August 30, 2011 photo by South Beach Hoosier
Dear oblivious Jane Doe, Chip & Andy, et al, defenders of Hollywood union deals that'd cripple city's financial future: You lost, common sense actually won.
Rather than see the two comments I received today run at the bottom of my Saturday post, where only people who never saw it in the first place would see them, I've chosen instead to put them right out front today where everyone can see them for the nonsense they are.
Let's look at the self-serving comments, shall we?
Which, as was true during the abbreviated referendum 'campaign,' as usual, didn't and don't answer the simple reasonable questions that the residents of Hollywood were entitled to know before they actually voted.
Not the failure of the City of Hollywood to anticipate and deliver straightforward answers to, but rather the side that the 'Jane Does', DWS and labor acolytes of the Hollywood area supported.
The side that lost and which is still bitterly complaining.
Those questions can be boiled down to one: IF X, with X being maintaining current labor deals, then Y, with Y being job cuts and program and service interruptions if not outright elimination,
what will Y be like if the status quo with the city employees was maintained and no changes were made?
The unions could NEVER answer that simple question to enough Hollywood residents' satisfaction.
The very beleaguered people who already knew that their taxes were going to be going up substantially even if the city's position won out this past Tuesday.
How did the unions and their employees ever think they could win if they couldn't answer that simple question?
Exactly.
As stated previously, I'd have been perfectly fine with firing a lot more City of Hollywood employees than even the numbers contemplated by the city if the referendum had lost.
A lot more!
My own personal experience over the past seven years being all over Hollywood is that there are, indeed, far too many city employees who DON'T pull their weight and don't deliver a dollar's worth of service or labor for a dollar's pay.
Just as is even MORE TRUE in the City of Hallandale Beach, starting with the City Manager's Office and DPW.
City of Hallandale Beach City Hall and Police Dept. HQ, September 9, 2011 photo by South Beach Hoosier.
(Did you know that despite being about 350% smaller in physical size and population than Hollywood, as recently as two years ago, the City of HB's City Manger's Office was actually spending MORE taxpayers money on its personnel costs than Hollywood was?
Well, if you read this blog or read my friend Michael Butler's Change Hallandale you would, but other than Comm. Keith London, none of the other other four HB commissioners seemed the least bit troubled by this absurd and troubling fact. Cooper, Ross, Julian & Sanders were their usual Rubber Stamp selves and allowed it to go on and on, with predictable results, and yet they were the very ones who were unwilling to bite the bullet and actually take Mike Good to court last year when he wasn't even coming to City Hall to do his job.
How do you get any more insubordinate than that?
And Julian, typically, as if on cue, foolishly saying and doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, made a motion to end the city manger search even before it could get going in earnest and the public could participate and give their input.
Just another one of the 1,001 reasons that William "Bill" Julian deserves to be kept off the commission dais PERMANENTLY.)
Now, back to the matter at hand.
Even prior to receiving this anonymous comment, I've been shocked at the relative ease with which the Hollywood Police union (Jeff Marano) and the Fire union (Daniel Martinez) were able to skate with South Florida's local media without answering questions in depth about what the logical results would be if their side had won the referendum.
The only time that this was
NOT true was when Mayor
Peter Bober and
Jeff Marano both appeared on
Channel 10's This Week in South Florida (TWISF) with host
Michael Putney.
I do not feel your comment on the Hollywood Whistle Blower all that accurate. The person may have used someone else's picture but alot of what was written is accurate.
First off, it's not "someone else's picture" but mine.
Second, someone who purports to be a serious person with something to say doesn't do something as stupid and lazy as pilfer other people's photos on a blog as if they were a catalog to take what they like. Period.
There has been alot of mismanagement in the City of Hollywood and that needs to be brought to people's attention. It is not fair to blame the employees for the problems the city is in. The mayor and commissioners have agreed to union contracts and when the city was in trouble the unions agreed to pay cuts for employees.
No one disputes that there has, indeed, been financial under-performance and very poor choices.
But no matter how many times it is mentioned no matter how many times the numbers come up in a graph or pie chart, you and your cohorts seem to be oblivious to the fact that since Public Safety personnel/pension costs are by far the largest portion of the city's budget, they are the first on the chopping block.
Look at the current budget proposed by the City of Hollywood, below.
$113,461,70 of the $ 166,274,13 General Fund in the budget is for Public Safety.
Jeff Marano and Daniel Martinez did a piss-poor job of telling Hollywood residents what programs and services would have to reduced, largely be eliminated or zeroed-out in order to continue the fiction that they and you want to believe.
Because they didn't.
The voters made their choice.
