As of this morning, has the Florida Joint Legislative Auditing Committee received
any correspondence from the following state legislators formally requesting that JLAC
perform an audit of the Hallandale Beach CRA: Sen. Eleanor Sobel, Rep. Joe Gibbons
and Rep. Shevrin Jones?
Living here, and being very involved in the effort to get your Committee to do one so that
citizens of this community can finally get the financial answers that we have long been
denied, I can tell you that there are no media reports of any of the three of them doing so,
thus far, so I just want to get confirmation of that fact.
Thank you for your assistance!
----- For those of you who don't know, state Rep. Shervin Jones represents the part of Hallandale Beach west of the FEC Railroad tracks and Dixie Highway. In my opinion, he is also a career-politician-in-training just like like Hallandale Beach City Commissioner Alexander Lewy, and obviously I mean that as a big warning sign for anyone who cares about common sense and actually solving problems, instead of relying on tried, tired and unproven ideas that come from liberal orthodoxy. Jones has recently been brought up short by his caviar dreams and his West Park reality, the reality that gave him a gerrymandered seat for all practical purposes. But in a state like Florida with term limits, even a gerrymandered seat promising no competitive races doesn't seem as fun a sinecure as it once did, even for an African-American pol who had no real experience of any kind, yet drew no opposition when he first ran, in part because his father is the mayor of the city he's from. That gives you an idea of what the district is like -not a lot of civic discourse. More like a herd mentality.
Anyway, Jones, of FL House 101, who is supporting Lewy in his effort to replace term-limited Gibbons in the FL House District 100 seat in 2014, and Gibbons in his efforts to defeat former Hollywood City Commissioner Beam Furr in the 2014 race to replace term-limited Broward County Commissioner Sue Gunzburger -who endorsed Furr many months ago- is under investigation by the Broward State's Attorney office for his curious spending habits. Or is it his expensive eating habits so very far from home?
Broward Beat State Rep. Likes To Eat On Lobbyist’s Dime By Buddy Nevins August 2, 2013
State Rep. Shevrin Jones likes to eat….well…on his campaign’s dime.
He’s basically found a way for lobbyists like Ron Book, who donated $1,000, to pay for his meals.
Jones has spent roughly $2,000 of the $9,350 he raised from lobbyists on “meetings” and “campaign meetings” in various restaurants. Lobbyists were the only ones giving to his campaign.
Happy 4th Anniversary, Mayor Cooper's un-necessary, taxpayer-subsidized office!
Which, four years later, STILL isn't even listed on City Hall's own building directory
Under the City of Hallandale Beach's charter, the only additional power that the elected mayor
has that the four elected city commissioners don't possess is the right to call a meeting and
the right to preside over it.
That's it.
That's the whole list.
Over four years ago, Mayor Cooper convinced then-City manager Mike Good that despite the
fact that these differences were very slight on the face of it, she believed that she needed to have a much-larger office than her colleagues on the commission, and so, thousands of tax dollars were spent to ensure that Mayor Cooper got what she wanted.
Yes, no expense or amount of feigned ignorance is spared to keep her happy.
And not just a larger office in the back with the other commissioners, but right on the main hallway, just a short distance from where visitors get off the elevator.
Which is how four years ago this week, just as the mayor returned from the first Obama
that office burst onto the scene, becoming perhaps the only mayor's office in Broward County
or all of South Florida that isn't actually listed on their own City Hall's directory, in this case, the one located to your left as you walk thru the front lobby door.
Yes, because every queen must not only have her own palace, but her privacy... even it's paid for with taxpayer dollars.
I actually read this WashingtonGuardian piece early Saturday morning and have been waiting patiently to see something on this topic elsewhere, ideally, at a South Florida-centric news website or blog, or a decent segment on TV with some real depth.
Nope, it seems that few want to actually deal with the actual nuts and bolts of school security and the source of funding, they just prefer repeating the same old homilies and tut-tut how terrible it all is.
