issued last that I cited on my blog on Saturday, City of Hallandale Beach prints analysis that refutes Mayor Joy Cooper's mendacious efforts on red-light cameras - "In summary, there is no safety benefit to the citizens, and there is no financial benefit to the taxpayer due to automated for-profit law"
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/city-of-hallandale-beach-prints.html
which Bob Norman linked to, we see the logical results of Mayor Cooper's efforts in Hallandale Beach -less safety, more revenue.
We all know that she wants to expand their use if re-elected in November, regardless of what the results to-date have been.
That's not my idea of public safety, and yet another reason why she needs to be defeated 70 days from today.
____________________________________________Hallandale Beach Blog is where I try to inject or superimpose a degree of accountability, transparency and insight onto Florida and local Broward County government and public policy issues, which I feel is sorely lacking in local media now. On this blog, locally, I concentrate my energy, enthusiasm, anger and laser-like attention on the coastal cities of Hallandale Beach and Hollywood.If you lived in this part of South Florida, you'd ALREADY be stuck in stultifying traffic, paying higher-than-necessary taxes and continually musing about the chronic lack of accountability among not only elected govt. officials, but also of city, county and state employees as well. Collectively, with a few rare exceptions, they couldn't be farther from the sort of strong results-oriented, eager work-ethic mentality that local residents deserve and expect.This is particularly true in the town I live in, the City of Hallandale Beach, just north of Aventura and south of Hollywood. There, the "Perfect Storm" of years of apathy, incompetency and cronyism are all too readily apparent.Sadly for its residents, HB is where even easily-solved, quality-of-life problems are left to fester for YEARS on end, because of myopia, lack of common sense and ineffective supervisory management. It's a city with lots of potential because of its terrific location, yet its citizens have become numb to its outrages and screw-ups after years of the worst kind of mismanagement and lack of foresight. On a daily basis, they wake up and see the same old problems that have never being adequately resolved by the city in a logical and responsible fashion, merely kicked -once again- further down the road. I used to ask myself, not always rhetorically, "Where are all the enterprising young reporters who want to show that through their own hard work and enterprise, what REAL investigative reporting can produce?" Hearing no response, I decided to start a blog that could do some of these things, taking the p.o.v. of a reasonable but skeptical person seeing the situation for the first time, and wanting questions answered in a honest and logical way that citizens have the right to expect.Hallandale Beach Blog intends to be a catalyst for positive change.If there's one constant gripe in South Florida, regardless of your age, race, nationality or political persuasion, it's about the fundamental lack of PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY here among Florida's state, regional and local govt./agency officials. Hallandale Beach Blog aims to be a small step towards regaining some of that needed accountability, whether it's thru simple public scrutiny, or requires a degree of follow-up investigation and public exposure of incompetency, cronyism or simple negligence -South Florida's usual governing style."And David put his hand in the bag and took out a stone and slung it. And it struck the Philistine on the head and he fell to the ground. Amen."- Preacher Purl encouraging the underdog Hickory High basketball team before the state title game against heavily-favored South Bend Central in 1986's Hoosiers http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091217/
Audio of pregame speech:
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_____________________________________The South Florida I Grew Up In
Excerpted from Joan Didion's Miami, 1987, Simon & Schuster: In the continuing opera still called, even by Cubans who have now lived the largest part of their lives in this country, el exilo, the exile, meetings at private homes in Miami Beach are seen to have consequences. The actions of individuals are seen to affect events directly. Revolutions and counter-revolutions are framed in the private sector, and the state security apparatus exists exclusively to be enlisted by one or another private player. That this particular political style, indigenous to the Caribbean and to Central America, has now been naturalized in the United States is one reason why, on the flat coastal swamps of South Florida, where the palmettos once blew over the detritus of a dozen failed booms and the hotels were boarded up six months a year, there has evolved since the early New Year's morning in 1959 when Fulgencio Batista flew for the last time out of Havana a settlement of considerable interest, not exactly an American city as American cities have until recently been understood but a tropical capital: long on rumor, short on memory, overbuilt on the chimera of runaway money and referring not to New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Atlanta but to Caracas and Mexico, to Havana and to Bogota and to Paris and Madrid. Of American cities Miami has since 1959 connected only to Washington, which is the peculiarity of both places, and increasingly the warp...
