More intentional Hallandale Beach City Hall misdirection & deception re HB CRA - Media Trackers Florida has more proof of the unseemly behavior at City Hall that HB citizens recognize on sight from past experience: "Hallandale Beach Officials Failed to Document Contacts with Florida Lobbyist"

The chickens are finally coming home to roost in Hallandale Beach and they want an honest audit done on the city's scandal-plagued Community Redevelopment Agency, (CRA), so citizens can finally find out where all the millions of dollars really went. Above, a scene from North Beach, Hallandale Beach, FL. February 14, 2008 photo by South Beach Hoosier. © 2013 Hallandale Beach Blog, All Rights Reserved.

For reasons that I hardly even need explain to most of you regular readers of the blog at this point in the continuing controversy that is the scandalous Hallandale Beach CRA, and the efforts of the city's elected officials and top administrators to suppress any effort by Hallandale Beach citizens to get an honest audit of the CRA, this email of mine was sent this morning to lots of interested parties throughout Florida with an interest in making sure that South Florida taxpayers are not intentionally made monkeys of forever. 

Besides the trustworthy and hardworking elements of the local press corps -a diminishing number to be sure- lots of Broward's most well-informed citizens, civic activists, bloggers and a few selected elected officials, were Florida Governor Rick Scott, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Florida CFO Jeff Atwater and Florida state Senators Jack Latvala, Jeremy Ring and Joseph Abruzzo, as well as Broward Inspector General John W. Scott.

Most of you reading this already know perfectly well why the state legislators who are supposed to represent the best interests of Hallandale Beach's citizens in Tallahassee, state Senator Eleanor Sobel and state Rep. Joe Gibbons, are NOT part of the list.

Certainly things would be easier if they were anything but the colossal failures they've proven themselves to be over so many years on so many issues of interest to this community.
Not just unhelpful, but actual obstacles.

No, our small community's collective misfortune is that Gibbons and Sobel's perfectly dreadful track records in office, individually and collectively, over SO many years, consistently shows that they DON'T put our community's best-interests first, but rather their own, especially their own political futures.
That dismal track record makes them completely untrustworthy in every important respect that counts, especially when it comes to getting the truth for HB's beleaguered citizens out of a City Hall led by their imperious pal, Joy Cooper.

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Hallandale Beach Officials Failed to Document Contacts with Florida Lobbyist

By: Tom Lauder 

June 27, 2013

http://mediatrackers.org/florida/2013/06/27/hallandale-beach-officials-failed-to-document-contacts-with-florida-lobbyist

Just to confirm the validity of this post above, not that any is needed, since the facts are crystal clear, as of 5 p.m. Thursday, I'd still NOT received the copies of the text messages sent between lobbyist Judy Stern and Hallandale Beach Mayor Joy Cooper and HB City Manager Renee Miller that I requested in writing on June 12th.

Text messages that had one central goal in mind: preventing an honest and accurate audit of the Hallandale Beach CRA so that HB residents, taxpayers and small business owners could FINALLY find out where the millions of CRA dollars really flowed all these years with no genuine oversight or follow-up by officials.

Officials who were, in theory, supposed to do that as part of their official responsibilities -but didn't.

But as we have all learned the hard way, oversight and follow-up were simply words that did NOT exist in their lexicon for YEARS, with important files missing left-and-right and many documents missing or inaccurate in the files that actually were present.

In this most-recent case, Cooper, Miller and Stern were aghast about a June 4th public request to the entire Broward County Commission requesting an audit of the CRA performed via Broward County Auditor Evan Lukic's office.

Well, you already know what transpired, who said what and who did nothing at all to help HB residents get that long-overdue public accounting that's been denied us all these years by the same powers-that-be at HB City Hall who didn't want any more public scrutiny.

But then this isn't even the first time all year that public disclosure of public information has been a quaint and abstract idea in Hallandale Beach.

Yes, as previously mentioned, the same poorly-run city that DIDN'T publicly disclose its legally-required official Contacts list for well OVER two months, even while city officials, elected and administrators -inc.  the Mayor, City Manager and CRA Director- were meeting with real estate developers, at least one of whom, Stephen Riemer publicly admitted at a March 18th CRA meeting that he wanted the city to (illegally) use its power of eminent domain to buy-out small businesses near properties he  already owns near the FEC tracks, in order that he can build a large development there.

