FOLLOW me on my popular Twitter feed. Just click this photo! @hbbtruth - David - Common sense on #Politics #PublicPolicy #Sports #PopCulture in USA, Great Britain, Sweden and France, via my life in #Texas #Memphis #Miami #IU #Chicago #DC #FL 🛫🌍📺📽️🏈. Photo is of Elvis and Joan Blackman in 'Blue Hawaii'

Beautiful Stockholm at night, looking west towards Gamla Stan
Showing posts with label Charlotte Greenbarg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charlotte Greenbarg. Show all posts

Monday, September 16, 2024

Now is the time to make up for the lost opportunity of the past decade to make sure that the Broward Public Schools are firmly under the Broward Inspector General's purview, to root out unethical and corrupt behavior

Above: The hulking octop[us-like presence at 600 SE Third Avenue, Fort Lauderdale that serves as the multi-armed and entangled HQ for the Broward County Public Schools and the governing Broward County School Board


Originally posted Monday September 16th, 2024, 
Updated Saturday September 21st, 2024 

Most of you who know me even reasonably well, whether from any of the hundreds and hundreds of public meetings, civic association meetings or forums I've attended in South Florida over the past 20 years since returning from the Washington, D.C. area, largely from here on my humble blog, via my popular Twitter feed, or via my fact-filled observational and strategic emails over the years -IF you are on my mailing list- know one thing about me.
I have been focused like a laser-beam on ethics in local government and public policy in South Florida since long before I created this blog 17 years ago. Probably since my family first moved here in the summer of 1968, me, aged 7 years old, but a very curious and precocious seven year-old to be sure.
And, a kid quite positive that South Florida did NOT make sense the way other places so often did, however imperfectly. That clearly hasn't changed.

Back when the Broward County Office of Inspector General was originally proposed by the Broward County Commission, in large part because of increasing public outcry and the heroic efforts of my own district County Commissioner, Sue Gunzburger, YEARS after such an office was desperately needed, I had the somewhat unique distinction(!) of often being the only member of the public -in all of Broward County!- who actually attended the appointed Advisory Board's meetings.

Meetings that were at 8 a.m. sharp at the County HQ on Andrews Avenue, maybe a mile walk from the photo up above. 
Me being me, the type of person who enjoys having hard evidence of what I saw and heard when I'm making the argument for or against an idea or public policy -and to guard against occasional moments of boredom or even almost falling asleep in a large county room- I brought along my fully-charged video cameras and lightweight tripod.
And I recorded what was said -and by who- no matter how inspired or banal. and made contemporaneous notes on who was in the room, who they were communicating with, and what they were otherwise doing. Sh-h-h... lobbyists!

Yes, despite the fact that the meetings were deemed something important in the larger scheme of the county's efforts to regain the public's trust after so many scandals over the years, someone made the conscious choice NOT to have the meetings in the County Commission chambers that were already equipped with TV cameras, to make everything easy.
Instead, they were held in a much-smaller room. 
Without any cameras.

And, so, was NOT recorded by the County, just me.
I was always VERY aware of the fact that I was usually the only member of the public in the room, AND and that I had some pretty quality video of the BTS workings of government that nobody else in South Florida had, whether the local news media or other interested parties, like local elected officials.

To be kind, the Advisory Board meetings were very much a Poor Man's version of the Constitutional Congress in Philadelphia, but with air conditioning and so-so coffee in the back of the room.
It was there, right near the county-provided coffee, where I parked myself at every meeting I attended to make myself available for quick chats with the members in attendance. 
I almost always brought bagels + donuts along from home to keep myself fully awake and full of enough energy to pounce or text on my telephone at the first sign of mischief.
There, not so much holding court as guarding the waterfront, along with a thermos of hazelnut coffee I'd brewed beforehand at home, I took copious notes. 

Over a period of several months, I came to know these appointed members like the back of my hand: I knew who was always diligent about being properly prepared from the start and ready to push for stricter ethical standards in the county, and, of course, who was, well, generally unprepared, winging-it, and always looking at their watch, ready to throw in the towel if that had a quorum. 
And there were a LOT of times I thought that the latter was going to happen! 

