Why is Hallandale Beach City Hall allowing Peter Deutsch's REQUIRED Ben Gamla public meeting at a religious facility, instead of HB Cultural Center?

Peter Deutsch desperately wants to make the facility above another campus of his Ben Gamla Charter Hebrew School empire, for which he and his financial partners will be paid over $2 million a year by the Broward County School system if the HB City Comm. gives him the zoning variance he needs to build the K-12 project in that quiet single-family home neighborhood.
April 30, 2010 photos of Hallandale Jewish Center by South Beach Hoosier

Last Thursday, April 29th, I sent out an email around the area saying the following:
By 5 p.m. Friday, this community's citizens ought to demand an official explanation from HB City Manager Mike Good on why he has okayed a REQUIRED public information meeting on May 6th for Ben Gamla Charter School at the Hallandale Jewish Center, instead of at the much-larger city-run HB Cultural Center, like every other single developer or project has been required to do.
Why the special treatment for former Congressman Peter Deutsch?

And why were they NOT required to run a public notice for their required information meeting in the Herald like the Diplomat was last year, below?
Again, why the special treatment?


This was published in the Miami Herald on 10/25/2009

These questions about special treatment afforded Peter Deutsch and the Ben Gamla Charter School proposal are not just ones that are percolating inside of my head, but also in the heads of many other concerned Hallandale Beach citizen taxpayers, who are not at all happy with the way this process has been handled, going back to last year.

It's an especially relevant question after what the community witnessed by Deutsch and his associates last year.

First, their rather creepy self-evident behavior at the HJC, when after being greatly surprised at the number of people attending who were opposed to their project -for a VERY POORLY noticed public meeting that the City of Hallandale Beach all but winked at- the Ben Gamla people intentionally played around with the building's air conditioning in order to make it so hot and miserable that opponents would start leaving.
Talk about an unfair home advantage!

An eyewitness to this is a friend of mine and was standing right next to HB City Manager Mike Good at the time and pointed it out to him.
I'm further told that even Good seemed somewhat shocked they'd be so obvious about what they were trying to accomplish.

I don't believe this location decision on the information meeting is appropriate, and think it sets a very bad precedent for all sorts of logical and legal reasons.

It seems that in Coral Gables, regardless of whatever other problems they may have at City Hall, they seem to prefer required public information meetings on Charter schools actually be held on neutral city property, NOT religious property.
We should follow suit.

Miami Herald
April 28, 2010
POSTPONED: Charter school meeting moved to May 7
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/28/1602750/postponed-charter-school-meeting.html

The last time this Ben Gamla proposal was in the news was five months ago, in early December.

South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Ben Gamla Charter School proposed for Hallandale Beach
By Sergy Odiduro South Florida Sun-Sentinel
December 6, 2009

A proposed charter school in Hallandale Beach is getting the cold shoulder from some residents.

Those opposed to the Ben Gamla Charter School are hoping that Peter Deutsch, the founder and former U.S. congressman, will seek an alternate site.

"We understand that Mr. Deutsch is very enthusiastic about his project, but we just don't think this is a good area," said Gerry Brady.

Brady joined a roomful of residents who voiced their disapproval during a recent meeting hosted by Commissioner Keith London at the Hallandale Beach Cultural Community Center.

London said one of the goals of the meeting was to provide answers to some of the community's questions.

"This was a unique opportunity to come face to face with the developer," he said.

The often-contentious exchange left some people calling out their complaints, including one woman who worried about all the noise it would cause.

"My bedroom window is just seven feet from where all this action is going to take place," she said.

Deutsch is hoping to move the school into the Hallandale Jewish Center at 416 NE Eighth Ave.

Ed Napolitano is convinced this is a ruse for taxpayers to foot the bill for a religious school using public funding.

"They're trying to use this charter school nonsense as a loophole," he said.

Others worried over the increased traffic they say would be brought to the area.

"This is a nice quiet neighborhood," said Etty Sims. "We already have the traffic coming in from the racetracks."

Deutsch countered by saying that he's revised plans submitted to the city in order to address residents' concerns.

"This is a plan that is in response to what the neighborhood wanted," he said. "I think that we have made pretty significant changes. We have decreased the number of students from [852] to 600. We're also going to put up a 6-foot solid wall plus landscaping to separate the property from the homes."

