Hide-and-Seek? The City of #HollywoodFL's many longstanding problems with the RAC and the city + CRA websites, most notably, "missing" public information that ought to be easy to find for EVERYONE, and why so much the public wants remains hidden or nonexistent.
After three-plus years of the city playing games with the public and using #COVID19 as an excuse to thwart the public's desire to full engage on important issues, it's clear that much of the info is "missing NOT by accident, but rather by design to keep citizens in the dark and at a disadvantage to real estate developer lawyers and consultants.
Below, at bottom, are excerpts from an email that I sent recently to my trusted and well-informed friend and fellow Hollywood civic activist, Patty Antrican, the North Central Hollywood Civic Association president. Above it are some of the subjects we spoke about, the city's RAC -Regional Activity Center- and the city's website's effectiveness, or lack of it. 🙁
https://www.facebook.com/NorthCentralHollywood/
(The North Central Hollywood Civic Association spans the area north from Hollywood Blvd. to Sheridan Street, and from from I-95 to Dixie Highway/21st Avenue. The association spans two Hollywood City Commission districts 2 and 3, Linda Hill Anderson and Traci Callari. It meets the 4th Tuesday of the month at 7 pm at Fred Lippman Center, 2030 Polk Street.)
Patty and I had a nice long talk Thursday about several issues percolating in Hollywood and environs that have concerned people's attention and which threaten to put their anger into overdrive.
As always when I talk to Patty, I keep in mind her initial public comments about where she stood on the issue of development and redevelopment in the city when speaking to the association's members at her first meeting as president a few years ago, after longtime association president AND Hollywood Council of Civic Association (HCCA) president Cliff Germano had moved out-of-town:
“We must stay in touch and work together. We are not anti-development. We want to have a vibrant, moving city, but we have to be careful.”
Be careful! 😉
This was what I tweeted re the city's website and their recent example of not posting public information in time to be legal
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Dear Patty:
Thanks again for sending me the URL for Hollywood RAC map, below, after our interesting
and wide-ranging phone call this afternoon, after you looked for it online at the city's website for a good 10-15 minutes. In a sense, you memorialized our longstanding, shared POV that it should be MUCH EASIER to find considering the way that seemingly everyone at Hollywood City Hall and the CRA lauds the RAC as some sort of amazing tool.
Yet despite its apparent super-powers, the RAC map is NOT on the City of Hollywood's
main website, as you said and as this search I performed later shows, and as we discussed today:
And honestly, why hasn't the city updated the 5-6 year-old information on it so it is accurate for 2023? That's embarrassing for the CRA and everyone involved.
Like we have both said many times in public at civic association meetings and amongst
ourselves, the city's website continues to be a genuine problem, yet the denizens of City Hall
still want the public to believe that everything's fine, despite all the extant evidence to the
contrary, and the many emails I have received over the years from frustrated TV and print reporters asking me for info they can NOT seem to find on the city's website.
Because the reporters don't know -as you and I do- that the city deletes lots of very useful public information because they have not yet figured out a way to archive it online.
Like the contact log of developers, lobbyists and others who meet the mayor, the city commission or the city's bureaucrats. Is the website slightly better than it used to be, yes,
but that's relative to what the reasonable expectations of the public are NOW.
This larger issue of the city website's completeness, accuracy and timeliness -or rather
the lack of same- is something I wrote about last year but never posted to my blog, or the
Hollywood Residents - Speaks Up Facebook page that we're both active on.
The very useful site which I finally joined last year after hearing you urge me to do so for many years when I steadfastly refused to join Facebook.
The city website's relative completeness, accuracy and timeliness suffers in comparison to what the Hollywood CRA website has, but is not without its own share of problems.
In the end, I never posted it largely because there were simply TOO MANY examples of the city + CRA websites failing to have info they should have, or that its employees claim it has, after you alert them to it, despite how self-evident that's not the case.
The city's badly-bungled University Station P3 effort that I was at from the initial secretive
Evaluation Comm. meetings until the bitter end, is perhaps the best example of that.
Where's the dedicated page about that on the city's website that informs residents
and interested parties what's happened so far, besides the lawsuit that caused a judge
to order the city to reboot the process, what was approved, and what if any upcoming
deadlines or benchmarks are approaching? MIA!
Cathy Swanson-Rivenbark's decision as Asst. City Manager to create a dedicated,
information-filled web page on the city's website re Johnson Street/Margaritaville was
one of the best decisions at City Hall of the past 15 years.
So why has it not been replicated on other P3 or large projects in the city that
involve lots of info, plans and renderings that are constantly being updated and
refined?
Simple. Lack of will.
Perhaps new City Manager George Keller will be more open to constructive criticism
and useful suggestions for making public information more accessible.
Dave
Regional Activity Center
City of Hollywood Regional Activity Center
The Regional Activity Center (RAC) is generally located East of I-95 and West of 17th
Avenue with Sheridan Street as the northern boundary and Pembroke Road as the
southern boundary. The RAC covers an area of over 1,450 acres that includes Downtown
Hollywood and the key commercial and residential corridors of Federal Highway, Dixie
Highway and a portion of Hollywood Boulevard.
The Regional Activity Center is a high-intensity, high-density multi-use area that encourages
attractive and functional mixed living, working, shopping, education and recreational activities.
Demographics and Key Data Points about the Regional Activity Center
15 Minute Drive Time
The Regional Activity Center, located east of I-95 and encompassing Downtown, is within
close proximity of Fort Lauderdale and Miami. A 15 minute drive demonstrates that it is the
center of a growing and thriving metropolitan region.
 150,430 Population |  2.41 Average
Household Size |  43.3 Median Age |
 12% No High School Diploma |  28% High School Graduate | 30% Some College | 30% Bachelor's/ Grad/Prof Degree |
 10,579Total Businesses |  85,986Total Employees |
 5.5%Unemployment Rate |  65%White Collar |  21%Blue Collar |  14%Services |
 $55,390 Median Household Income |  $32,931 Per Capita Income |  $87,013Median Net
Worth |
| | Regional Activity Center |
|---|
| 2016 Estimated Population | 331,031 |
| 2021 Population Forecast | 352,590 |
| 2016 Estimated Households | 137,007 |
| 2021 Household Forecast | 145,311 |
| 2016 Average Household Income | $64,917 |
| 2016 Median Household Income | $44,536 |
| 2016 Workplace Establishments | 21,405 |
| 2016 Workplace Employees | 195,432 |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Esri Forecast for 2016 and 2021; Infogroup
Regional Activity Center Zoning
In order to create a vibrant, high-intensity, high-density multi-use area, the regulatory
framework of the Regional Activity Center was recently updated. The new zoning
encourages high quality and functional mixed living, working, shopping, education
and recreational activities. Staff completed the proposed zoning changes in early 2016
and they were adopted by the City Commission in later that year. You can download
a copy of the RAC Zoning Regulations and associated maps below. For additional
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