Even pre-9/11, living and working in Washington and going fairly regularly to some of the places I did for work or my own purposes because of where some friends worked, I was always VERYsafety and security conscious about myself and the people I worked with, since we often worked VERY late in almost completely empty office buildings in a city that was among the most crime and violent-prone in the country. I had no qualms about complaining to the property management company about aspects of building security that I found weak or unsatisfactory, and actually got building security people fired for their continual lack of attention to detail, and unwillingness to tell their friends to stop coming by and hanging out near high-security areas. I took the approach that we could always find someone who understood our unique security circumstances and who'd pay more attention, so I never lost any sleep about getting someone fired for not doing their job the way we wanted it done. We were the client. The day in 1994 that the Oklahoma City Bombing took place at the Murah Federal Building, I was at the NLRB HQ on Vermont Avenue, N.W. doing some research and going over the recent filings and proceedings re the MLB lockout, even while ESPN was reporting on it just a few blocks away. The difference in security in that building within one week was night-and-day.
During the nearly 15 years that I lived and worked up there, one of the regular features of local TV news reporting in Washington, D.C. were fairly-lengthy segments on the ease with which strangers/reporters could access and penetrate D.C. high schools without detection. Seemingly once a week, someone at one of the four area TV stations showed how easily it could be done regardless of how much the School system spent on security. And I hardly need mention that one of the biggest problems were the school's students themselves trying to finesse the security systems by creating pathways that allowed them to skip off campus without being noticed by authorities. Frankly, I always thought that there'd be a mass shooting at one of those schools but it never happened, even while the drive-bys during afternoon football games were not uncommon. I have no reason to think that the security down here is any different with respect to students actually watering-down whatever the schools put in place.
The Washington Guardian
Before Connecticut tragedy, administration eliminated emergency preparedness program,let school violence prevention programs lapse
John Solomon and Kimberly Dvorak
Updated 23:43 PM EST, December 14, 2012
Beneath the expressions of grief, sorrow and disbelief over the Connecticut school massacre lies an uneasy truth in Washington: over the last few years the Obama administration and Congress quietly let federal funding for several key school security programs lapse in the name of budget savings.
Government officials told the Washington Guardian on Friday night that two Justice Department programs that had provided more than $200 million to schools for training, security equipment and police resources over the last decade weren't renewed in 2011 and 2012, and that a separate program that provided $800 million to put police officers inside the schools was ended a few years earlier.
As some of you reading this post may or may not have heard -though certainly not on Miami TV- Broward County Democratic Party czar Mitch Caesar is running for re-election against activist Cythia M. Busch, and many people, not just the devout Obamaphiles, want to toss him overboard toute-de-suite for his inability to translate this county's overwhelming Democratic registration advantages into... well, something else.
They argue among themselves about the details of what they actually want, but they're in agreement that he needs to go, which makes him sort of like what Dave Wannstedt was his last year as Dolphins head coach.
People wanted him gone!
Given what many people believe are Caesar's poor and clumsy management skills, inability to communicate any message except his own when he himself is in front of a national TV camera, plus his myriad lobbying activities within the area, where he's apparently often in towns where, theoretically, he has some degree of power over the people he's actually lobbying, party-wise, people think it's time to change horses.
This evening, just a few moments after it got posted, I was sent this Buzz blog item written by Adam C. Smith at the Tampa Bay Times website, which had this great quote from Florida Democratic Party Chair Rod Smith on what he'd like to do, if her could, to make the party structure more open and responsive:
Why? "It's about some people who are empowered and have disproportionate, political attention because you have to go to them and get their support to be, chair of the party...when they might not even have much influence in their own, county," Smith said.
Can anyone save egotistical Lauderhill mayor and amateur mind-reader Richard J. Kaplan from himself? The chronic Internet crank continues showing his true colors and ignorance at BrowardBeat, and other readers have finally had enough of his twaddle, too. Or will an intervention be necessary?
I was going to send in the comment below about an hour after seeing Lauderhill Mayor Richard J. Kaplan's initial smarmy comments to attorney and frequent contributor Sam Fields ill-informed essay, but I decided to just wait.
Good thing I did, because just like Hallandale Beach's own chronic Internet crank -whose name and multiple Internet identities I will try my best to avoid mentioning here to give him even more attention- Mr. Ego, Kaplan, couldn't help himself; he HAD to write yet again. And again! And yet again!