From Day One, I was always mindful of the fact that the only thing preventing the members from giving up was the sure knowledge that the appointees definitley did NOT want to publicly embarrass their political patrons by making it seem like ethics u. Do no harm! 😠 

 Before she eventually moved up to Lutz from Hollywood, my good friend and well-known South Florida civic activist Charlotte Greenbarg also appeared at times early in the AM, speaking for both common sense and with a deep and genuine appreciation for understanding human behavior in such a weird political dynamic.
One, where many members of the Advisory Board not only didn't want to embarrass the person who'd selected them for the position over others vying for it, but also because I knew for a fact that many of them clearly had their eyes on running for elective office some time in the near-future, IF they weren't already an elected somewhere in the county, or an important person at some interest group in Broward used to flexing their muscles. 

Charlotte had years of first-hand experience dealing with the all-too-frequent and frustrating incompetency and failures of the Broward School system by virtue of being the much-respected head of its Audit Committee, and so had an insight into the realities of School Board's operation and (often pointless) direction that none of the Advisory Board members could hope to match. 

Charlotte and I were folks in the community at the time who were willing to actually show up in-person to publicly support the much-needed IG Office, and consistently spoke under Public Comments asking that the office be sure to include the Broward School system. 
The reason, of course, is obvious, because everyone who knew anything about how things REALLY work/works in the county, knew that some of the worst financial/patronage excesses and rampant, endemic ethical corruption and misbehavior was located there. 
Often, as we know from numerous investigations, hiding in plain sight. 

But nobody was willing to do the right thing, least of all, in the Broward SAO. 

 Unfortunately, most of the people selected by the county commissioners at the time to represent them on the board had very different priorities, and were NOT particularly interested in seeing the Broward School system be included, as well as see that the office cover lots of other things in the county that were common with such IG offices around the country. 
Naturally, me being me, before the first meeting, I'd spent a lot of time researching just those very things, so that as often as possible, I'd speak to the members before and after meetings about what could be done to make the office even more effective. 

Here's me in 2014, when there was a push to expand the Broward IG Office's areas of concern and responsibility.

 But as I learned years ago in electoral politics at the national and state level -and trust me, the people selected to the IG Advisory Board were VERY political- the #1 rule in politics is... to know your universe. 

People who didn't even think the office should exist were very vocal on the Advisory Board, so pulling THEM in the right direction was, alas, a losing battle. 
Now, the public in Broward finally has the opportunity to make up for that lost time! 

Sun Sentinel
Voters could expand watchdog role - Initiative asks whether Broward County inspector general's responsibilities should include the school district
Scott Travis South Florida Sun Sentinel
September 14, 2024

School Board elections are over, but Broward voters can still decide in November whether they want some new oversight to help the district root out waste, fraud and corruption.

A ballot initiative will ask those voting in the general election Nov. 5 to say yes or no to expanding the role of the Broward County inspector general to include the Broward School District.

Read the rest of the article at:





WSVN-7 News
Proposed amendment would expand authority of Broward Inspector General to include independent oversight of school board operations


Dave













David Bruce Smith 

Hallandale Beach/Hollywood Blog: http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/ 




Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

In light of U.S. Appeals Court ruling against President Trump's use of Twitter and Blocking people, when can we expect Broward School Board to publicly say when it'll conform to the spirit and letter of the law? Don't hold your breath!


Above and below, July 13, 2010 photo by me, looking south at the Broward County Schools HQ, 600 S.E. Third Avenue, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

In 2016, quite out-of-the-blue, I received an interesting Tweet from someone I'd never met or ever heard of before, Angela Greben, a San Jose, California resident. Among other things, Angela really hates government agencies and officials who seem to not think twice about violating norms (or even laws) about public records and transparency and what the public is entitled to expect in the way of access to public information. 

Her tweet caused quite a ripple after I wrote about it and what I thought it represented.
Though I've never spoken about it before, despite all the dozens of prior blog posts I'd written here about the feckless School Board, her tweet, and actually seeing that list of Blocked people, with my name on top of it, caused me to receive lots of email from concerned people all over Broward County, South Florida and points north and west whom I'd never heard from before.
People who shared my own misgivings about the bad conduct of the scandal-plagued and mis-behaving Broward County School Board.