Traffic, he added, will be mitigated by the smaller number of students and by rotating dismissal times.

"Theoretically, there should never be cars waiting in the road to get into the school, he said.

He was emphatic in saying that it is not a religious school.

"This is not a Jewish school," he said. "This is a dual-language Hebrew English school. We cannot be a Jewish school. That would be illegal ... and if we did anything illegal, we would be shut down. Period."

This is not the first time Deutsch has had to answer questions about Ben Gamla.

In 2007, when he launched the first Ben Gamla charter school in Hollywood, he faced opposition, and school district officials temporarily suspended Hebrew lessons while they sent in experts to scrutinize the curriculum.

After several revisions, the board unanimously approved the lesson plans, paving the way for the school to flourish. Ben Gamla in Hollywood now has a waiting list to enroll.

Since then, Deutsch has seized the opportunity, announcing plans for additional locations in Miami-Dade and Broward.

Some Hallandale residents, however, were not convinced.

"It's like a David and Goliath type of issue here," said Jacqueline Crucet. "Peter Deutsch knows politics. We're all working-class, middle-class folks who have to get educated on the system and how it works and on the issue itself. We've made public statements at commission meetings. We've organized together. ... We want to at least go down fighting on it."

"If [a commissioner] votes for this, I am voting against them in the next election," Brady said. "That's not a threat. That's a promise."

-------
For the record, I note that it was not until the October 2009 HB Planning & Zoning meeting that the city definitively stated for the record that the RAC's eastern border north of HBB was the West side of N.E. 8th Avenue, and so did NOT include the area across the street, adjacent to the Hallandale Jewish Center.

As that critical meeting on Thursday draws near, I'd like to share some well-chosen words on the Ben Gamla project, as well as on the supercilious antics of bully-boy Peter Deutsch, who really took his large ego and sense of entitlement into hyper-drive last year at one of Comm. Keith London's monthly Resident Forum meetings.

Deutsch publicly declared to the crowd that nobody-but-nobody in the city, county or state could stop him from getting what he wanted.

When an older gentleman at the meeting -where Deutsch spoke for about 80 minutes- asked Deutsch a question he didn't particularly care for, in front of a crowd of Hallandale Beach citizens he ought to have been trying to inform and charm, Deutsch responded by striking his classic bully posture, and actually had the nerve to mockingly ask the older HB resident just who he though he was to be asking him such a question.

Deutsch played the bombastic bully-card to the hilt, and, essentially dared HB residents to stop him, implying that it was already a 'done deal,' and actually saying that we were all powerless to stop him, as if Peter Deutsch and his investor pals were entitled to whatever they wanted in Hallandale Beach, while we get all the additional traffic -twice a day.

Sadly for us, this is YET ANOTHER instance where completely invisible School Board member Ann Murray's complete betrayal of her pro-reform campaign promises has real negative consequences for the community, just as is the case with HAAS, since from what I have been told by several people, Murray is NOT at all interested in opposing bully-boy Deutsch publicly in any way, shape or form.

If there is a bigger disappointment to me in Broward than Murray, I don't know whom that could be.
She is a complete empty-suit, mind and body.

Speaking of that meeting where Deutsch threatened hell and brimstone for anyone publicly opposing him, HB residents attending the meeting reacted VERY, VERY NEGATIVELY to Deutsch, as my cell phone and email inbox literally blew-up with more angry and outraged comments about that performance than any other single issue since I started my humble little blog.

In fact, a good friend's teenage daughter was so incredulous at what she'd seen, that days later, she actually felt the need to do an impression of Deutsch's tongue-lashing to that man to show how upset she was.

Seriously, how creepy do you have to be to get kids to immediately turn on you and size you up as a first-class bully and jerk the first time they ever see you?
Well, I guess we have our answer, no?

Like I've said so many times, in emails, on the blog and in personal conversations with some of you, when you really get right down to it, Peter Deutsch is really quite the insufferable bastard.

There's a reason that his reputation on Capitol Hill was what it was.
He is all about whatever is best for Peter Deutsch and his friends.
Period.
To him, you are nobody.

And if he has to threaten or sue to get his 852 students into that single-family HB neighborhood -and their parents cars, twice a day- he will do just that. Deutsch publicly dares anyone to stop him, and it's pretty clear to me from all the available evidence that Mayor Cooper has already caved-in on this issue.