Here's what I know and what has already been independently confirmed -and mentioned here previously on Friday- though you would never know it by what was written in the BrowardBeat post or by Mayor Kaplan's initial comment: the family of the individual at the center of the hair-cutting controversy, John Lauber, says that The Washington Post completely mis-characterized him and got major facts about him wrong.
His sister further says that she didn't know anything about the story, and as if more was needed, the so-called "witness" in the originalWaPo, Stu White contradicted WaPo's reporting in an interview with ABC News and has since admitted that he was NEVER physically present at any such incident and did NOT know about the story UNTIL it was told to him by the WaPo.
Yet White was initially used by the newspaper to authenticate a story he was neither present for or aware of.
A perfect snapshot of the American Mainstream Media in 2012.
Given his own inconsistency, lack of personal knowledge on the matter in question and what we all now know is his giant sense of arrogance in making claims about Gov. Romney's honesty or lack thereof, from a thousand miles away, Mayor Kaplanshould cool it and accept that considering how frequently he finds the need to post at Buddy Nevins'BrowardBeat blog in ways that strike so many well-informed people as the very definition of utterly self-serving, we DON'T put any stock into what he says.
If he said it was raining, we'd check the window to see for ourselves.
As a prominent member of Broward County's status quo I've-got-mine society, where taxpayers are always at the bottom rung, he in particular is hardly in a position of lecturing or hectoring others about matters of morality or scruples.
(Seriously, he's been on the Broward MPO for about twenty years? No wonder transportation issues in this county are discussed at a Junior High level and taxpayers who pay attention are so f-ed with geniuses like Kaplan making policy -garbage in, garbage out, with taxpayers left holding the bag for bad ideas.
In the near future I'll have a scathing post here on the blog for you all to chew over re the clique of geniuses over at the Broward MPO that details not only how truly ineffective they are in getting their "message" out, if that's what they're calling it these days, but how completely ignored they are by anyone who pays attention, whether concerned Broward taxpayers, bloggers or the sleepwalking South Florida news media. I thought that so-called "independence" the MPO was given was actually supposed to make things better. It's NOT! Especially for taxpayers in Hollywood and Hallandale Beach.)
A little more hubris and a lot less self-serving comments would do real wonders for Mayor Kaplan, but I doubt it'll take with him.
He sounds remarkably like many of the well-educated and smug upper- middle class Adams Morgan liberals I met in D.C. twenty years ago, who thought that they were down with the struggle because they voted Democratic, and had a Guatamalan gardener, a Honduran housekeeper and ate at a Salvadoran restaurant.
Yes, they were like their very own Model United Nations, and were so full of their own goodness.
But in 1991, when there was a riot there shortly after a Black female Metro cop arrested a drunk Hispanic man in a public park, and the liberals saw that their political sensibilities didn't prevent their neighborhood from being damaged or looted, some at least had the common sense to take off their blinders, stopped being so cowed by their friends PC ways and tried to stop being so oblivious to their own past condescending attitudes towards others.
Which is to say, people who had different opinions than them.
Me, I bet that Mayor Kaplan can't go two entire months without writing something on Buddy Nevins' popular blog.
And I will let you know how long he goes, too. ----- Updated on May 16th at 3:54 to add Kaplan's fourth comment, #17
actsofsedition video: WPLG-TV/Miami's story on the first reading of the proposed puppy mill ordinance on April 4, 2012. Contrary to what is stated here, the ordinance was actually passed weeks later after the second reading.
BrowardBeat's Buddy Nevins' reminder of the recent past in Broward County with respect to shadowy third-parties in Tallahassee carpet-bombing us with fake facts and specious lies, serves as a sobering warning of what we can expect in Hallandale Beach in the Joy Cooper vs. Keith London mayoral showdown this Fall
In my opinion, this particular post of Buddy Nevins is one of the most important that he's written since I started reading his blog, so I urge you to not only read it and understand the larger point, but send it along to others you know who care about what happens in upcoming South Florida elections, and who don't want shadowy third-parties -Electioneering Campaign Organizations- carpet-bombing us with fake facts and specious lies to actually succeed with their misrepresentation.