Presumably, after he and the city have chased-out all other existing businesses, however they can to help him personally, no doubt using CRA funds.

That's illegal in this state, of course, as the FL Legislature has made clear, but then lots of federal, state and local laws are routinely ignored in Hallandale Beach with the current crew in charge the past few years, with my blog an accurate chronicle of their years of mendacity and anti-democratic fervor.

As you might well imagine, those small businesses owners resent NOT knowing what's going on and NOT being able to get honest and forthright answers from the very people who are supposed to be working for them, not against them.

But here's what they see with their own eyes, right in front of their businesses: promised, overdue road improvements by the city delayed several times without any sort of public explanation, and after hearing Riemer declare war on them at a public meeting, they can't help but wonder if it's being done intentionally by the city to drive the businesses out, just as Riemer wants, using CRA funds.

Lots and lots of curious coincidences that always turn out the same way, eventually add-up to an interesting fact pattern that's hard to ignore.

There was deception everywhere when Riemer spoke at that March 18th HB CRA meeting against the city's long-promised funding of that CRA-funded road improvement program, which took place without the public knowing anything at all about those private meetings he'd held with city officials because the city didn't post them.

Though they had the opportunity to do the right thing, albeit, after-the-fact, and publicly disclose to the public that they'd met privately with Riemer, the city officials who met with Riemer never disclosed it. 

They acted like this was the first time they were hearing anything at all about Riemer's plans or concerns.

Yes, disingenuous is the word that comes to mind. 

But that's how things continue to roll routinely in a city where the spirit and letter of Florida's  Sunshine Laws are routinely ignored by the very people in charge of following the laws and enforcing them.

In case the link within the story above proves hard to pull up, it's at

http://www.scribd.com/doc/150219454/Stern-Hallandale-Beach

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Not in email:

Among the many recent predicates for the email above that help explain it, especially the situation on the city's Fashion Row area -N.E. First Avenue- that has, unfortunately, pitted small business owners against the City of Hallandale Beach, whose employees and elected officials have been arrogant, deceptive, and intentionally duplicitous to them, while blaming others for their own actions, are the following:

TUESDAY, MARCH 12, 2013

Future of Hallandale Beach's Fashion Row Arts District on N.E. First Avenue to be discussed at an important 5:30 p.m. meeting on Wednesday at Dekka; What, if any, are insurance executive and developer Stephen L. Riemer's strategic plans for the future of the N.E. First Avenue area, alongside the F.E.C. tracks?; More cases of déjà vu on Hallandale Beach's woeful website

http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/future-of-hallandale-beachs-fashion-row.html

FRIDAY, MARCH 15, 2013

Entrepreneur Luciana Preguerman and other Fashion Row shop owners in Hallandale Beach draw a line in the sand over the City Commission/CRA threatening to sabotage an already-approved and budgeted plan for street improvements they've been desperately waiting for, and are livid over the new CRA Director's inability to logically articulate why they're considering such a move. They want answers before Monday night's important CRA meeting at 5 p.m.

http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/entrepreneur-luciana-preguerman-and.html

It's raining cold hard facts again! Media Trackers Florida exposes the secret of Hallandale Beach's terrible After-School Special on Ethics starring Joy Cooper/Joe Gibbons pal & lobbyist Judy Stern; Some HB residents, previously on the fence, are finally seeing Joy Cooper's lack of character that we always knew was missing, a fact she confirmed herself years ago when she called yours truly a "Nazi" at a City Comm. meeting -where she thought I couldn't hear her- and then called HB Comm. Keith London "a Hitler." Yes, the same hypocrite who wants to lecture other people about civil behavior!

Hallandale Beach CRA accused of misspending $2.1 Million, Broward County Commission takes no action on audit request.
By Bob Norman, Reporter, bnorman@Local10.com, Published On: Jun 04 2013 05:17:10 PM EDT
 Updated On: Jun 05 2013 11:02:28 AM EDT
http://www.local10.com/news/hallandale-beach-cra-accused-of-misspending-21m/-/1717324/20421380/-/mcmla1/-/index.html
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#UNC Hallandale Beach CRA accused of misspending $2.1M: A report by the Broward County Office of Inspector G... bit.ly/17YATUG
— trish galla (@GallaTrish) June 4, 2013

State of the South Florida news media in 2013: A non-reporter is seemingly paying more attention to the biggest ethical scandal in Broward County than CBS4, NBC6, 7News and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. 
Surprise! 

