May 20, 2012 photo of Hallandale Beach's very own "South Beach" by South Beach Hoosier.
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The view from here: Connecting the collective energy of a community and channeling it into positive results has never been easy. But in Hallandale Beach, city officials are USUALLY a big part of the problem, not part of the solution. And that behavior continues apace...
The following post is an expanded version of an email that I sent out last Thursday afternoon to about 300-plus concerned residents, Small Business owners, civic activists, politicians and members of the news media in Hallandale Beach, Hollywood, Broward County and South Florida.
It's an email that I actually wrote many weeks ago and have kept in cold storage, waiting until last Thursday to send out, chiefly, for reasons concerning the calendar year that make perfect sense from my point of view.
Last Thursday, Dec. 31st was, officially, Renee C. Miller's last day as City Manger of Hallandale Beach, where, three-and-a-half years after being selected over candidates that I thought were better, and after she promised me and her many other doubters in this community to tangibly change the culture -and pathology!- of the city's bureaucracy and management style, top-down, she was finito.
It's clear in retrospect, as it was to me after just six months on the job, that Miller accomplished little of the things that she promised me and other concerned residents and small business owners to directly improve the quality of life in the city and the city's management.
Those of you who were at the city's poorly-attended Town Hall meeting over on the beach in January of 2013 who saw Miller alternately ignore or obfuscate when I asked her some fact-filled questions that directly called her out on unfulfilled promises she had made to city residents -and to me to my face- including ones about Dept. heads ignoring longstanding citizens complaints that were self-evident, even after they were told about them or shown contemporaneous photos of the problem, know exactly how pathetic it was.
Yes, continuing the pattern in Hallandale Beach where ignoring a genuine problem was treated by City Hall as the same as actually solving it.
Like it was a question of psychology, not competency.
Yes, the red tape at HB City Hall is as exhausting and thick as ever, and the mood is as autocratic as ever, too. Which is why Small Businesses continue to move out of the city rather than continue having to jump thru hoops -or continue hitting their heads against the wall.
All of this continues to take place while the city's poorly-run and crony-filled HB Chamber of Commerce acts like an ostrich, with its head buried in the sand, instead of being innovative and proactive.
That is, unless it's time for its president and its Board to play the role of taxpayer-subsidized cheerleader for certain entrenched pols and business interests in the city who already have undue and outsized influence in this city of under 40,000, relative to their contribution to making it better.
Or at least as good as it ought to be already -but clearly isn't.
My blog post about new Hallandale Beach City Manager Daniel Rosemond will be up on the blog later in the week. Teaser Alert for you newcomers to the blog -I'm NOT a fan of Rosemond.
My comments are below the article
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Hallandale city manager quits
By Susannah Bryan, Staff writer
October 15, 2015
After more than three years at the helm, Renee Miller plans to step down as city manager by the end of the year.
Her resignation will take effect Dec. 31.
Miller, 38, cited a desire to spend more time with family in a resignation letter to her five City Commission bosses.
"I know it was a surprise to most of the members of the dais," said Miller, who is married and raising a two-year-old daughter. "But as family people, they understand the need to seek a better work-life balance. And that's what I'm really looking for."
In her resignation letter, Miller described her past three years as city manager as both a blessing and a challenge.
Read the rest of the article at:
Connecting the collective energy of a community and channeling it into positive results has never been easy.
But it’s especially difficult when the people running the city at City Hall have a LONG track record of NOT being either particularly competent or inspired, consistently DON’T follow Best Practices -or even Common Sense- and NEVER feel the slightest bit of public remorse for continually refusing to be held personally accountable to the public for their actions, words and votes.
No, unfortunately, the people currently at HB City Hall DON’T sweat the details the way they should, nor do they show any tangible interest in dramatically improving the city’s present and future Quality of Life and capture its true potential, thru either proven sensible ideas or meaningful innovation, to satisfy the citizenry and the Small Business community.
Year-after-year, the powers-that-be at City Hall have rejected adapting to new realities and making the overdue needed changes or improvements, despite concerned citizens and business people conscientiously pointing out the many, many self-evident problems at public meetings that anyone who lives and work here see and experience every day, but which City Hall continues to ignore.
Because this city has the wrong caliber of people making policy AND carrying it out, lots of potential opportunities to markedly improve and revitalize this city in exciting and innovative ways come and go –completely unrealized, leaving others to benefit from the city’s myopia and indecision -and bad judgment.
To this city’s current and future residents’ detriment, we’ve seen a culture take root at City Hall of arrogant, self-interested elected officials and bureaucrats who are demonstrably anti-democratic and anti-accountability in their mindset, and impervious to change, even when it’s obvious to everyone but them.
It’s the difference between selflessness and selfishness.
The current crew prefers to continue doing things in the same old unproductive and unsatisfactory way that they have done them for years, even when it’s clear to everyone concerned that these tired, old methods and practices simply DON’T work and produce positive results and outcomes.
That reluctance to change was highlighted by their years of denial of the facts and engaging in completely self-serving and promiscuous behavior with respect to employing crony capitalism with limited public (CRA) funds, so that their friends and political supporters benefited.
In fact, more than three years and a half years later, many of these very same officials who did NOT provide anywhere close to the level of oversight and accountability they were legally bound to perform, still can NOT bring themselves to posting onto the city’s website, the Broward Inspector General’s damning report about their years of completely negligent and unsatisfactory oversight of the city’s CRA.
You have to be willing to imagine a different future and strategy for success before you can make it a reality.
Faking it, as this city has done for so many years, simply doesn’t work.
Me? I’m just someone working hard to spark and accelerate change for a better and more dynamic South Florida for EVERYONE, not just certain favored people, or forces in town who think they have a veto on every good idea that comes into town.
I'll have some more thoughts to share with you next week about the city and some thoughts about the caliber and quality of people we need to be willing to step up to the challenge of confronting the longstanding idiocy and incompetency that has held this city back, and as we are all too aware, kept its beleaguered residents unhappy with the results HB City Hall has continually portrayed as "normal," but which would clearly be unacceptable in 99% of this state's cities and towns.
My most recent previous blog post is here:
Happy Holidays from Hallandale Beach: A taste of chutzpah, hypocrisy & incompetency with your eggnog -again!- thanks to Mayor Joy Cooper