BrowardBeat
Just What The Doctor Didn’t Order: Tim Ryan
By Buddy Nevins
May 11, 2012
If an apple-a-day keeps the doctor away, Broward County Commission candidate Tim Ryan better get a bushel.
Angry over Ryan’s three-year old lawsuit against a shadowy political committee funded by the Florida Medical Association, state doctors are preparing to throw money against him in his commission race.
As it happens, I wrote about former FL State Rep. Tim Ryan's lawsuit on my blog when it first started, following that 2008 State Senate primary election won by Eleanor Sobel over Ryan and former State Rep. -and now Broward Judge- Ken Gottlieb, but the Miami Herald, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and local Miami-area TV stations, to the dismay of this area's most-concerned and active citizens, almost COMPLETELY STOPPEDcovering it on a daily basis after about the second week. (See the July 2009 South Florida Sun-Sentinel andMiami Herald articles on the lawsuit at bottom.)
I know that because I've checked their archives many times in the interim and have copies of the few articles that actually were written.
More recently, I've re-checked them yet again whenRyan -responsible for that rarest of bills, a bill toughening ethics that actually passed the Florida legislature- announced a few weeks ago that he was formally running for the Broward County Comm. seat now held by term-limited John Rodstrom, District 7.
All of us who follow these things closely in Hallandale Beach, as well as the much-larger number of activists and concerned citizens who follow the activities of Broward County's public policy and government, know that it's only a matter of time before Hallandale Beach Mayor Joy Cooper's pals and cronies in Tallahassee start a similar deceitful effort against Hallandale Beach City Comm. Keith London and those of us who want reform in this city.
It serves to reason that these Cooper cronies will likely use the same basic template that Sobel's supporters in Tallahassee used against Ryan and Gottlieb, and it's even possible that it will be the very same people doing political hit-piece mailings against Keith London that did the ones that appeared in 2010, when he ran for re-election the first time
For instance, the one by Roger A. Pennington's Committee to Protect Florida that implicitly supported City Comm. candidate Alexander Lewy, given that candidate William "Bill" Julian, then a sitting HB City Commissioner, said at the time that he didn't have anything to do with it, and didn't know who was behind the direct mail -one of the few times I ever believed him.
After all, you didn't really think Mayor Cooper would be running for re-election on HER feeble record, did you?
No, objectively, Joy Cooper's resume as mayor of Hallandale Beach the past ten years is clear: of perpetually attacking and maligning her own citizens at public meetings, both City Commission and CRA; of often preventing citizens from being able to speak, esp. on important matters; of failing to even follow the city's very own rules of procedures in all sorts of crucial ways during these meetings; and of intentionally moving important City Commission agenda items, esp. those dealing with land use and development, to the end of the night.
Mayor Cooper does this because she knows from experience that if the most-important agenda items are not heard until after 10 p.m., it WILL discourage HB citizens and other interested parties wishing to speak, from actually participating in important decisions that they and every other HB resident will have to live with forever.
This has the practical effect of meaning that HB citizens interested in participating in their own city's public policy know in advance that they may have to wait 3-4 hours on a Wednesday night to have their say, since Mayor Cooper incessant talking -before, after and during other people's comments- only adds to the length of the far-too-long meetings.
Far too often, Mayor Cooper's behavior at public meetings resembles nothing so much as a one-woman filibuster against American democracy and public participation.
(FYI: If after reading the article above you haven't already figured it out, reader "Drew" is Andrew Markoff. Who else in this area would think to write 38 sentences via three separate comments to what was just an 18-sentence story? And then, merely to criticize the public and defend the mayor? Yes, defend Mayor Cooper, the very person who appointed him to the HB Charter Review Comm., where he was a minority of one in writing the dissenting view.)
And, of course, as we can hardly forget, Mayor Cooper has been the person in charge as the city's budget has nearly DOUBLED in the past six years, with little tangible evidence to show for it in the eyes of most HB taxpayers, who have seen neighboring communities in Hollywood and Aventura make noticeable changes that positively improve not only the look of their cities, but also improve their residents' Quality-of-Life.
