March 4, 2009 photo by South Beach Hoosier
Bottom photo, left to right, seated: acting City Clerk Canada, City Att'y David Jove,
Comm. Keith London, Comm. Dorothy Ross, Mayor Joy Cooper, Comm. William Julian, Comm. Anthony A. Sanders, City Mgr. Mike Good.
Standing: principals Steve Fecske, President, and Sanders-supporter John Hardwick,
Executive Vice President.
Frankly, I was reluctant to get any closer to the dais than this during the agenda item,
given how testy Mayor Cooper was getting, actually making a motion to cut-off Comm.
London's line-of-questions about Steve Fecske's business experience,a not-unimportant question.
Shocker!
Commission rubber stamps Julian, Ross and Sanders promptly voted for the motion.
To me, the principals' Power Point presentation was, in a word, preposterous.
Literally, a montage of print ad bumpers like you've seem a million times before at a movie theater before the Coming Attractions reel starts, plus a couple of vague words thrown together on blank pages that sounded to me like they'd been ripped-out of a textbook on creating business plans they checked out of a library.
Vague, vaguer, vaguest.
They were clearly -embarrassingly obvious to me- attempting to make a play for a yes vote by bending over backwards to make it seem like this effort of theirs would somehow help the city's African-American community, especially youth, with lots of talk about internships.
But there was next-to-nothing about their presentation that was actually unique to the City of Hallandale Beach, as well as its peculiar place in the South Florida area, demographically
and geographically, and everyone knows that these issues affect every aspect of life here,
for both good and bad.
Well, except for Fecske complaining about two specific HB businesses not being interested
in their particular idea, and requesting help (from the city?) in getting those two businesses
to change their minds on a corporate level.
Personally, I've been to what seems at times like millions of audio/video presentations -good, bad, indifferent and quite spectacular- while working in Chicago and Washington for, with and against some of the largest law firms in the country, as well as some of the most capable and resource-rich corporations in the country, as well as in two separate efforts to bring MLB to Northern Virginia, as I've previously written about here.
(I worked on some of the largest corporate mergers in American history while working in Washington, doing my bit for the cause.)
Trust me, I was literally cringing -when I wasn't giggling inside!- so eager was I for you all to see as quickly as possible how absurd and feeble this business plan of theirs was.
Most troubling from an academic p.o.v. was that their plan completely ignores everything
we know about human and consumer behavior, the worst of all possible sins for a project
based on marketing to the public.
Guess what? People say one thing and do another.
You don't have to have read famed marketing guru and Kellogg professor Phillip Kotler,
or even had the pleasure of hearing him in person in a classroom like me, to know that,
yet these guys seem completely unprepared for clients to change their fickle minds quickly
after they see how poorly the plan performs.
That these guys didn't seem hip to that, only showed how deep a hole they've dug for
themselves, strategy-wise.
Sort of like the city's purchase of land without a particular plan for what to do with it, no?
I will try my best to get some of the video of this meeting onto my blog soon and also put
it on YouTube for you to see.
I particularly recommend Fecske's obfuscations about his background as Comm. London
asked him some tough-but-fair questions about his involvement with the adult entertainment
industry.
These were questions that came up after Mayor Cooper said something about not wanting
the city to have these TV sets on their property if they would be showing ads for the Cheetah.
Hallandale Beach's very own Cheetah!
I nearly lost it then when Cooper said the club's name, so often have I heard their ads on
WQAM sports programs!
To my way of thinking, London's questions tended to show that Fecske was at least slightly
exaggerating both his business track record and his ties to other companies that he said were
no longer in operation, one of which he headed and claimed was a $20 million company in
documents made public.
But London had a printout from the State of California website that said one of the companies
alleged to be kaput was actually still in operation as of yesterday, while another listed Fecske's
wife as the receiving agent.
H-m-m-m...
Fecske tried to make himself a martyr, and offered to answer questions in writing later.
Free business consultation of the week: Dude, you're asking for a loan of over $100K
from a city's CRA and you don't want to answer some easy questions about your own
business experiences?
Really?
After London got City Manager Good to admit that the city had NOT performed any background or credit check on Fecske, I just thought to myself, this sounds exactly
like something you'd see on NBC Dateline.
One where you didn't catch the beginning of the segment but when they come back from the very next commercial break and do their requiste show story V.O. recital for people just tuning-in, you absolutely know that before the end of the program, someone will be saying adios after having received mucho dinero from a small town promising them the sort of (high-tech) answers to their simple problems that they want to hear, leaving townsfolk a little chastened and a litle wiser.
And much poorer!
That Mayor Cooper and Comm. Julian called these perfectly reasonable questions of Comm. London an "interrogation," tells you everything you really need to know about the simpleton nature of their own questions, which were more in the line of positive affirmations for what this traveling businessman selling hope from the back of his wagon before heading off to the next city over the horizon wants to hear.
And did I mention that Mayor Cooper never publicly said anything about the public NOT being allowed to speak to the assembled citizens in the Chambers and those at home watching on the city's bare-bones cable TV channel would know.
Nope!
That's just not her style.
It was only after Arturo O'Neil and I walked up to the City Clerk's sign-up area on the side of the dais, separately, that the City Clerk, in a rather snippy mood, said that the mayor had used her prerogative and decided it wasn't an HB CRA meeting, and that the public would NOT be allowed to speak -about a loan from HB CRA funds that was originally to be $200K, then $125k.
Above, Hallandale Beach resident and civic activist Arturo O'Neill outside the HB Commission Chambers around 1:45 p.m. this afternoon, after he and I witnessed yet another unbelievable anti-democratic performance by HB's Usual Suspects at HB City Hall: Cooper, Good & Jove.
A lot of people say that's life in Hallandale Beach, that, in fact, that's why the management and editors of the Miami Herald haven't sent anyone here since June.
I forgot, what do they call that new journalism award they hand out to newspapers for NOT covering local news.
Oh right, The Rocky Mountain News Memorial Out-of-Sight, Out-of-Mind Award.
But honestly, to see Mayor Cooper display her sort of venal, autocratic despotism so brazenly today -with her poodle, Comm. William Julian snapping to attention when she left the dais for a few minutes- almost daring someone in the city or elsewhere to actually do something, like file a formal lawsuit or multi-layered ethics complaints against her and many other people
on that dais, esp. the ethically-challenged Julian, well, that day is getting MUCH closer
than she knows.
Queen Cooper is soon going to learn that her continuing fits of malevolent anti-democratic
attitude and tactics won't win her any points with people who can decide her future and
who don't give a damn about who she met with when she was in Washington, D.C.