* To give you an accurate idea of how badly things are botched at Hallandale Beach City Hall and the city's complete lack of any kind of transparency (or remorse to taxpayers) on this matter, the Broward Inspector General's preliminary and final report about the City of Hallandale Beach CRA -characterized by them as "gross mismanagement"- as well as the city's own response to them, have still NEVER appeared on the city's own website. 
Not once. 

But because of this Broward County Commission meeting that touched on the scandal, the city's response to the preliminary response IS on Broward County's website, but still NOT on the city's. Really. 
Who could make this sort of thing up?
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Lobbyist Judy Stern uses texts to thwart Hallandale CRA investigation florida.mediatrackers.org/2013/06/10/hal… @browardpolitics @browardbulldog @buddynevins
— MediaTrackersFL (@MediaTrackersFL) June 10, 2013

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MediaTrackers Florida

Hallandale Beach Mayor and Controversial Lobbyist Thwart Investigation of Financial Mismanagement

By Tom Lauder

10TH JUN 2013 AT 14:20

Hallandale Beach Mayor Joy Cooper and controversial lobbyist Judy Stern joined forces to prevent a Broward County Commission investigation of the misappropriation of funds by the Hallandale Beach Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA). Hallandale Beach residents asked the Broward County Commission for assistance after a Broward County Office of the Inspector General (OIG) investigation “identified numerous instances of gross mismanagement that stemmed from institutional deficiencies in the establishment, organization and function of the CRA.”

Read the rest of the post at:

http://florida.mediatrackers.org/2013/06/10/hallandale-beach-mayor-and-controversial-lobbyist-thwart-investigation-of-financial-mismanagement/

I strongly suggest you check back throughout the day for reader comments at the URL!

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Having nothing to do with this very meaty post below, I'll soon be doing a public records request for all 2013 correspondence between HB City Hall and lobbyist Judy Stern, since HB City Hall so completely tried to sandbag me on the Stephen Riemer request, taking well over a month to respond after they'd promised a response within five days.

All of this is a result of my trying to connect-the-dots on the fact that real estate developer Riemer has met several times with City Manager Renee Miller and CRA Director Daniel Rosemond without the city publicly disclosing that as required by state law, or the city's own ordinance that requires a public disclosure within 72 hours.

Instead, the Broward city where the buck rests with Renee Miller took almost three months.

Then, they insulted me by asking me to pay $677.18 for copies of completely extraneous documents that I'd specifically said I didn't want, i.e bury me under paperwork. 

Trust me, I can spot the rope-a-dope strategy from a mile away, so I didn't fall for it, but this should be a clear sign to all of you reading this that HB City Hall is once again engaging in their longtime practice of trying to frustrate HB citizens and taxpayers making valid public information requests, and choosing to play hardball with public information that should've been properly disclosed and made public MONTHS AGO.

I found this information from this article re a text message from Judy Stern to Broward County Comm. Tim Ryan to be especially amusing:

"Media Trackers Florida obtained text messages sent by Stern to Ryan’s office on the morning of the Commission meeting. Stern blasted whistleblower Keith London for bringing the item before the County Commission. She wrote, “Keith and his blogs are such twists of the truth.”

Amusing since I'd already contacted Comm. Ryan the week before the meeting and had shared more facts with him connecting-the-dots on this HB scandal than he could probably have known existed.

Plus, until Keith London left a message on my voicemail last weekend, a few days before he and Comm. Michele Lazarow spoke to the entire Commission, I hadn't spoken to him or Michele in-person or by phone in well over two months -March 31st.

But when you're Judy Stern, what are a couple more lies and half-truths to tell after a career of them?

That's who she is.

In any case, it's not a half-truth but rather the complete truth that I'm the person who discovered that Dr. Deborah Brown's little HB group was no longer considered a non-profit by the IRS -because they hadn't filing their Form 990's for years- and that COHB officials were clearly 

NOT performing even the most cursory due diligence or double-checking of documents.

