Good news for Hallandale Beach taxpayers! Rare victory for common sense and financial accountability at City Hall courtesy of Comm. Michele Lazarow
Above, 501 N.W. 1st Avenue, Hallandale Beach, which includes the office of Zamar, Inc. Of course, even without the $50,000 in CRA funds they thought they were going to get Monday night, I suspect they can swing the $10 they pay a year in rent to taxpayers for use of the former Sanders property. May 22, 2012 photo by South Beach Hoosier. © 2012 Hallandale Beach Blog, All Rights Reserved
Good news for Hallandale Beach taxpayers!
There was a rare victory for common sense and financial accountability at City Hall last night, at the CRA Board of Directors meeing, courtesy of Comm. Michele Lazarow, just elected in November.
Lazarow made a motion to table the voting on agenda item 9A and have the HB City Commission vote on it again on January 14th, after the CRA Advisory Board meets one more time at a time and place TBA, which I'll share with you here once it's announced so you can attend.
http://www.hallandalebeachfl.gov/files/2012-12-17-HBCRA2/Exhibit%2013%20to%2015%20-%20HBCRA%20Advisory%20Committee%20Rank%20and%20Recommendations.pdf
Only the four original groups that made the cut will be re-examined for accuracy and compliance with city rules.
Also, at 7:11 p.m., CRA Executive Director Dr. Alvin Jackson, Jr. announced that Zamar, Inc would NOT be eligible for funding this year on account of their failure to qualify as a 501(c)(3),
as I've been writing and discussing for well over a year.
That means that $50,000 is, theoretically, on the table, to be added to the totals previously approved, or placed back into that line item until next year.
The final vote was 5-0!
Afterwards, Comm. Anthony A. Sanders, as has often been the case the past four years on those rare times when he hasn't gotten his way, seemed to grumble and complain on the dais about the actual function and purpose of the CRA right now.
But what he really meant was the fairness of it all, just not in the way that most of the world understands the concept of "fairness."
He preferred the way things were done before when fairness to taxpayers' long term best interest played second-fiddle to his base political interests, he just didn't say this out loud, but not to worrry.
We all knew that was what really got him upset -he didn't get his way.
Sanders lamented (i.e. bitched) about the fact that some people in this city -you may know them as taxpayers and small business owners- took the initiative and were able to do their own research and write persuasive emails to Comm. Lazarow and others in the community to raise reasonable questions about the true facts surrounding some of the assertions on applications of groups who've gotten CRA funds with little real oversight in the past, and who seem to have gotten used to telling less than the whole truth on their applications.
Yes, it turns out that taxpayers don't like being played for fools, not that Sanders would acknowledge this.
Lazarow was able to use common sense and persuasion about being entitled to vote based on real facts and numbers that made sense to prevent a fait accompli, and was able to make the case that more scrutiny needed to attach to the information included in the myriad applications.
In the timing is everything department, her comments came just hours after the news swept the area that earlier Monday the Broward IG has forwarded info to the Broward State's Attorney Office re Dr. Deborah Brown's Zamar Inc. re allegations of misappropriation of Hallandale Beach CRA funds.
Of course, Comm. Sanders phrased it differently, in a sour and petty way, and in the process, threw my friend and civic activist Judy Selz under the bus by name, because earlier in the evening, she reminded the entire room what taxpayers had been promised in the way of transparency, accuracy and standards with respect to CRA grants by former City manager Mark A. Antonio.
Comm. Sanders didn't seem to like the reminder that many members of this community's pro-reform elements, of which I am a part, have NOT FORGOTTEN that this process was supposed to be much more honest than it has been, but the truth is that some of his closest political pals operate on the margin in this community and do NOT tell the truth and operate on the margins of what is acceptable -and we all know it
That even includes many members of the South Florida press corps.
It's certainly no secret.
Trust me, those remarks of his won't be soon forgotten, even though it's par for the course for him, a person who was deathly afraid of showing his face before voters in most parts of this community, as he proved during this past election, when he refused to participate in any meaningful debate.
Poor Comm. Sanders has no idea what that upcoming CRA Advisory Board meeting might be like if some of us in this city choose to drop some very pertinent facts on the table at that public meeting that don't square with the contrived version of reality some of these groups are trying to foist upon us.
Where they "serve" the community in ways that are hard to measure or in some cases, try to solve problems that most of us don't think we actually have.
(Honestly, this city and the CRA district in particular have so many problems, why the need to make them up?)
Also, in what was news to me, Comm. Sanders announced that his wife, Jessica, no longer has the role she did at the Palms Community Action Coalition.
Yes, the group with the useless website that is on an 18-month time delay.
Don't know whether she gets to keep her city office and resources at the Hepburn Center!
There's still a segment of the local population that believes there's still a fairly good chance that Mayor Cooper will try to make someone else the scapegoat for the many years of chronic mismanagement at the HB CRA that happened under the two previous City Managers while Mayor Cooper and her Rubber Stamp Crew adamantly refused to perform their proper oversight function.
They did nothing to stop what was happening, instead, only encouraged more of it as long as their own political supporters reaped the benefits.
Ask yourself this question: Why is it that in a city this size, it's the same 8-10 people who consistently got their hands on CRA funds when there is so little to show for that money afterwards?
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Previously I'd written...
Subject: FYI re Hallandale Beach CRA's annual shell game of ranking groups, per Monday night's CRA meeting at 6 pm. Talk about history repeating itself...
Philanthropic oversight group Guidestar's page on Zamar states that their exempt status was
automatically revoked by the IRS in 2010 for failure to file a Form 990, 990-EZ, 990-N, or 990-PF for 3 consecutive years, so why does the city still treat Zamar like it's tax exempt?
Here's the IRS doc report re Zamar and the Automatic Revocation of Exemption Information:
On fourth page of document, Document 11 - Exhibit 11 - Zamar School of Performing Arts Application, uses a copy of the 2003 IRS form that is no longer valid about the organization.
And nobody at the CRA said anything about this????
Where does Dr. Deborah Brown get off thinking that she can fool taxpayers by including invalid docs from the IRS to try to scrounge up $50,000 from the city, yet again? Or by using docs from the Florida Dept. of State that appear to be seven years old and not current?
Where exactly is their current, properly filled-out 990 Form?
Why is that such a big mystery if they have nothing to hide?
There seems to be no end in sight for this woman getting tens of thousands of
dollars from Hallandale Beach taxpayers every year despite consistently being
less than honest or transparent with them.
And why, despite all the money involved is all this CRA loan information copied and managed
in such a consistently self-evident half-assed fashion that it can NOT be searched for on the
Yes, it's hard to shake the impression that some of the staff at Hallandale Beach City hall want taxpayers, their real bosses, to be in the dark and NOT be able to simply look at easy
to understand information so they can connect-the-dots and draw their own conclusions.
How can there be not one but two city employees at the CRA making over $100,000 a year involved in this sorry spectacle of an effort, and yet this is what they present to HB taxpayers with a straight face, as if we should be grateful?
It's still unclear to me what Liza Torress really does and why her salary went up $40k to $100K this past Spring.
____________________________________________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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