In all sorts of important ways, starting last year when she continually showed her lack of proper preparation by repeating her nonsensical and inaccurate remarks about what form the school would take, grade-wise, and more importantly, on the actual number of proposed students, she showed me that she doesn't want to publicly challenge or anger Peter Deutsch.

Whether that's done for her future political purposes or not is a judgment you'll have to make on your own, but I already have my suspicions.

Regarding the problem of the 852 kids and their parents' cars that Peter Deutsch and Co. want to bring into a residential HB single-family neighborhood, I'm told that a P&Z meeting
on Ben Gamla will take place in June.

Everyone needs to know what sort of self-righteous jerk we're really dealing with, and what's at stake for this community, where there are practically no White students attending the high school bearing this city's name.

There's a very good reason why Peter Deutsch was among the least-liked FL elected officials in Washington while he and I were both living there.

Not just among my well-informed and opinionated friends who were also from Florida, and who worked on the Hill and throughout the federal agencies and interest groups, but among other FL reps, too.
People I'd regularly see at parties and functions pretty regularly.

In fact, he's the same guy who hired a Harvard college student to be his number one staffer in Washington, an AA, while the kid was still up at Cambridge.

That's how smug and condescending he is.

People on the Hill were aghast at that decision for many reasons, but they also knew that his volatile personality was such that he would never earn loyalty and thus a party leadership post, or become an important committee member, and so that hiring decision was seen for what it was,
Deutsch setting himself up for some other position on the political food chain.

Last spring, following an email that I sent around, I received a phone call about Ben Gamla's application in HB from Akilah Johnson, who wrote this blog post below, and most of the stuff on Ben Gamla the paper has written, ALL of which has been extremely positive, but without ever writing anything about ANY of our legitimate concerns in HB.

Since then, she has not returned any phone calls of mine, including the one I made filling her in on Peter Deutsch's really outrageous threats at Comm. London's December meeting, that so freaked everyone out.
Just something to think about when you read her articles and blog posts.

By the way, nobody has commented on her blog post on their Ed blog web page. You might want to consider doing that if you feel the urge.
Especially since Mayor Cooper has never held a city-wide forum or meeting of the City Commission on the sad state of education in this city since I returned to South Florida in Oct. of 2003.
Why not?

The high school has received poor grades two years in a row; is she waiting for three?
And lest you forget, the school also serves kids from Hollywood, whose parents surely must wonder what it takes for HB City Hall to get off their butt and get more involved in changing the mix of options for kids in the area.

From Sun-Sentinel's Education blog: http://weblogs.sun-sentinel.com/educationblog/ http://weblogs.sun-sentinel.com/educationblog/2009/11/hallandale_to_school_board_don.html

Hallandale to School Board: don't close our schools

Posted by Akilah Johnson
November 20, 2009

As it specifically affects the beleagured residents of Hallandale Beach, where the local public schools are poor-mediocre, where the rampant White/Middle Class Flight to other schools is common knowledge, the idea of telling HB taxpayers, parents and students who want REAL options -not marketing-driven educational choices which don't DIRECTLY
address the needs of the majority of HB kids- that Ben Gamla is an answer, is, in fact, an insult.

It's an insult to our fellow residents' ability to accurately see the unfortunate reality for what it is.

To me, the only thing that could be worse for HB's kids and taxpayers than Ben Gamla coming here, would be the creation of a Charter School directly run by the certified geniuses at HB City Hall, who prove their serial incompetency 24/7/365.

As opposed to the HB citizens who already live in the immediate area under consideration for the Ben Gamla Charter School, who would be forced to deal with that huge increase in daily traffic in their quiet family neighborhood if this got approved -and who will surely move out as many have already told me in private- consider how this looks if you're someone who currently lives out-of-state, and considering relocating and investing your family's financial future into a condo here, for example, over at The Beach Club, how does this educational environment sound for your kids?

On top of the city's already very unsatisfactory performance in doing the basics, I think I know what people from outside this area will think.

People who are used to normally-performing city services and normally-performing albeit not-perfect public schools, who expect, at a minimum, some public accountability from elected officials and govt. employees whose salaries they pay for, and hope that it'll even be better than whatever it is they used to live.
For them, Ben Gamla sounds like a deal-breaker.