That is to say, the Broward School Board as a collective entity, as well as it ragtag collection of constituent members and superintendents, and their army of supporters and flacks.

For you newcomers, take a look at this post from earlier in the year:
Culture of Corruption & Incompetency by Feckless Broward School Board, General Counsel Barbara J. Myrick & Supt. Robert Runcie in a Nutshell.
re The special Grand Jury impaneled by the Florida Supreme Court via Gov. Ron DeSantis investigating feckless Broward County Schools & its School Board: 
Broward education activists & taxpayers want you to make sure that Broward Schools General Counsel Barbara J. Myrick is one of first persons grilled. 
She has a LOT to publicly account for, as does nearly every School Board member
https://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/p/broward-school-board-supt.html

Yes, the whole cast of charcters at Broward Schools have been a frequent and popular target of my fact-filled blog posts and fact-based Twitter barbs ever since I started the blog twelve years ago, and then, finally got a Twitter acount under the nom-de-guerre @hbbtruth. 

Yes, as in Hallandale Beach Blog + Truth, because that's what this blog is all about in the end. 
Revealing the truth so that the public knows what is reality and what is, you know, Fake News.

To my own eternal regret and embarrassment, I was rather late to the Twitter party, especially given my ENFP personality, who I am in the scheme of things locally in this part of southeast Broward and the sheer volume of history I know as well as the number of knowledgeable and influential people I know who know even more than I do, including about the Broward School system's history, track record, and its various roster of players over the years, who've shared what they know with me.
People like Charlotte Greenbarg, for instance.

"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."
- Winston Churchill

So, as to that part above about having "enemies"... For those of you who are newcomers to the blog, I've been writing fact-filled, analytical blog posts about the serial corruption, incompetency and fecklessness by the Broward School Board on a whole array of issues for the past twelve years.

And, I've also written about them with regularity as well on my popular South Florida Twitter handle, @hbbtruth, since October of 2013, often buttressing some other person's good point with facts, or, necessarily throwing some cold water on someone via cold hard facts who wants us to believe something that can't be believed by anyone who knows anything about common sense or human behavior.

Trust me, there's a good reason that so many activists, personalities, elected officials and members of the South Florida or Florida press corps that you know and trust are Following me on Twitter and reading my latest post on this blog, which can net anywhere between 15,000 and 90,000 page views a month, depending upon the subjects du jour and the time of year, with, not surprisingly, "the season," October thru April being highest readership numbers for the blog.

 That means not just accepting whole what is written in South Florida newspapers or on websites or seen on TV, but of my actually going to meetings all over Broward County -and especially in Hollywood and Hallandale Beach- and meeting other concerned and curious Broward citizens and taxpayers who wonder about the same things I do: ethics, accountability, public oversight, conflicts-of-interest and power plays by certain parties and groups within the Broward education Establishment and the people who support it in the Broward business community, who make lots of money on the school system as contractors and vendors for projects needed and wasteful.

So, I have seen first-hand the incriminating reports and the damning photos and the files that have been so much in the news since 2007 surrounding the culture of corruption.

 As you might imagine, that sort of consistent public questioning of elected officials and administrators and a willingness to publicly challenge people personally to substantiate and back up what they say leads to lots of things.

On the one hand, it means that many people throughout Broward who make education one of their chief concerns -regular citizens, public officials as well as many local print/TV reporters and columnists- know from personal experience that when I say something, that I not only know of what I speak, but can also personally produce the incriminating evidence, or, know the very people who can produce it so that the public finds out the truth.

That sort of effort over a dozen years also creates all sort of friction with people who are supposed to be working FOR the public, including numerous past and current elected Broward School Board members, administrators and their staffs, who do NOT like seeing the truth being publicly discussed in a logical and reasonable way.
And even worse, discussed in print where anyone can see the facts and not have to accept their own particular spin on things.

 So that kind of effort is why I was on the Top Ten list of people whom the Broward School system has been BLOCKING on Twitter since 2016, as the Angela Greben tweet above makes clear.
Yes, I wear they're BLOCKING of me like a gold medal, and proudly so.


