No, that resume of Mayor Cooper's reads more like a bill of indictment, which is why she wants the coming election to be about everything but HER own record in office as mayor.
That's also why the mayor is deathly afraid of partipating with Comm. London in a genuine candidate debate or forum run by objective third-parties she can't control, like the BrowardLeague of Women Voters, Broward Urban League, et al.
It's also explains why the Cooper-cronies at the HB Chamber of Commerce won't ever sponsor a debate or forum, as happens in thousands of other normal cities across America in election years, perhaps over breakfast for a small donation, with the money going to some local charity.
She can't defend the indefensible.
Cooper's ten years of providing invisible oversight and imaginary accountability over millions of tax dollars -yet attacking those of us in the community who wanted genuine accountability and oversight- of her preferring to have a system of crony capitalism with respect to HB CRA monies that are supposed to help end blight, instead be used to keep benefiting he same cadre of people, has gotten us precisely to the shaky point we are now -the breaking point.
This week's recent William Gjebre piece in BrowardBulldog, titled, Hallandale’s generous loans to private surgery center raise more questions about city program, is that sameJoyCooperattitude in a nut-shell.
It all sounds so very depressingly familiar doesn't it?
Once again, taxpayers are left to consider more instances of questionable or poor decision-making, city monies going out the door, and missing paperwork.
And Joy Cooper assuring us that it's all okay.
That's no way to run a city. The past is prologue. -----
Broward County candidate who lost state Senate race sues over attack ads he says were false
By Jon Burstein, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
July 25, 2009
FORT LAUDERDALE - The last-minute attack ads were damning. They accused the state Senate candidate of a "shady" land deal that had taxpayers shelling out $12 million for a $1-million piece of property his family owned in Davie.
The ads were wrong--the real estate had been appraised at $15.5 million. But they may have worked: the candidate finished last in a tight three-way Democratic primary last August.
Now Tim Ryan, a onetime member of the state House, wants the people responsible for the ad campaign against him to answer for their claims. He's pursuing a lawsuit that alleges not only that he was defamed by the group, People for a Better Florida Fund Inc., but that its creators lied as part of a conspiracy to keep him out of the state Senate district 31 seat, which represents a chunk of southern Broward County.
The case is one of the first of its kind in the state--a losing political candidate using the courts to go after what's known in the jargon of campaign law as an electioneering communications organization. Such groups, also called 527s after the section of the U.S. tax code that regulates them, are allowed to raise unlimited amounts of money to make claims about candidates and issues, but are barred from telling people how to vote.
These groups--many with vague, often innocuous names including words like truth and justice-- have become players in Florida politics, spending more than $16 million in last fall's election. On the national level, they have been factors in recent races for the White House, most notably Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which assailed Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry and his service record in Vietnam in 2004.
"(527s) are important because we have a lot of people new to Florida who don't know much about the candidates and are dependent on television and newspapers for what they hear about candidates," said Lance deHaven-Smith, a Florida State University political science professor.
The attacks on Ryan came in the waning weeks of his bare-knuckles election battle with two other former state House members-- Eleanor Sobel and Ken Gottlieb. Sobel emerged narrowly victorious, with 36 percent of the primary vote, then trounced a write-in rival in the general election.
"I'm taking this step (the lawsuit) because it's the only way to hold these outside special interest groups accountable," Ryan said. "(These groups) hijack the public process by spreading half-truths and sometimes just plain lies about people running for office."
In his lawsuit filed in Broward Circuit Court in October, he is seeking an unspecified amount of monetary damages from People for a Better Florida Fund Inc. and five men tied to it.
According to Ryan's lawyer, former state Sen. Walter "Skip" Campbell, it's been learned in the early stages of the litigation that the 527 group spent about $700,000 on television advertisements and mailings in the local race. That would be almost double what Ryan raised --$351,235.
Why the 527 spent so lavishly on the contest for a legislative seat in South Floirida is unclear. The group did not respond to requests from the SunSentinel for an explanation. Campbell said he believes the group targeted Ryan, as well as Gottlieb, because they are lawyers, while Sobel, a former Broward School Board member, is the wife of a physician.
