Well I guess it'll come as no surprise to those of you who have come to this space from time to time and become attuned to the strange backward ways of Hallandale Beach, that despite my specifically making a point of publicly requesting it the first week of January of 2008, 57 weeks ago, at the HB City Commission's city-wide public meeting to discuss the city's proposed Master Plan as well as their Transportation Plan, guess which South Florida city nestled along the FEC tracks won't be hosting a second-round round of SFECC public meetings for its own citizens over the next few weeks?
Shocker!
Hallandale Beach, forever the public policy orphan!
This, despite my very public conversation via microphone with HB City Manager Mike Good there, wherein he implied his office would "get right on it" since it seemed so obvious.
Last year, when Mayor Joy Cooper was head of the Broward League of Cities, she had no trouble in quickly finding a public space within the city where she and her allies/cronies within Broward County could speak out against the FL Constitutional Amendments, securing Hallandale High one night, and even running ads in the local newspapers, which is actually how I came to first find out about it.
(Right, Hallandale High, the F-rated school that somehow never has its poor academic standing brought up publicly at HB City Commission meetings, even when efforts were made recently by Comm. Anthony Sanders to utilize taxpayers funds for FCAT practices and/or workshops for their students -even though some kids there live in Hollywood.
Where's the accountability?
How many kids will participate and how much will it cost? That doesn't really seem too much to ask -in advance.)
From accounts of people I know and trust who attended the Broward League of Cities event, they apparently tried to tilt the proceedings so that it would only be people against the Amendments who spoke, but apparently Broward Property Appraiser Lori Parrish showed-up to attempt to balance the equation, somewhat, ruining the League's plans for a one-sided event, which, to my mind, was clearly a press conference masquerading as a "public forum."
But what do Cooper & Company actually do for the citizens she's supposed to be representing?
Well, in the case of the SFECC, nada.
Why?
Perhaps because, right now, in my opinion, SFECC can't immediately help Joy Cooper acquire more power, name recognition or fame, which in my opinion, based on her own actions and words, is what she's all about these days, witness her rather pathetic and clumsy name-dropping of Bill Clinton's name in her recent so-called Sun-Times column.
That's the weekly column that's always chock-full of so many laughable spelling, syntax, and metaphor errors, not to mention, clear mis-statements of fact. In fact recently while drinking some coffee, someone walked up to me and asked me -in all seriousness- if I'd seen her recent absurd reference to the effect of "Yang and Yang."
No doubt she meant ying-and-yang, but how does she not know that, or ever check for spelling mistakes?
I'm a very good speller, but I still usually remember to use Spell-check on my computer before sending something out.
Somehow, coming on the heels of the embarrassing travel expense stories in the Sun-Sentinel by Jennifer Gollan and the Herald's subsequent editorial, Cooper didn't mention the fact that she's spent more than $3,000 for a new office at HB City Hall, even though there was nothing wrong with her old office.
She just wanted a new one.
That planned one-sided meeting by Cooper & Company at Hallandale High recalls the city's own unintentionally hilarious meeting later against the Amendments at the HB Cultural Center, wherein City Manager Mike Good, not some independent third-party, conducted the entire meeting, even to the point of using his own property bill as a reason to be against it, though he was not a good example since he'd recently moved within the past few years.
That Mr. Good lives in Cooper City is his choice, of course, but it underscores the fact that far too many other HB City Hall folks in charge live up around there, so see next-to-nothing of the city on weekends, like the sad beach conditions beach-goers encounter, or the complete lack of routine police patrols there.
And -shocker!- the City of Hallandale Beach also didn't invite anyone from the other side of the issue to appear, so residents could make-up their own minds, based on the facts, not the city's mis-information campaign.
As you know well from my past postings here, that's how they do things in this part of Broward County.
For those reasons, I'll instead be attending the SFECC meetings in Hollywood tonight and in Aventura on the 24th.
And this time, I'll remember to bring my camera!!!
If you haven't already done so, I invite you to please take a look at some of the recent changes my friend Michael has made to his Change Hallandale website,
He's gotten a great response since starting it, expanding the base of people who know exactly what's going on in plain sight in Hallandale Beach, and how that compares to other cities in the region.
His facts, all independently-sourced, speak volumes, which is why they so confound the folks at HB City Hall.
They can't argue the self-evident facts-on-the-ground in the city, policy or process, so instead, they obfuscate, malign and take umbrage at informed and concerned citizens who refuse to take their word for anything.
This was perfectly evident to everyone during the Public Participation portion of the City
Commission meeting two weeks ago, when someone asked about those very facts.
After hearing Mayor Cooper say in response to a HB citizen, something along the lines of residents needing to speak to the people in charge and the people who knew the answers,
after spotting the city's DPW manager, William M. Brant, sitting in the back of the City Hall Chambers, like he didn't have a care in the world, still peeved at the months of inaction on beach conditions I'd witnessed, I took the opportunity to lambaste him and the Dept, for STILL not having a single blue recycling bin on the beach -much less, an appropriate number in convenient places- more than SIX MONTHS AFTER Mike Good specifically said at the city's Budget meeting in August that it would happen.
Well, I was at North Beach soon afterwards, on Sunday afternoon the 8th, reading the Herald, the NY Times and the NY Post, while also noticing the very visible beach erosion that had sand disappearing less than a foot from in front of the lone lifeguard stand there.
(It was a two-foot drop, running south towards The Beach Club for just about a block. In case you missed it, see News-4's Michael Williams' excellent report from early February: Hollywood & Ft. Lauderdale Beaches Want Their Sand
And there at the beach, four days after my public comments, showing the city's typical apathy and incompetency, there was still not a single blue recycling bin around that busy part of the beach, despite all the dozens and dozens of such bins the city owns that are in storage.
That's a cold hard self-evident fact that my camera documented with photos that'll appear on my blog soon, with earlier photos I've taken over the past six months of the invisible blue recycling bins.
"No, as a matter of fact, I really don't have to take their word for it, do I?" I said laughingly
After looking at this official response to Hallandale Beach Commissioner Keith London's public records request, after I asked him about it after the fact, one of the things that really jumped out at me was the fact that, for whatever reason, City Manager Good's office thought to toss Commissioner Anthony Sanders' office costs in here, too, even though that information was NOT specifically requested by Comm. London.
September 7, 2009 photo of Gulfstream Park Racing & Casino