The city chose to go way over budget building Arts Park, to agree on a vendor who could not provide a fully functioning WiFi system, gave millions through the CRA to developers who did not build a thing and walked away with the money and now one is suing. They have a downtown CRA that has not accomplished anything yet they keep getting taxpayers dollars while the west end of the city is going down hill. They could have shut down the downtown CRA and saved money but they won't. There has been advice given to the city but the mayor and commissioners have their own agenda. They chose to play bully and tell taxpayers if you do not vote yes for pension reform we will raise your taxes even higher. Now they are cutting pensions while relying on developers to save the city and will continue to give them money the city does not have. Is that the direction you want to see the city go?
I knew about these myriad problems before you did, attended the often-ponderous Hollywood City Commission meetings and knew more about what had and hadn't been discussed than you did.
I am all-too aware of the shortcomings of the City of Hollywood and their employees and elected officials.
I've actually written about them here, remember?
When nobody else was, I complained about what I saw that didn't seem logical or reasonable or make sense and still was done anyway because that's what the city or its condescending employees wanted, even if was wrong.
The City Commission passed the Margaritaville project on Johnson Street and the Broadwalk unanimously, and while I didn't like all aspects of it, I MUCH preferred the Hard Rock proposal because you'd get more buzz and reach a much more diverse demographic who'd spend money.
Margaritaville? I will never go there -it's not at all appealing to me.
And neither will anyone I know who'd come to visit.
I also don't think it will be appealing to out-of-town/foreign visitors who are African-American or Latino.
It's a one-trick pony.
A very tiresome one-trick pony in my opinion.
If the Super Bowl came back to Joe Robbie Stadium, do you think most fans with a choice would prefer staying at The Hard Rock located on the beach, or Margaritaville, where they can never escape that music?
Well, many of the fans of the latter are fishing on Sunday afternoons on their boats, right?
Asked and answered.
But when you finally found out about the decision-making problems in Hollywood, what did you do about them?
Exactly.
Nothing.
The unions were content to let bad decisions be made in Hollywood so long as it didn't affect their Golden Goose.
Conveniently, the so-called "Whistle Blower' blog didn't show-up until last month, and yet still does not disclose who is behind it, just like your comment to me, Jane, Chip & Andy.
That lack of transparency and honesty makes you and them not worth believing, especially when your arguments are so lacking in facts and context.
for whatever reasons, you and your pals continue to NOT understand the purpose and function of a CRA as they operate in Florida.
By now, I think it's because you'd rather not know and would just prefer to have the issue to complain about it.
That's your choice, but as I remarked previously, simply repeating something doesn't make it true, and is unconvincing among people who know the facts.
So very many unpersuasive arguments.
That's why I was not at all surprised the unions lost.
Chip and Andy has left a new comment on your post "Shining a light on a sanctimonious -and anonymous...":
"...There's one over-riding fact: a majority of the Hollywood residents actually voting chose to support the City of Hollywood's P.O.V."
I disagree.
With only 14% voter turnout and the 'winning side' winning by a 55/45 split, majority is hardly the way to describe the results.
I know that by the very definition of the word the majority is the winning side of the vote, but with over 80% of the voters deciding to sit this one out, the 'majority' made their voice heard by not saying anything at all.
Honestly, criticizing the results of the vote based on the number of people who voted is the worst of sour grapes since it proves that the Police union and
Jeff Marano and the Fire union and
Daniel Martinez, were utterly unable to persuade even a small number of people to vote who hadn't planned on voting, even though everyone knew going in that a small percentage would actually turn out.
Personally, I hate apathetic people, which is part of what makes living in South Florida so frustrating to me, even when I was a kid.
Hearing a pathetic excuse like the one above that someone or some group of people "made their voice heard by not saying anything at all" is honey for elected officials, lobbyists and the status quo, all of whom already have too much influence in Broward County and south Florida than they do in most other parts of the country with a higher civic-participation level and different attitude.
That said, here's what I know for a fact: There was a public election held this past Tuesday in the City of Hollywood, and among those legal residents who actually voted, one side got more than the other.Apparently, it was not your side.
While I usually prefer to have as many legitimate people vote as possible, there's absolutely no evidence that if 25%, 50% or even 100% of the city's residents had participated, the results would have been any different.
If anything, I personally suspect the percentage of voters supporting the city's position on the referendum would have been even larger, since conversations I've had the past few days among people who are registered voters but who blew-off the vote because they were so sure it would pass, 90% of them were for it.
They opted out because their intuition was that it would pass and their vote wouldn't change much; they were right.
The universe of people who think it's more important for City of Hollywood employees to retire with a pension when they are near age 50 or 55, than to have a fairly-normal city offering various programs and services (of varying quality) to city taxpayers is much less than you think.
The unions reached their universe of supporters.
It's just that they are a minority of actual legal voters in the City of Hollywood.
No sale.
That's the end of the issue.
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