Which is exactly what I told the Broward Inspector General's office last year.

AFTER posting it here on the blog first.

As if we didn't already know from their not-so-glittering track record, Judy Stern and Joy Cooper's understanding of the word 'truth" is NOT the same as yours and mine.

A distinction for which you and I are clearly very thankful.

Calling all Carpetbaggers! Repeat after me, "Requirements, what residency requirements?" Carpetbaggers in South Florida have it easy compared to their cousins in Calif. due to the lack of serious reporters here, but in both places, carpetbagging and ethnic identity politics often go hand-in-hand; LA Times: "Does this man live in San Gabriel or not? A residency challenge prompts council members to hold their own hearing -with sworn witnesses- to decide if the No. 2 vote-getter should be seated"; Is that a preview of things to come in North Miami Beach, where a Miramar resident named Dargenson is running for NMB City Commission, and thinks she'll win -largely because she's Haitian-American?

Calling all Carpetbaggers! Repeat after me, "Requirements, what residency requirements?" Carpetbaggers in South Florida have it easy compared to their cousins in Calif., but in both places, carpetbagging and ethnic identity politics often go hand-in-hand; LA Times: "Does this man live in San Gabriel or not? A residency challenge prompts council members to hold their own hearing -with sworn witnesses- to decide if the No. 2 vote-getter should be seated"; Is that a preview of things to come in North Miami Beach, where a Miramar resident is running for NMB City Commission and thinks she'll win -largely because she's Haitian-American?

If you ask me, it's too bad for South Florida's continually-beleaguered citizenry that FL state House Reps Frank Artiles, Joe Gibbons and Perry Thurston and FL state Senator Maria Sachs have never been forced by the powers-that-be in Tallahassee to publicly explain themselves and their very curious living situations.
Under oath 
In public.

Unlike Council candidate Chin Ho Liao in San Gabriel, CA, who was actually elected but not seated.

Oh, the great questions we'd all have all loved to have peppered our local political miscreants under oath with!

Speaking of carpetbaggers, if you haven't already been reading what straight-talking blogger Stephanie Kienzle has been saying with real vigor and much-deserved anger the past few weeks about North Miami Beach's faux City Commission candidate, Yvenoline “Yves” Dargenson -a woman who lives in Miramar, i.e. Broward County!- please do yourself a big favor and do so today via her blog, http://www.votersopinion.com/

You won't regret it because Stephanie gives you a very clear look at the corruption and illegality that passes for "normal" in South Florida politics and government these days, where far too many candidates and elected officials can seemingly break clear-cut rules about their prescribed conduct and behavior with relative impunity.

And the existing legal institutions that are supposed to keep people within the clearly-defined parameters of the law, instead, seem content to just shrug their shoulders and to let THEM dictate what the rules are to the public, putting everything upside-down.

Dargenson is the Broward County resident who running for a City Commission seat in a Miami-Dade city, and to both Stephanie and myself, she's someone who has a lot to to answer for publicly after the M-D Supervisor of Elections ruled that she lives in the City of Miramar.

But but based on what I'm hearing and reading, a Miami-Dade judge, Darrin P. Gayles, did
what M-D circuit court judges have been doing a lot of ever since my family first moved to Miami in 1968 -making bad decisions for the community and letting guilty parties walk.
Or, in this case with Dargenson, run for office in a county she does NOT live in.
No, it seems to have very little to do with upholding the state's laws or with getting justice for NMB's voters, to say nothing of actually adhering to Florida's Constitution.

Even more than usual, Stephanie has lots of great nuggets in her recent blog posts about the longstanding culture of corruption in NMB and North Miami, and actually makes the case that it's actually threatening to grow exponentially in NMB as a result of all the unethical goings-on in next-door North Miami that local and state law enforcement have been ignoring.

Ignoring it, it seems to me, in part at least, because so many of the people engaging in this
unethical political behavior in Northeast Dade are Haitian-Americans, a rapidly-growing voter bloc now compared to Non-Hispanic Whites in Miami-Dade County, and a demographic that is courted by candidates in ways that were not imaginable even thirty years ago, just a few years after I graduated from NMB High School, followed three years later bv my sister.