Well, much as we might wish that it weren't so, that's our reality here in Hallandale Beach, isn't it?

As my friend Catherine wrote yesterday: Let’s get all of our community members out at this meeting and let them know how we feel about their wanting to add an additional 900+ cars to Atlantic Shores and 8^th Ave. Let’s not let Peter Deutsch & Gang dictate what they’re going to do in our neighborhood!

The meeting is Thursday at 6 p.m., 416 NE 8th Avenue


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Deutsch

Here's Ben Gamla's Wiki page -guess who's name doesn't appear? Peter Deutsch http://www.corporationwiki.com/Florida/Miami/the-national-ben-gamla-charter-school-foundation-3661040.aspx

Hotline TV: Blanche Lincoln's Senate campaign ad; "Never in the history of Arkansas politics has someone won by proclaiming that they're liberal"

Above. my license to practice politics in Arkansas. And to make it easier for me to flash my credentials, I had it made into a key chain! License is courtesy of my dear friend Shannon, a beautiful multi-talented dynamo from a town called Hope. Yes, THAT Hope.
(Her mother grew-up across the street from Bill Clinton.)

Hotline TV, May 4, 2010:
NAME DROPPING: Primary Endorsements, Bandwagon & AR SEN Ad



http://www.youtube.com/user/HotlineTV http://hotlineoncall.nationaljournal.com/

I've long felt that Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln was the perfect antidote to almost everything negative I ever saw on Capitol Hill in my many years in Washington: a bright and thoughtful person who got so fed-up with the status quo and the sinking feeling that her own viewpoint was getting short shrift, that she decided to do something both RISKY and POSITIVE about it.
She ran against her former boss -and beat- Beryl Anthony, a popular incumbent Democratic Arkansas congressman in the primary!

In 1998 she was elected to the U.S. Senate, re-elected in 2004, and now faces national liberal poster boy Bill Halter, the Arkansas Lieutenant Governor, for the Democratic nomination, with the primary scheduled for May 18. Halter is beloved in the liberal blogging community -by Ron Gunzburger, for instance- despite the large number of jobs he has sent overseas.



Of course, for all their talk about the common man, the vast majority of Halter's supporters don't actually know anyone in Arkansas whose job went overseas, so they play dumb and instead excoriate Lincoln for not being more liberal in a coal-dependent state that doesn't value either extremist politicians or outsiders telling them what's what and who to vote for.

It's a state that I first visited when I was a kid growing-up in Memphis, but even then, I couldn't help but notice the overwhelmingly friendliness and kindness of the people I met, who'd offer to help you before you ever thought to ask.
Every trip back there has been just like that.
And it's so beautiful, too, in a way that people who have always lived on the East Coast or South Florida can't imagine.

It's also a state where the friendly people who run the charities and civic groups, and who make sure that the ball fields are manicured on weekends for their sons and daughters to play baseball or softball on, are strongly against Obamacare and favors its repeal, and as Rasmussen Reports details below, "By a 61% to 31% margin, Arkansas voters say their views on today’s major issues are more in line with those of the average Tea Party member than with the views of President Obama."

Though I disagree with her position on Obamacare, in every other way, Blanche Lincoln has shown thru her words and actions that she's a true profile in courage, the likes of which does not currently exist in either Broward or Miami-Dade. As is patently obvious when we open the local newspaper or turn on the local news.
http://lincoln.senate.gov/

Which is to say that she's the polar opposite of an Ilene Lieberman, who seems incapable of not always thinking about how she, her husband and their pals can benefit from the existing political system that's riddled with loopholes which someone as smart as her has proven quite adept at manipulating, and not particularly interested in eliminating. Not that Mitch Caesar cares about that, either.
------------------------

Rasmussen Reports
Election 2010: Arkansas Senate

Arkansas Senate: Lincoln’s Support Continues to Slide

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections2/election_2010/election_2010_senate_elections/arkansas/election_2010_arkansas_senate

U.S. News & World Report
http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/2010/03/24/demint-lincoln-and-the-perils-of-progressive-purity-politics.html

DeMint, Lincoln, and the Perils of Progressive Purity Politics-
By Robert Schlesinger

Posted March 24, 2010

Broward School Board's poor budget and personnel choices continue to outrage taxpayers and parents alike, esp. the unctuous double dipping