"The general wildness, the eternal labyrinths of waters and marshes, interlocked and apparently neverending; the whole surrounded by interminable swamps... Here I am then in the Floridas, thought I," John James Audobon wrote to the editor of The Monthly American Journal of Geology and Natural Science during the course of an 1831 foray in the territory then still called the Floridas. The place came first, and to touch down there is to begin to understand why at least six administrations now have found South Florida so fecund a colony. I never passed through security for a flight to Miami without experiencing a certain weightlessness, the heightened wariness of having left the developed world for a more fluid atmosphere, one in which the native distrust of extreme possibilities that tended to ground the temperate United States in an obeisance to democratic institutions seemed rooted, if at all, only shallowly. At the gate for such flights the preferred language was already Spanish. Delays were explained by weather in Panama. The very names of the scheduled destinations suggested a world in which many evangelical inclinations had historically been accommodated, many yearnings toward empire indulged...
In this mood Miami seemed not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility could and would be accommodated...
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"Why do they need that in the Broward County charter?"
_____________________________________________"Laws and Constitutions go for nothing where the general sentiment is corrupt."-New York Times, September 22, 1851"Why do they need that in the Broward County charter?"-
Hallandale Beach Mayor Joy Cooper at April 2, 2008 HB City Commission meeting, in discussing possible inclusion of Broward County Charter Review Commission's proposal for Ethics Commission to deal with Broward County Commission, on November 2008 ballot.Six YEARS after the county's voters had overwhelmingly passed an amendment to the County charter requiring its adoption, the Broward County Commission had yet to live up to its legal responsibility. That's why!________________________________________
Corruption Isn't Unique to South Florida, It's the Level of the Stupidity That Is
Corruption Isn't Unique to South Florida, It's the Level of the Stupidity That Is
"[Chicago Mayor] William Hale Thompson was defeated Tuesday after a campaign which he alone made disgraceful. The election was an ejection, a dirty job, but Chicago has washed itself and put on clean clothes. Thompson recognized the [Chicago] Tribune as his chief enemy. The Tribune was glad to earn that opinion. It certainly tried to do so. It has taken the fight to him on every occasion during the long and depraved course of his administration. It is unpleasant business to eject a skunk, but someone has to do it. For Chicago, Thompson has meant filth, corruption, obscenity, idiocy and bankruptcy. He has given the city an international reputation for moronic buffoonery, barbaric crime, triumphant hoodlumism, unchecked graft and a dejected citizenship. He nearly ruined the property and completely destroyed the pride of the city. He made Chicago a byword for the collapse of American civilization. In his attempt to continue this he excelled himself as a liar and defamer of character. He’s out. He is not only out, but dishonored. He is deserted by his friends. He is permanently marked by the evidences of his character and conduct. His health is impaired by his ways of life and he leaves office and goes from the city the most discredited man who ever held place in it."
-Excerpts from April 1931 Chicago Tribune editorial following Republican "Big Bill" Thompson's loss to his Democratic rival Anton Cermak. A friend of organized crime during the Al Capone era, Thompson was the last Republican elected mayor of Chicago. But less than two years later, Mayor Cermak was shot while shaking hands with President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt at Miami's Bayfront Park. He died from gunshot wounds to his lungs three weeks later.
See http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/3686.html
Hallandale Beach in The Miami Herald over 25 years ago
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Hallandale Beach in The Miami Herald over 25 years ago "For years people living in and out of its condo-walled sector east of U.S. 1 have wondered what to do about the city of Hallandale. In the 19th Century the condo giants would have served as ideal fortresses. From top floors of the towers, enemy ships could be readily spotted and blown out of the Atlantic. Oceanfront dwellers could have been protected from the west by the Hallandale Beach Boulevard drawbridge and moat called the Intracoastal Waterway. But this is the 20th Century..."-Miami Herald Broward Columnist Bill Braucher's first paragraph from July 24, 1983.To which Hallandale Beach Blog can only say, Bulls-eye!
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