Yesterday we all learned that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit had finally ruled in a case that has been featured dozens of times in U.S. news media over the past few years, issuing a unanimous opinion that President Trump has been violating the U.S. Constitution by blocking Twitter users who criticize or mock him.

Plaintiffs Buckwalter, Cohen, Figueroa, Gu, Neely, Papp, and Pappas (“Individual Plaintiffs”) are social media users who were blocked from accessing and interacting with the Twitter account of President Donald J. Trump because they expressed views he disliked.  The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University is an organization alleging a right to hear the speech that the Individual Plaintiffs would have expressed had they not been blocked.  The Plaintiffs sued President Trump along with certain White House officials, contending that the blocking violated the First Amendment.  The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Buchwald, J.) found that the “interactive space” in the account is a public forum and that the exclusion from that space was unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.  We agree, and, accordingly, we affirm the judgment of the District Court.

that he engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination by utilizing Twitter’s “blocking” function to limit certain users’ access to his social media account, which is otherwise open to the public at large, because he disagrees with their speech.  We hold that he engaged in such discrimination and, consequently, affirm the judgment below

The ruling leaves open lots of other interesting questions, like whether this will also apply to other federal, state and local elected officials, governments or agencies?

Read the court's opinion for yourself:







So in thinking about all of this yesterday, I knew that someone needed to ask a reasonable question to someone at the Broward School Board about its past history of Blocking concerned Residents like me on Twitter, given that South Florida's news media has not exactly jumped on this sort of story to the extent that I and many other civic activists believe they should have.

So, I thought of whom the most reasonable person was on the School Board whom I could ask.
That was an easy call.

It certainly isn't the feckless, foul-mouthed and Runcie-supporter who represents Hollywood and Hallandale Beach, Ann Murray, long a target of public criticism here on my blog and on my Twitter handle DOZENS of times when she has repeatedly and publicly engaged in misdirection and misrepresented both herself and her long track record of inaction, inadequacy and logrolling. 
https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%40hbbtruth%2C%20%23annmurray&src=typd

Because of the demographics of this part of Broward, our area should have an outstanding person on the School Board representing us. Someone who is known for their savviness, public demeanor, scrupulous ethics, their reliable, hardworking nature, and their willingness to admit when they are wrong and adjust their thinking to new facts and new realities.
None of which are qualities that have ever been associated with Ann Murray.
We could do SO MUCH better than Ann Murray, who was narrowly re-elected last November.


Given what I wrote about her last Friday on the blog and had earlier tweeted about her, it clearly wasn't going to be Dr. Roslind Osgood, now was it?

Mystery solved at Broward School Board! The Doctor did it! New York Times revealed that Broward County School Board member Rosalind Osgood used her African-American college sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, as a conduit to mobilize supporters of Supt. Robert W. Runcie at BCSB meetings earlier this year debating Runcie's future
https://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2019/07/mystery-solved-at-broward-school-board.html



In the end, I decided I'd use Twitter to ask School Board member Lori Alhadeff, someone who actually led the charge in March to make Supt. Runcie publicly accountable, to his one of his bosses, even though many of the School Board members defer to him so much on policy issues and decisions at meetings that you can well be forgiven for thinking that they work for him, not the other way around.
But not her.

 What Lori Alhdaeff wants doesn't seem like too much to ask for: she wants the truth, positive results and to end the reign of the faceless School bureaucrats who seemingly can never be held to account publicly, no matter how bad things get and have already gotten.
That's something and someone worth supporting, especially under the horrific and unique circumstances that led her to running for the School Board last year.
Her pain is real and omnipresent.




I'll keep you advised on what I hear about this, since we all know that unless they are pushed or shoved, there are far too many members of the South Florida press corps who simply are NOT going to see this issue for what it truly is.
A sign that for many people in government in South Florida, i.e the Broward School Board and the Supt. Runcie, there are rules for some people and special rules for special people.
And they think they are special people.

 No, the law has to apply to everyone if it is going to be both respected and followed.
No special rules for special people.
Period.



Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Friday, March 15, 2019

Culture of Corruption & Incompetency by Feckless Broward School Board, General Counsel Barbara J. Myrick & Supt. Robert Runcie in a Nutshell

Culture of Corruption & Incompetency by Feckless Broward School Board, General Counsel Barbara J. Myrick & Supt. Robert Runcie in a Nutshell.

 re The special Grand Jury impaneled by the Florida Supreme Court via Gov. Ron DeSantis investigating feckless Broward County Schools & its School Board: 
Broward education activists & taxpayers want you to make sure that Broward Schools General Counsel Barbara J. Myrick is one of first persons grilled. 
She has a LOT to publicly account for, as does nearly every School Board member



"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."
- Winston Churchill

 So, as to that part above about having "enemies"... For those of you who are newcomers to the blog, I've been writing fact-filled, analytical blog posts about the serial corruption, incompetency and fecklessness by the Broward School Board on a whole array of issues for the past twelve years.
And, I've also written about them with regularity as welll on my popular South Florida Twitter handle, @hbbtruth, since October of 2013. 
There I often buttress some other person's good point with facts they might not be aware of, or, necessarily throw some cold water and cold hard facts on someone saying something that's contrary to reality that can't be believed by anyone with common sense who knows anything about human behavior. 
There is an awfully LOT of that on Twitter from Broward County, especially among supporters of Supt. Runcie and the business Establishment who can't even do their own independent investigating, relying almost entirely for their numbers and talking points on the very people in charge and who've been elected who aren't getting the job done right.

Trust me, there's a good reason that so many activists, personalities, elected officials and members of the South Florida or Florida press corps, people that you know and trust, are Following me on Twitter and reading my latest post on this blog, which, depending upon the subjects du jour, can net anywhere between 30,000 and 90,000 page views a month.
(For the record, I'll be picking up the pace and be posting more posts per week now that I'll not be traveling quite as extensively as have since early last August.)

 That means not just accepting whole what is written in South Florida newspapers or on websites or seen on TV, but of my actually going to meetings all over Broward County -and especially in Hollywood and Hallandale Beach- and meeting other concerned and curious Broward citizens and taxpayers who wonder about the same things I do: ethics, accountability, public oversight, conflicts-of-interest and power plays by certain parties and groups within the Broward education Establishment and the people who support it in the Broward business community.
The latter being people who make extraordinary amounts of money on the Broward school system as contractors and vendors for projects, whether they're needed or completely wasteful.
So, all that said, I have seen, first-hand, the incriminating reports and the damning photos and the files that have been so much in the news since 2007 surrounding the culture of corruption.

Above and below, July 13, 2010 photo by South Beach Hoosier, looking south at the Broward County Schools HQ, 600 S.E. Third Avenue, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. 
©Hallandale Beach Blog, All Rights Reserved




















Above, Supt. Robert Runcie after a public meeting of his Listening Tour at the City of Hollywood's  Fred Lippman Multi-Purpose Center, which was the second time I'd heard him speak in-person, having previously heard him in March at Hollywood Hills High School, also in Hollywood. May 14, 2012 photo by South Beach Hoosier. 
©Hallandale Beach Blog, All Rights Reserved.

For more on the situation above with my friend Catherine, who has since moved to Las Vegas, please see parts 1 and 2 of my February 2012 blog post titled, 
Ann Murray -she's a phony, a bigot and a no-show. Consistently. That's what voters have seen of her tenure on Broward School Board so far -she needs to go!; update on projects at Hallandale High School

 https://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/part-1-of-2-ann-murray-shes-phony-bigot.html
https://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/part-2-of-2-ann-murray-shes-phony-bigot.html

 It speaks volumes about what has been allowed to go on in Broward County for YEARS without any of the know-it-all "geniuses" in the Broward business Establishment finally saying "Enough!"
It also says a lot about the bad reporting the past ten years in South Florida that with the exception of the Florida (Broward) Bulldog, no other media outlet in South Florida reported on this story that explains so much of what happens here.