Found the ad above from the Broward School Board in Sunday's Herald about a School Board budget update workshop on Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Once again, as is quickly becoming very noticeable to me, the ad in question was NOT available on the Herald's website on their Ads and Special Section webpage. http://newspaperads.miami.com/ROP/Categories.aspx

I just checked again at 2:55 p.m. and it is still not listed on their current list: http://newspaperads.miami.com/ROP/Subcat.aspx?cat=3328

If It wasn't for the Hallandale Beach City Commission meeting in the morning and Hollywood's in the afternoon, I'd be inclined to attend, listen and videotape the odd doings that are 100% likely at the School Board HQ.
Why would tomorrow be any different than any other day?

Hollywood's meeting will include votes on whether to place the Charter Review Comm.'s excellent questions on November's ballot for citizens to decide re term limits and staggered
terms for City Commissioners, and designating November as the only time when regular voting for City Commission races can occur
http://agenda.hollywoodfl.org/cache/00000/992/AGEN%2005-05-10.pdf

But knowing that the HB Commission morning meeting will be where City Hall tries to explain away their strange Special Meeting on Friday that never "officially" happened, seeing Notter and Co. in person has to come in a close second place. There's only so much time to see so much craziness in one day.

Within the past 36 hours, Buddy Nevins of Broward Beat has been all over the Broward School system in a way that reminded me of those heady days when I lived in Chicago in the mid-'80's, under Mayor Harold Washington, and the competitive local TV news scene in Chicagoland was fast and furious.

You honestly never knew what you'd see on TV when you got home, but you knew that it would be assertive and non-apologetic for asking the hard questions.

We need MUCH MORE of that attitude in South Florida journalism, and a lot LESS sycophantic coverage of the Miami-Dade and Broward School systems, esp. on local TV by female reporters
who don't seem very curious, which is, itself, curious.

Keep it coming!

Broward Beat
Principal Retires And Is Back, All In A Month
By Buddy Nevins May 3, 2010

Attention teachers, school staff and legislators: Broward Schools are at it again.

Bob Crawford, who recently retired as principal of Atlantic Technical Center, is on Tuesday’s School Board agenda to be rehired….for the same job he just left.

A School Board member says candidly: “It doesn’t look good.”

That’s an understatement.

Read the rest of the post at:
http://www.browardbeat.com/principal-retires-and-is-back-all-in-a-month/


Broward Beat
Widely Distributed E-Mail Attacks Principal’s Rehiring
By Buddy Nevins
May 4, 2010

The following e-mail was sent to dozens of school employees and the School Board on Monday attacking the decision to rehire a principal who just retired. The e-mail rehiring during a financial crisis ”reprehensible and insulting.
It is, in fact, cronyism at its’ worst.”
Strong stuff. Will the School Board listen?

Read the rest of the post at:
http://www.browardbeat.com/public-e-mail-attacks-principals-rehiring/


Broward Beat
Dozens of School Employees Double Dip
By Buddy Nevins
May4 , 2010

They retired from the Broward schools, but didn’t really retire.
At least 35 employees who recently retired were immediately rehired. This allowed them to get their taxpayer-paid pension and a salary – the ultimate double dipping.
And this is the school system that is about to lay off hundreds and is always begging for more money?

Read the rest of the post at:
http://www.browardbeat.com/dozens-of-school-employees-double-dip/

On Tuesday afternoon, Broward County Commissioners will meet ethics reform up-close and personal. But will they swallow it or just complain?

What does this patched-up hole in this wall of a Broward County government building on Andrews Avenue and Broward Blvd. -one block due north of the Broward Govt. Center- the same building with this filthy exterior on the Andrews Avenue side, below, have in common with transparency and ethics?
Think about it for a minute.

Back on March 12th, these were the subject of my post titled Errant driver's crash highlights Broward's embarrassing neglect of property; give that driver an award!
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/errant-drivers-crash-highlights.html

Both photos taken April 27th, 2010 by South Beach Hoosier

What they both have in common is that it is self-evident that there is a problem and yet the very people who are supposed to do something about it, the County Commissioners and Broward Administrator Bertha Henry, have not done very much about it.

They've tried to cover it up in spots, like a bad doctor who treats a patient's symptoms instead of the actual underlying causes, but when you are up-close to the problem, it makes you pretty angry that it is not being fixed in a way that is either logical or promptly, but rather with an obvious half-assed band-aid, which is what this plywood really is.

