Hallandale Beach City Hall. October 13, 2012 photo by South Beach Hoosier. © 2012 Hallandale Beach Blog, All Rights Reserved.
Not that this news will come as any great shock to anyone who pays close attention to what actually happens in Hallandale Beach, but if you didn't already hear, the word on the street courtesy of some of the people who were at the table themselves is that sphinx-like HB Comm. Anthony A. Sanders and former ten-year commissioner, general laughingstock and 2012 candidate William "Bill" Julian absolutely bombed at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's Editorial Board meeting Monday morning before their three-employees asking questions.
That group consisted of editorial writer Douglas Lyons, columnist Michael Mayo, and someone else whose name I have forgotten at the moment, speaking to the six City Commission candidates for a little over an hour at the Sun-Sentinel's HQ, following the one hour mayoral candidate interview with Mayor Joy Cooper and Comm. Keith London.
Typically, both Sanders and Julian seemed completely unprepared for what they were walking into, which is how they usually appeared to me and others observing them at City Commission meetings over the years, unprepared to get at the heart of any particular matter other than to repeat or mumble things they's heard city staff tell them prior to the meeting.
Talk about a lack of work ethic!
Sanders and Julian seem to have thought they were going to a friendly family Bar BQ dinner, somewhere where everyone would say nice things about each other, instead of a vetting panel of serious people who didn't care about their feelings who would be asking probing questions about their truly terrible and embarrassing records in office, as well as ask them to explain what their future plans were if re-elected and elected in their respective cases.
What Julian and Sanders also clearly hadn't counted on so much was not only the directness of the probing questions fired at them by the three employees of the Sun-Sentinel, but the glee and eagerness with which three of the other four candidates -my friends Csaba Kulin, Michele Lazarow and Gerald Dean- were prepared to positively hammer them over-and-over with cold-hard facts and votes they couldn't refute and even some embarrassing questions and admissions, too.
Surprise!
From all accounts, more than three years after-the-fact, Sanders could STILL NOT intelligently
explain to the Sun-Sentinel with a straight face what the specific facts and context of the
sale of his and his wife's land to the city were, and why,
a.) they received more money than the property was really worth,
b.) why there was and STILL IS no city plan for the building that taxpayers like you and me
paid $235,000 for, but only receive the measly sum of $20 a year in rent from a non-profit run
by Dr. Deborah Brown, who is,
c.) a longtime Joy Cooper ally who has been receiving tens of thousands of dollars a year in CRA funds and city grants.
The folks from the Sun-Sentinel simply were NOT buying the cock-and-bull story that Sanders was trying to peddle to the, and it didn't help him at all that Michael Mayo was one of the three people peppering him with knowing questions since Mayo has already written several fact-filled columns on the land transaction over the last few years that positively blister Sanders and unmask his carefully-crafted image and show him as the not-so-ethical pastor he is.
Mayo was all-too-familiar with the germane facts that Sanders has found far too painful to share with HB taxpayers in public at any point in the last three years, as I've been saying here on the blog for so very long.
Sanders basically cut his own throat in public and was exposed for what he is, which is fine with me.
I only wish there was video of it so I could play it for you here, so you could see it for yourself and many people in town could finally admit that they were conned.
By the way, lest we forget, thanks to a Bill Julian motion made in 2009, Sanders & Co. get to keep using the city-owned building for free until it is leveled... whatever year or
decade that turns out to be.
If you can believe it, despite you and me and seemingly everyone else here talking about it for so long -and so disappointingly, after the HB City Commission essentially changed the election rules in mid-course and dis-enfranchised us- the folks at the Sun-Sentinel did NOT know that thanks to the doings of that same City Commission, three candidates will be elected to office in three weeks, on November 6th, even though the ballots will still remain marked to Vote for No More Than Two -NOT THREE.
That particular point came up when my friend Csaba Kulin complained about the way the HB City Commission -thanks almost entirely to the partisan and selfish efforts of Comm. Lewy, a.k.a. Lewy the Liar- had completely botched the entire election process by cancelling the originally-scheduled January 15th vote for someone to serve the remaining two years of Comm. London's term, because he resigned effective Election Day in order to run for mayor against Mayor Cooper in three weeks.
(You know, where Lewy ignored the fact that prominent Broward Democrat Angelo Castillo already did in Pembroke Pines and what Charlotte Rodstrom was and is now doing in Fort Lauderdale that Lewy pretends that he's so very, very upset about here -London running in January for his old seat if he lost to Cooper.
But, of course, Lewy is far too chicken to ever say anything publicly about Castillo and Rodstrom, of course.
Nope, he just keeps his mouth shut because he knows what would happen to him, the unctuous career-politician-in-training, if Broward Dems got a whiff of what he'd been saying in HB about London and heard him say the same thing about Castillo and Rodstrom, even though it's the exact same thing,
yes, once again proving that for the young self-aggrandizing Lewy, always trying to play the angles, principles are more a matter of convenience than anything else.)
According to what Csaba told me hours later on Monday afternoon, the folks from the Sun-Sentinel were, literally, dumb-founded at finding out how this process had been mishandled -intentionally as we all know- and that the three of them seemed aghast that they did NOT know such a crucial fact before the meeting started.
To which I say, yeah, so imagine how WE feel, knowing that we are being prevented from voting for a third candidate in an election for an all At-Large City Commission where three candidates WILL be elected, not two.
