Above, the Hallandale Beach City Hall monument sign on U.S.-1 and S.E. 5th Street, across from Gulfstream Park Race Track & Casino and the Village at Gulfstream Park retail complex, as photographed on February 20, 2013 and continuing this week. The sign that, thanks to the longstanding unsatisfactory performance of the city's DPW, has lights that haven't worked properly at night since BEFORE new-ish City Manager Rene Miller first showed-up last June. Eight months ago.
And which you can only see at night, below, when you walk up to it with your camera and use a flash!
Speaking of visioning, that's a form of vision, too -myopia.
This is a slightly-expanded version of an email of mine from four days ago about how things were really going here in Hallandale Beach two months into the new year -and eight months into the regime of the new City Manager, Renee Miller.
It was prompted by a number of conversations I've had with weary HB residents and exasperated business owners, and informed people on the outside looking in with concern.
Everyone has the same basic question about the new City Manager - "Where are all those positive changes in attitude and organizational culture we were promised at HB City Hall last year?"
In Ft. Lauderdale, Broward County's largest city, its active corps of high-minded citizen's input, with lots of big problems on the plate to solve, plans for its future to the extent they can, with the resources they have, and that includes the public.
Meanwhile in the City of Hallandale Beach, its taxpayers, residents and small business owners are treated like outliers, and are NOT allowed to speak at HB's Visioning meeting which ran all day on a weekday and was NOT televised or recorded.
I guess, possibly due to Mayor Joy Cooper's fear that constructive criticism and suggestions by concerned people who live here and care enough to actually show-up and participate, unlike 99.99% of city, might interrupt the powerful intellectual firepower being displayed up on the dais by the HB City Comm. at what was reputed to be a public meeting, one that was, sadly, NOT recorded for either posterity or later viewing by the city's own citizens.
Which, of course, is wholly consistent, since the "public meeting" was also NOT mentioned on the city's own website, either.
Talk about a circle of negative reinforcement!
Yes, like a cartoon character, the city's elected officials and administration continue to chase their tails and believe they're really making progress, when instead, all they're accomplishing is continuing to depress the morale of their own citizens.
In the process, continuing to ruin this city with their longstanding myopia that fails to see opportunities right in front of them in equal measure to their inability to see the longstanding problems that exist mostly due to their own laissez-faire oversight and management practices.
Myopia is a form of vision, too, just not the particular one you want when tens of millions of tax dollars and your own family's future Quality-of-Life is concerned.
And so it goes in Hallandale Beach...
-----
Broward Bulldog
Fort Lauderdale draws up vision for the future
By Ann Henson Feltgen, BrowardBulldog.org
FEBRUARY 19, 2013 AT 6:23 AM
Within the next few months, if city commissioners approve, Fort Lauderdale residents will have the option of receiving and paying their bills for city services online. The savings in postage and personnel will be used to purchase shade trees for residents who use the online pay system, or be placed elsewhere around the city.
That’s one proposed outcome of a new plan, called Vision Plan 2035, offering residents’ views of what the city should become.Read the rest of the article at:
http://www.browardbulldog.org/2013/02/fort-lauderdale-draws-up-vision-for-the-future/
So what happens when you tell the South Florida news media what is going on here, and specifically, about the public being barred from asking questions at the City Commission's annual day-long Visioning meeting the past few years as they discussed -usually with a taxpayer-paid consultant getting a $5-10k for a few hours- what THEY would like he city should be like in the future.
Without the public being able to comment at all on the sort of predictable brain-dead ideas and expensive schemes involving crony capitalism and taxpayer dollars that they love?
.
Well, here in South Florida, when the news media is told about such things -and more, as I have dozens and dozens of times- typically, the reaction of the news media is to just just shrug their shoulders and ignore the story altogether. :-(
