Michael Butler's Change Hallandale video: http://youtu.be/dyM5P3Kl6iQ
Here's the all-too-true back-story on the video above created by my friend, and fellow civic activist and blogger, Michael Butler of Change Hallandale fame.
(See more on Michael and his website at the bottom.)
In the summer of 2010, in a Hallandale Beach City Hall room where regular HB City Commission meetings are NOT held, the infamous Room 257, a room where the proceedings are NOT televised, and on an agenda item that was NOT previously advertised to the public, Hallandale Beach's City Commissioners discuss how much to pay in a bonus to then-interim-City Manager Mark A. Antonio, who'd been on the job for all of about six weeks at the time.
And talk about putting the cart before the horse, at one point, you actually hear Antonio, one of two city employee who work directly for the City Commission, tell the members to hurry up and make a decision on how much he should be given, because, as he explains, "his wife" wants to know.
That's both telling and appalling for all sorts of reasons.
You will also hear oblivious EIGHTY-something HB Comm. Dotty Ross making the sort of disingenuous crack we've come to expect from her -when she's awake that is.
The night meetings, well, those are a different story for her, as she'll often play possum and not say more than four words over 3-5 hours.
In this case, she condescendingly says something about "asking the blogger" about what they're about to do.
Dotty Ross was only too happy to give away thousands of taxpayer dollars at a meeting where the public didn't know what was going on, and in this case, a bonus to someone for just doing the job they were already getting very well-paid for.
With, I might add, NOT very much for him to point to in the way of positive accomplishments considering the sorry state of the city then -and now.
Yes, the same exact things in this small 4.2 square mile city that were screwed-up then, as you know from reading my blog -the deplorable conditions of the public beach, the public parks, the dark conditions of and security at city facilities...-are still badly mismanaged and botched now, and it's self-evident, not any great mystery.
And to absolutely nobody's surprise, as you can see for yourself, oblivious Comm. Anthony A. Sanders didn't really want to tax his brain at the meeting and is actually overheard telling his colleagues that he doesn't really care what the amount of the bonus is, they ought to just work it out amongst themselves and he'll okay it.
But the thing is, of course, Sanders is one of the five people elected specifically in this city to make public policy and make those decisions, not sit there like a bump on a log, and yet this is indicative of his behavior for 42 months, as I've been saying so long on this blog.
He'll let everyone else decide what to do and then he'll just apply his Rubber Stamp vote to whatever they say.
Yes, that's Comm. Sanders in action -waiting on the sidelines for the others to tell him what to say and do.
That's a lot of things, but that is NOT "representing."
Many of you have told me that you couldn't believe he really was as bad as I've said and written that you wanted some tangible proof of his sheer uselessness and waste of a seat on the dais, there, now you have it: Him actually admitting that he'd let the other Commissioners decide things.
This is the person who was going to make a difference?
Pathetic!
Many of you have told me that you couldn't believe he really was as bad as I've said and written that you wanted some tangible proof of his sheer uselessness and waste of a seat on the dais, there, now you have it: Him actually admitting that he'd let the other Commissioners decide things.
This is the person who was going to make a difference?
Pathetic!
It might interest those of you who are somewhat new to the blog to know that using their own publicly-revealed figures, in early 2010, the very small group of people working in the HB City Manager's Office received as much in salary as next-door City of Hollywood, this despite the fact that Hollywood is SIX times larger in land size, and with over THREE times the population size -37,000 vs. 140,000.
Chew on those figures!
For more on infamous Room 257 at Hallandale Beach City Hall and Mark Antonio's longstanding proclivity to not want to face either the facts or the music, see my post of June 10, 2010 about his role in city employees intentionally preventing me from attending a public meeting, which, when I finally got up there, was mysteriously cancelled.
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/latest-unethical-lowlight-at-hallandale.html
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CHANGE HALLANDALE BEACH
- A fact-based website run by my friend and fellow Hallandale Beach civic activist, Michael Butler, which goes directly after the longtime incompetency and crony capitalism at Hallandale Beach City Hall with cold-hard logic, quantifiable figures, graphs, charts and videos.
The kind of evidence that Mayor Joy Cooper, City Manager Mark A. Antonio and her Rubber Stamp Crew -i.e. City Commissioners Dotty Ross, Anthony A. Sanders and Alexander Lewy- CAN'T refute with any of their serial lies, half-truths, mis-statements of fact, or exaggerations from the dais.
Theirs is a strange Looking Glass world of un-reality that can quickly confuse -or frighten!- normal people not prepared for such self-evident mendacity.
Which is where Michael comes in stage-left and I come in stage-right...
See the evidence for yourself and see what's REALLY going on in Hallandale Beach from Michael's well-informed perspective at http://www.changehallandale.com
* March 10th, 2012 update
I received a few emails from readers yesterday telling me they were having problems with the Change Hallandale website, though it seemed fine when I was on it Friday afternoon. I forwarded one of the comments to Michael and he responded thusly:
Hey David, thanks for the note! The site is still up although its transitioning to Wordpress….