Sure, just keep ignoring the cracks in the wall surrounding it and pretend that nothing bad will happen!
In this case, the loopholes in the ethics proposals.

Per an email I received Sunday from my friend and longtime Broward civic activist, Charlotte Greenbarg, President of the Broward Coalition, there's going to be a workshop tomorrow that you may want to take note of, which, as of now, I fully expect to be at. http://www.browardcoalition.org/

Broward County Commission Ethics Workshop,
Broward County Government Center, Room 430,
115 S. Andrews Avenue, Fort Lauderdale,
Tuesday, May 4 12:30-2:30 p.m.

Park in garage to the west of the Government Center, take your ticket to the receptionist in the Commission office to be validated, so you don’t have to pay.

This issue is one that Comm. Sue Gunzburger has been championing for quite some time.

In case you missed it the first time around, see Buddy Nevins' excellent post from February 23rd titled Commissioners Loving Ethics Reform To Death, that keenly noted the overt and hidden dynamics and politics behind something as simple as bringing stricter ethics and transparency to Broward County government:
http://www.browardbeat.com/commissioners-loving-ethics-reform-to-death/

His predicate for that post was this one : http://www.browardbeat.com/gunzburgers-ethics-reform-has-political-undertone/

I wasn't feeling so great over the weekend, so I didn't post the video that I shot of Friday morning's Special Meeting(!), all 121 seconds of it, to my YouTube page. http://www.youtube.com/user/HallandaleBeachBlog

I fully expect it'll be up by Tuesday morning, along with some other videos I've shot the past few weeks.

Comm. Dotty Ross hiding in plain sight at Hallandale Beach's "Special Meeting" on City Manager Mike Good's employment; "Recall" is in the air!

By now you've all probably heard thru the Hallandale Beach version of the grapevine that this morning's Special City Commission Meeting proved to be just the latest debacle and punchline in a long line of embarrassing and cringe-worthy moments for its beleaguered citizen taxpayers, as a result of continuing anti-democratic and un-professional conduct at City Hall.

To quote myself, "Just when you think you've seen it all before at HB City Hall..."

The public notices about this morning's meeting as seen at Hallandale Beach City Hall. Of course, last Wednesday, April 21st, as I mentioned at that night's City Commission meeting, instead of having the required list of April city Advisory Board meetings posted, they had the one for -wait for it- March.
back on April 2nd, I'd told them they needed to put up the correct list, but they don't take criticism well, so it was left up for three weeks, and was still there on April 23rd.
That's the kind of people we are dealing with.

This morning, displaying a foolish bravado and sense of anti-taxpayer sentiment that shocked even many of her usual defenders and apologists throughout the city, HB Comm. Dotty Ross refused to come down to the HB City Chambers, the new location of the meeting.
Apparently, she was hiding up in her office.


The tip-off?
Her Camry in its reserved parking space.


Hallandale Beach civic activist Csaba Kulin, one of the leaders in the fight against the Westin Diplomat's LAC proposal, near the car of Comm. Dotty Ross just minutes after the pathetic debacle we witnessed inside the City Chambers.
Did the car drive itself to HB City Hall today?

Comm. Dotty Ross' car in its reserved space this morning, before the meeting, from the point-of-view of the breezeway in front of the Hallandale Beach Police Dept. HQ.

With Vice-Mayor Julian wielding the gavel and Comm. Sanders alongside of him, and with Mayor Cooper and Comm. London each out-of-town but 'present' via a popular technology we now call the telephone, the meeting was canceled before it could really begin due to there NOT being a "physical quorum" present.
Really.


Bewildered HB citizens, including many Cooper & Good apologists, mill around in the City Hall breezeway after the Ross no-show debacle.

But don't worry, I videotaped the entire ridiculous spectacle for you to analyze for yourself from the comfort of your own home, as you once again are forced to try to make sense of the inexplicable that has become our norm the past ten years.

I'll have the video posted to my YouTube page on Saturday, and have some other photos and my thoughts on what this means in the bigger scheme of things, on my blog as well.

Whatever else today's low-light may signify in this city, one thing is certain.
The heretofore abstract idea of launching a petition effort to Recall Dotty Ross from office in November got some rather unexpected help.
From her.