Perhaps nobody exemplified this cultural change as much as North Miami's oft-charged but never-convicted-thus-far incumbent mayor, Andre Pierre, though there are others on both sides of the border who are nearly as brazen.

Seriously, did you really expect the political crooks and their cronies in NMB not to notice the fact that nobody was being prosecuted in North Miami for what they do, no matter how self-evident?

Out in San Gabriel, California, you have the cancers of ethnic identity politics and carpetbagging at work, but with a Chinese-American patina, and a town that wants to go old-style New England and make the person accused of wrong-doing convince them that they have not broken the spirit and letter of the law.

Meanwhile in North Miami and North Miami Beach you just have... oh, right -the same things, just with Haitian-Americanss, instead.

Plus, thinly-disguised Black racism and grievance politics as both the facts-on-the-ground and reader comments to this piece make clear.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/05/04/3380678/north-miamis-upcoming-city-elections.html

Los Angeles Times

San Gabriel council deems itself judge over election results

By Frank Shyong, Los Angeles Times

April 27, 2013, 8:45 p.m.

San Gabriel Councilman-elect Chin Ho Liao was the second highest vote-getter in the city's March elections, but his first time on the council dais last week was as a witness under cross-examination.

The City Council voted not to seat Liao after resident Fred Paine filed a complaint alleging that Liao's true residence is outside of the city's borders. Though Liao has filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court to contest the council's vote, the city has also created its own hearing process to determine Liao's residency.

Read the rest of the article at:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0428-san-gabriel-20130428,0,4091862.story

I can't help but wonder if this is what the good residents of North Miami Beach can look forward to dealing with in the coming weeks if a sufficient number of Haitian-American voters there are prepared to simply cast common sense and the facts aside, and vote for a woman who doesn't even live in their city, simply because Dargenson is Haitian-American, too.

Well, it's not like local Miami TV stations have spent any real time covering what's been going on there, now is it?
No, today, two days before the May 7th election, CBS4, NBC6, 7News and Local10 are all guilty of NOT doing a single story on Yvenoline Dargenson.

Seriously, given what this woman is attempting to do by blowing a hole in even the most basic requirement for candidate eligibility, how can that be so?
How can every single English-language TV station news operation in Miami just ignore this?
That, my friends, is the low level to which South Florida journalism has sunk to -a complete lack of curiosity.

It's as if they're waiting for her to win before covering it, no?

For more on the very curious and perhaps even unethical living arrangements of FL House Reps Gibbons and Thurston and FL state Senator Sachs, please see an archive of Tom Lauder's recent pieces on residency requirements at Florida Media Trackers

http://florida.mediatrackers.org/author/toml/

It makes for interesting reading, and the fact that the Broward County Property Appraiser's Office has gotten involved so many times in these cases -esp. with Gibbbons, who clearly didn't comply with the law- only shows how egregious the lack of serious reporting on this subject has been in South Florida over the years.
These pols have positively dared reporters to say what is right in front of us.

I'm sorry to say it, but it also appears from the all the available evidence that some local African-American reporters, columnists and editors down here have been very easy on both Gibbons and Thurston for reasons that have nothing to do with journalism, but everything to do with either shared political ideology or friendship.
(Whatever happened to the proscribed arms-length relationship between reporters and subjects?)

I've commented on it here before, because otherwise, how do you reasonably explain the fact that the Sun-Sentinel's Douglas Lyons has scrupulously avoided mentioning this obvious residency issue for years, despite how often he has mentioned Thurston and Gibbons, quoted them and interviewed them?
What is his excuse, anyway?

Trust me, despite whatever it says on their resumes, Lyons and other reporters at the Sun-Sentinel and the Herald  don't think they have to answer to readers, and I know about him because I've given him plenty of opportunities over the past few years and all he's done is nothing but sit there like a bump on a log.
That's who he is, you shouldn't count on suddenly getting any candor from him that you can have any faith in.
Lyons considers his refusal to ask reasonable questions, esp. of them, a dead issue.

Just another reason that I hope the Sun-Sentinel is sold very soon and that there's a great house-cleaning/bloodletting there to make that newspaper something it hasn't been in years -relevant and worth reading.