another email of Mayor Cooper's, full of her typical
intemperate remarks, bad spelling and lighter-than-air
brand of logic, I'm happy to be alerting everyone to
some very interesting news.
Tomorrow evening, Monday the 7th, the Hollywood Lakes
Section Civic Association (HLSCA) aka "The Lakes"
is going to be hosting a SPECIAL MEETING regarding
the Diplomat Golf Course LAC at 7 p.m. on Monday
Dec. 7th at the Hollywood Beach Community Center,
1301 S. Ocean Drive. http://www.hollywoodlakes.com/
It's the building that's next to the county's Hollywood
Reading Room/Library on the east side of the street,
with the message board.
Since I can't recall whether or not the Hollywood Beach
Community Center still has a Coke machine, you might
want to bring along a drink or two from home, just in case.
I will definitely be attending.
They'll be seeing a presentation by the developers of the
Diplomat Golf and Country Club on what so many
of us feel is their absurd and out-of-proportion expansion
plans, made worse by their condescending sense of
entitlement.
As if the ownership group being a union males their
preposterous plans more palatable.
I assume it will again be Greenberg Traurig's Debbie
Orshefsky paired with Suzanne Friedman doing their
roving microphone Q&A thing, but I suppose they also
could also be joined by their transportation consultant,
since traffic is but the most obvious reason to reject
the proposal among many others, like it NOT actually
conforming to the city's adopted Master Plan.
If the HB City Commission is going to ignore its own
Master Plan, its key tool for long-term planning
-as the mayor herself is always reminding us-
particularly, the element about NOT allowing large
out-of-scale structures to be built on secondary roads,
then what was the whole point of the city hiring
EDAW to create one?
http://www.hallandalebeachfl.
Links for Citywide Master Plan and
Transportation Master Plan
http://www.hallandalebeachfl.
And when are we going to start seeing some public
discussion about what the individual City Commissioners'
priorities are among the options described by EDAW,
so that we can start seeing actual implementation,
so the plan doesn't become a series of great
recommendations that collect dust on a Hallandale
Beach City Hall shelf?
Instead of wisely spending time doing that this past year
at one or two public informational meetings on the
EDAW proposals themselves, like finally fixing-up
Chaves Lake and making that the sort of positive
resource for the community that all residents think it
ought to be,
http://www.hallandalebeach.
and which nobody is against, what we've gotten
so far is the priority of one unelected man who doesn't
even live here, City Manager Mike Good and his
proposal for a RAC.
That's a proposal that none of the HB citizens I saw
at any of the many meetings I attended over the past
few years on the city's Master Plan ever spoke about.
Trust me, if a city resident had actually stood up at
one of the meetings and said that all these proposals
were nice, but that their personal favorite was a
mechanism for optimizing and concentrating density,
after the audience's laughing died-off,
I'd have written that down and mentioned it
on my blog.
But nobody did.
Mike Good doesn't care about that.
Because he wants it, that's the city's new priority.
But nobody elected him.
You'd think that at a certain point, that would
actually matter, but HB Commissioners Dotty Ross,
William Julian and Anthony A. Sanders seem
perfectly happy to turn their derived legislative power
over to an unelected person and his over-paid staff,
so long as they can still drive around town pretending
that they're the ones with the power.
Pathetic!
Because the Diplomat's proposal has so many
self-evident, long-term negative implications for
the Quality-of-Life for the citizens of both Hollywood
and Hallandale Beach, many people in our community
have made a point of trying to become better-informed
about the true facts of the proposal, and have taken
the time and energy to appear at the often inconvenient
meetings and do some original thinking, and not
merely accept the HB City Hall platitudes
as either factual or the Gospel, as it were.
2009 Diplomat LUPA Staff Report 2009
http://www.hallandalebeach.
2008 Diplomat report prepared for City of Hallandale Beach
byThe Mellgren Planning Group
http://www.hallandalebeach.
If the Diplomat's case was so logical and compelling,
Comm. Keith London would've gotten a second at
the City Commission meeting in November on his
common sense motion to put the Diplomat LAC info
onto the city's website many weeks ago, to allow
everyone time to peruse it and properly digest it.
Then, regardless of what people thought of the issue,
whether pro or con, we'd all be basing our own
opinion on some commonly-agreed upon set
of facts in evidence.
In a normal American city, his motion would've
been quickly seconded and we'd all have benefited
from the time to analyze the information.
Instead, because we live in Hallandale Beach,
and things at City Hall are routinely done in a
deceptive and stealthy way, Comm. London's
common sense motion died for lack of a second,
and the information that the city ALREADY HAD
was NOT put on the city's website until just
28 hours before the afternoon HB P&Z meeting,
That's not by accident, that's the way that Mayor
Cooper and City Manager Good wanted it.
And because they didn't really care what you thought
or whether or not you had time to read the information,
Commissioners Dotty Ross, William Julian and
Anthony A. Sanders just sat quietly in their seats,
letting the motion die.
Ask yourself why they'd do that.
Correct -because they can
That's why these three individuals are called the
Rubber Stamp Crew
And as for Debbie Orshefsky's Power Point
presentation at both the jam-packed Community
meeting and the overflow HB P&Z meeting
last month NOT having anything written on them
saying specifically how many stories the condo
buildings would be 27-35, well, that's NOT
by accident, either.
Just to give you a head's up, if you live in a condo,
you might want to consider attending the
United Condominium Associations of
Hallandale Beach meeting on Thursday,
Dec. 17th at 7 p.m., at the Mar-Bay Condo/Hotel
ballroom, on the corner of Hallandale Beach
Blvd. and Diplomat Parkway, so that you can
see what's afoot politically.
And finally, congratulations to my friend
Michael Butler of Change Hallandale Beach
http://www.changehallandale.
Earlier this morning, his spot-on question about
Hallandale Beach City Hall, and Mayor Cooper
and the Rubber Stamp Crew's lax oversight of
City Manager Mike Good, was included on the
Mail segment of Michael Putney's This Week
in South Florida show on Channel 10.
See the screen-shots I took below.
See also:http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/bestof/2009/award/best-tv-news-anchor-845598/
http://www.justnews.com/station/269244/detail.html
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/columnists/michael-putney/
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/search/?keywords=%22Michael+Putney%22&x=21&y=10