Formed in 2006, People for a Better Florida Fund Inc. is largely financed by the Florida Medical Association's political action committee or association members, and has raised $1.16 million since January 2008. The fund's registered agent--and one of the defendants in Ryan's lawsuit--is Timothy Stapleton, the FMA's executive vice president. The other four defendants are doctors or members of the FMA.
Martin Reeder, attorney for People for a Better Florida Fund Inc., said the group hired outside vendors to do research and prepare the ads. The ads were signed off on by an attorney and approved by Stapleton, he said.
"All of the statements published that relate to the land deal were to the best of our knowledge accurate in all material respects and to the extent that there are any technical inaccuracies in the publication, there was certainly no actual malice," he said.
Because Ryan is a public figure, to win in court, he must prove the group knowingly spread false information in an attempt to harm him, said Mark Herron, an elections law specialist in Tallahassee.
The claims made by the 527 revolved around 54 acres of open space that had been in Ryan's family. A national nonprofit land conservation group organized a $12.4-million deal in November 2006 in which the town of Davie bought the property using a combination of state and county grants and municipal bond proceeds.
An outside appraiser--hired by the conservation group--valued the property at $15.5 million.
But in a mass mailing, People for a Better Florida Fund Inc. wrote that "Taxpayers paid $12 million for the land--that's $11 million more than what the property was worth!"
Sobel, the ultimate beneficiary of the group's ad campaign, did not return repeated phone calls to her office and cell phone.
Gottlieb said People for a Better Florida Fund Inc. had a "big influence" on the race and was able to overwhelm his message with inaccurate ads. He said he was wrongly portrayed as beholden to "Republican special interests."
"They should be held accountable like everyone else and one of the problems with these ECOs is they are not and hopefully this lawsuit will do that," Gottlieb said.
----- South Florida Sun-Sentinel Broward Politics blog
Hollywood ophthalmologist fought hard for Sobel’s Senate victory
By Brittany Wallman July 30, 2009 04:09 PM
Staff writer Jon Burstein reports:
In Eleanor Sobel’s winning bid for a state Senate seat last year, she had no bigger supporter than a politically-connected Hollywood ophthalmologist who once served on Gov. Charlie Crist’s transition team, new court records show.
Alan Mendelsohn, then treasurer of the Florida Medical Association’s political action committee, aggressively raised money for Sobel and hailed her Aug. 26 victory in the Democratic primary as the FMA flexing its might, according to a string of e-mails.
When a secretive electioneering group attacked Eleanor Sobel's political opponents in a Broward state Senate race last year alleging "shady land deals," Sobel vowed she had nothing to do with it.
"I have no control over those groups," Sobel told The Miami Herald in August as People for a Better Florida Fund filled mailboxes with last-minute missives just before she defeated Tim Ryan and Ken Gottlieb.
But new court documents provide clear links between Sobel's campaign and the attack ads.
Sobel's political consultant was also a paid consultant for an affiliate of People for a Better Florida Fund and helped coordinate the attacks and plot strategy, according to e-mails and a deposition taken in a defamation suit Ryan filed against the group. Another campaign vendor also was paid in the effort.
Ryan contends the group unfairly alleged improprieties. People for a Better Florida Fund denies the claim. Sen. Sobel would not return repeated calls for comment.
Though Ryan's lawsuit is in its infancy, the case is already providing a rare glimpse into the world of shadowy political groups and the big money that special interests spend to ensure they have a supportive vote in the state Legislature.
People for a Better Florida Fund is closely linked to the Florida Medical Association, with the address listed for the group on the state's election website matching the doctors' organization. Sobel, the wife of a dermatologist, drew much of her financial support from the medical field. While a state representative, she was among a handful of Democrats to side with the medical industry on medical malpractice legislation.
Ryan and Gottlieb, also former state representatives, have at times sided with the political enemies of the doctor lobby: the trial lawyers.
"Eleanor Sobel was someone who had a better voting record on issues that concerned our contributors," Tim Stapleton, People for a Better Florida Fund's deputy treasurer, said in a deposition July 20. Stapleton is executive vice president of the FMA.