Her own words and actions add fuel-to-the-fire as they show her utter contempt for the rules of this city and HB citizens, just the latest in a long line of words, actions and behavior that belie her appearance, as just last week, she called HB citizens in the Chambers "shills" even
before they could get to the microphone during Public Comments.

She's the very same woman who continually voted AGAINST placing the Diplomat's application and related documents on the city's website for their citizens to examine days or weeks before the actual votes took place.
That's how it came to be that the docs only became available 28 hours before the first vote in mid-December.
Not that Dotty Ross and the other three HB commissioners who voted that way want you to remember that now.

Afterwards, I had to check to see if "our flag was still there." But are we really in America, or just an alternative universe, a "Twilight Zone" if you will, where the norms and conventions of laws and logic have no power and where law enforcement is well-nigh invisible?

See also:
BrowardPalmBeach NewTimes Meeting on Hallandale City Manager's Fate Canceled After Mayoral No-Show
By Thomas Francis, Friday, Apr. 30 2010 @ 10:50AM
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/juice/2010/04/hallandale_special_meeting_mike_good_canceled.php


BrowardPalmBeach NewTimes
Hallandale Mayor Calls Special Meeting to Discuss "City Manager's Employment" By Thomas Francis, Thursday, Apr. 29 2010 @ 12:26PM
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/juice/2010/04/hallandale_special_meeting_mike_good_employment.php

The last time the Miami Herald mentioned Hallandale Beach City Hall's incompetency and antics was...

Despite all the self-evident cronyism, public corruption and intentional deceit emanating from the City Hall of this ocean-side city for years, the Miami Herald has sent a reporter to a City Commission meeting here just once since June of 2008.

For that dearth of coverage, while everything was going to hell, we can thank current Broward editor Jay Ducassi and his predecessor, Patricia Andrews.

What follows is an excerpt from the last item the Herald ran that dealt with actual governance in Hallandale Beach.
You remember August of last year, don't you?

Tiger Woods and Sandra Bullock were, separately, happily married to their spouses, Tom Brady was poised to take the Patriots back to the Super Bowl after an injury, and the Florida Marlins were still fighting for a National League Wild-card spot.
And Marco Rubio, whom I'd seen wow a crowd two months earlier, was trailing badly in state polls that South Florida's know-it-all reporters said proved Rubio simply didn't have the requisite experience and resources to beat a popular incumbent governor like Charlie Crist.
Some reporters even darkly hinted that it might be because he was Hispanic.
Hmm-m-m...

Miami Herald
POLITICAL BEAT

Monday, August 10, 2009

By Amy Sherman
HALLANDALE BEACH MINUTES APPROVED -- A FEW YEARS LATER

Hallandale Beach City Commissioner Keith London, often at odds with other city officials, cried foul at a meeting Wednesday as the commission approved meeting minutes as old as 2003.

"It seems a little bizarre to go back and approve minutes going back six years," said London, suggesting that the city is violating its own procedure about creating written minutes "as soon as practical."

London is also ticked that the city decided to publish brief minutes rather than a verbatim transcript. "They don't want people to know what's going on," he said in an interview.

At the meeting, acting City Clerk Shari Canada said her audit found some minutes that had yet to be officially approved. They included meetings where the commission sat as other city boards.

"The fact that they are tardy is of no legal consequence," city attorney David Jove said.

Mayor Joy Cooper said if the public wants to review debate from meetings, anyone can come to City Hall and review the video.

Sunshine State awaits announcement on future of... Mike Good

Along with many other concerned residents of Hallandale Beach, I received the following email from Commissioner Keith London at 1:07 p.m. today
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Everyone,

The City Attorneys’ office has advised me that the Mayor has requested a “Special Meeting” regarding the employment of City Manager Mike Good and the details are as follows:

· City Hall

· Upstairs in Room 219

· Friday, April 30, 2010

· Time 10:30 A.M.

· Open to the Public

Please plan on attending if you are available. This is a “Publicly Noticed” meeting.

Thank you,

Keith S. London

City Commissioner

Hallandale Beach

954-457-1320 Office

www.KeithLondon.com

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I will be in attendance at the Special Meeting and suggest you make plans to do likewise, since we know from years of experience how existing city rules and state laws are routinely flouted around here.
There's no reason to think this will be handled any differently.
The more HB residents present the better.