As you might imagine, that sort of consistent public questioning of elected officials and administrators and a willingness to publicly challenge people personally to substantiate and back up what they say leads to lots of things.
On the one hand, it means that many people throughout Broward who make education one of their chief concerns -regular citizens, public officials as well as many local print/TV reporters and columnists- know from personal experience that when I say something, that I not only know of what I speak, but can also personally produce the incriminating evidence, or, know the very people who can produce it so that the public finds out the truth.

 That sort of effort over a dozen years also creates all sort of friction with people who are supposed to be working FOR the public, including numerous past and current elected Broward School Board members, administrators and their staffs who don't like seeing the truth being publicly discussed in a logical and reasonable way, and even worse, discussed in print where anyone can see the facts and not have to accept their own particular spin on things.
So that kind of effort is why I was on the Top Ten list of people whom the Broward School system has been BLOCKING on Twitter since 2016, as the Angela Greben tweet above makes clear.
Yes, I wear their BLOCKING of me like a gold medal, and proudly so.











In watching last week's important Broward County School Board meeting with an agenda item regarding the firing of Supt. Robert W. Runcie -whom I was an early fan of until two years later it was clear there was NOT going to any any of the required change in culture or direction- while I was traveling, I was so upset by what I saw and heard that despite promising myself that I would be calm and not LIVE TWEET responses to what I was seeing, I felt obliged to ignore that intuition and drop some knowledge on the Twitterverse, including some folks at the meeting or who were commenting upon it who didn't have the institutional knowledge that I had of many of the characters and charlatans who spoke on behalf of retaining Supt. Runcie.














































































































Proving yet again why = 4-letter word in : passive aggressive att'y makes deals WITHOUT knowledge of clients, elected officials, who are her BOSS, not the other way around. Another Barbara J. Myrick success story! 🤨


Hardly surprising that att'y Barbara J. Myrick, woman who thinks her clients work for her, wld decided that @ public meetings, she gets to make up rules to suit her moods

Of course, the public didn't vote 4 att'y Barbara J. Myrick, but she feels free to tell elected officials who ARE making policy what they shld do -ignore findings of past Grand Juries bec facts are a funny thing. WTF? 🤨

att'y Barbara J. Myrick, the runaway lawyer, continues to take advantage of her clients and use that to advance her own personal & professional interests. But nobody in voted for her! 🤨

att'y Barbara J. Myrick still acts like she's their boss: " was interrogated by Gen. Counsel Barbara Myrick last week on why she voted against new security chief & was told her reason was unacceptable." 🤨

“LoriAlhadeff has...helped us see that ’s is trending toward a rubber stamp... , that rules & laws need to be re-evaluated,... how Runcie and Myrick treat board members like subordinates, when they work for them.” 🙄🤨🤔

RT "Hasn’t Lori been through enough without having to put up with this? Myrick needs to be investigated by the grand jury not as an accessory but as a primary player and strategist for the BCSB Corruption Cartel. Florida Bar, are you listening?" 🤨🤔

When she says "they" she means "me." 🙄🤨🤔 MT att'y Barbara J. Myrick said SchoolBoard was not consulted before they took legal action to hold reporters in contempt of court. Said it was considered emergency decision.

Runaway lawyer's mea culpa, Aug 7, 2018 MT att'y Barbara J. Myrick said Supt. was not part of decision to hold reporters in contempt. "If you have anyone to blame, it's me. I take full responsibility for what occurred."

Suing reporters MT att'y Barbara J. Myrick compared the district’s actions to “leaving cars unlocked and someone comes and steals it and saying it’s not the thief’s problem that you left the door unlocked.” 🙄

MT Not meeting requirements of job description shld not disqualify 2 staffers fm high paid jobs, att'y Myrick said. But does disqualify candidate w/a PhD & MBA fm becoming a secretary, she previously said. 🤨

This is normal where, exactly? 🙄🤨🤔 MT member tried to vote against a job candidate over concerns w/process. att'y Barbara J. Myrick told her she’s not allowed.

Updated February 14, 2019 by Scott Travis of the South Florida Sun Sentinel

MT att'y Myrick makes Lori Alhadeff state reason why she was voting against Brian Katz. Alhadeff said bec some qualified applicants weren't interviewed/she had issues w/ process. Myrick said that's not an allowable reason. 🙄

----




Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)