While Sobel spent about $400,000 in the entire campaign, Stapleton testified that his group spent about $600,000 to help Sobel in the primary.
"That is the cost of doing business," Stapleton said. "We had a clear friend running, someone who understood the issues that we care about. So we wanted to help that person."
CONSULTANT Stapleton testified that his group's "point of contact" with Sobel's campaign was her consultant, Steve Vancore. He said the consultant's firm, VancoreJones Communications Inc., conducted the research that gathered material for the campaign ads.
Vancore was paid about $19,000 through People for a Better Florida Inc., the affiliated group. Sobel's campaign paid him more than $230,000.
Vancore said in an interview Wednesday he did not talk to Sobel about the group's activities, though she knew he was a consultant to it. "We said, 'We're not showing Eleanor,' " Vancore said, citing the Ryan mailers. "She knew we were working together."
Stapleton testified that the group's mail vendor, Dylan Sumner, was also a mail vendor for "the campaign."
The group attacked both Ryan and Gottlieb, with each ad depicting the candidates surrounded by a pile of money. The Gottlieb ad targeted a failed redevelopment project in Hollywood.
The Ryan flier said taxpayers paid $12 million for Davie land worth $1 million.
RYAN'S RESPONSE Ryan contends an appraisal actually showed the land's value at $15 million. The $1 million figure refers to the assessed value on one slice of the property, say Ryan and his attorney, former state Sen. Walter "Skip" Campbell, a veteran trial lawyer.
The group stands by the gist of its ad.
"People for a Better Florida Fund went out and hired highly qualified consultants to obtain accurate information to educate the voters -- and that's what they did," said L. Martin Reeder, attorney for the defendants. "What was published we believe was accurate in all material respects."
Although there were "some technical discrepancies" by Vancore's firm assuming that one parcel was the whole site, the ad's message -- that Ryan sold it for higher than what the property appraiser listed it at -- was true, Reeder said.
The day after Sobel won the August primary, Stapleton sent an e-mail to supporters declaring Sobel's win "one of the most significant, and most rewarding victories for FMA PAC in the last 10 years!"
Sobel then sailed to victory in November to represent the Broward district, which stretches from Hallandale Beach and Hollywood to parts of Plantation.
Ryan sued in October. He said the negative pieces not only helped Sobel win but spread false information.
While it is too early to tell which side will prevail, the Ryan lawsuit is shedding light on ECOs, or electioneering communication organizations, third-party groups that can sidestep contribution limits and have played a major role in recent elections.
The groups are highly secretive and powerful because they can raise huge sums, often have vague names and send attack ads close to election day, making it difficult for voters to discern who is behind them.
That could become even tougher now that a federal judge recently declared that Florida's regulation of the groups was unconstitutional.
In the Ryan case, Sobel is not named as a defendant and, by law, could have had contact with an ECO attacking her opponents.
But the Stapleton deposition raises the question: If voters knew some members of her campaign team were actively involved in last-minute attack ads, would it have made a difference?
"The e-mails did indicate that she did have communication with those consultants that were working with this group," Ryan said. "So it's really for Eleanor to explain what her involvement was with this group."
Attempts to reach Sobel through her cell phone, offices in Hollywood and Tallahassee and her Senate e-mail were all unsuccessful.
As Ryan's lawsuit -- which seeks unspecified damages but does not seek to overturn the election results -- progresses, Campbell said he plans to depose Sobel, among others.
ANTI-SOBEL ADS To be sure, Sobel faced campaign attacks too.
Another ECO -- the Integrity Counts Committee, run by political consultant Russ Oster -- sent mailers targeting her 2006 promise involving the School Board.
When running for the School Board, Sobel told a reporter: "I'm going to commit four years to the School Board." Nine months after taking office, she announced her Senate bid, saying she felt she could do more for the district as a state senator.
In one flier, a girl writes "I will not tell a lie" on a chalkboard. "Our Kids Learn To Tell The Truth, Shouldn't WE EXPECT BETTER From ELEANOR SOBEL?" it asked.
"Lies, lies and more lies," Sobel said at the time.
Miami Herald staff writer Marc Caputo contributed to this report.