There are lots of ideas floating around as to what will actually happen tomorrow, and after hearing from lots of people already, I'd say the three separate scenarios competing for oxygen are: family reasons, health and Loss of Confidence.

I can confirm what Thomas Francis mentions below about the unusual requirement of a super-majority in order to terminate Good's contract, because I can distinctly recall talking with mt friend Michael Butler over at Panera Bread after he'd already spent an enormous amount of time carefully reviewing the docs he had requested on the City Manager's curious contract.
See Michael's excellent factually-based website, Change Hallandale Beach at http://www.changehallandale.com/

Considering where we live and the small size of this city, I'd say that you'd be quite surprised upon learning some of the other aspects of his contract, including, among other things, the proviso about HB taxpayers being on the hook if he ever wanted to go to Business School, even after he left the city.

After all, as I've written so many times, this is the same city where in clear violation of the state's Sunshine Laws, the existing City Manager (Mike Good), the Police Chief (Thomas Magill) and Fire Chief (Daniel Sullivan) were all re-hired at separate City Commission meetings where these items (contracts) were NOT on the published agenda, NOT held in the City Chambers but rather upstairs in a room where it was NOT videotaped, and with ZERO HB citizens present to speak on the issues involved.

And in the case of Good, there was no documentation provided for the commissioners to read before voting.
Guess who the staffers who'd usually do that work for?

None of this happened by accident, of course, it was all done intentionally according to Mayor Joy Cooper's personal desire to keep this community in the dark as often as possible while she orchestrated policy, even though she is just one of five votes.

Joy Cooper's longstanding anti-democratic behavior, words, actions and notions about what truly constitutes a participatory democracy, will make an excellent case study someday, but in the meantime, the very people who are supposed to protect the community and enforce the laws in this state continue to look the other way -as they have for years.


BrowardPalmBeach NewTimes
Hallandale Mayor Calls Special Meeting to Discuss "City Manager's Employment"
By Thomas Francis, Thursday, Apr. 29 2010 @ 12:26PM
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/juice/2010/04/hallandale_special_meeting_mike_good_employment.php

At top: September 17, 2008 photo of Hallandale Beach City Hall by South Beach Hoosier.

Upcoming 2010 Spring Cleaning Media & Blog Purge: Sleepwalking South Florida news media and lemming blogs to be tossed overboard!

There is just a tremendous amount of news and information that will be coming to this space over the next few weeks, much of it about political ideas and strategy and upcoming elections that will have the possibility of seriously shaking up the deplorable status quo hereabouts.

Things both long in the planning as well as items that I've, admittedly, sort of lucked-into by paying close attention while most of South Florida's news media continues their 2010 spring slumber, preparing for their 2010 summer-long siesta.

But that's how it goes when you try to keep your eyes and ears open, return emails and phone calls from others promptly, and try to remain on good terms with people in a position to either make news -or cover it- all over the county, state and country.

In fact, I suppose you might even call what I have in mind -and in many cases, already have written- a torrent, though given the Broward School Board's continuing sub-par performance, if there are any Broward high school grads reading this, that's your cue to right-click 'torrent' and see what Google says it means.

I've got some big changes in store for my humble little blog, as this weekend I'll begin my 2010 Spring Cleaning Media and Blog Purge, wherein I make some long overdue changes that I had originally planned on making after Christmas, but couldn't due to time constraints
and some family obligations.

It's my hope that these particular changes will improve the blog's functionality and topicality, though perhaps not to everyone's satisfaction.
C'est la vie.

Frankly, I don't spend any time worrying about what people I've NEVER met, actually spoken to or received an email from, think about the blog, whereas those who have taken the time to actually contact me with their thoughts know that I generally take their constructive criticism pretty well, and only wish that I could change it the way I want to.

In the case of the former, people who have never contacted me but who have heaping helpings of criticism, I refer to people who never seem to actually manage to attend South Florida govt. or public policy meetings in person, what most people in the country might call no-shows, and who seem to "cover" things almost entirely second-hand from their living room or dens.

As anyone paying attention knows, that's the exact OPPOSITE approach of Genius of Despair and Gimleteye at Eye on Miami, http://eyeonmiami.blogspot.com/;
Daniel A. Ricker at Watchdog Report, http://www.watchdogreport.net/;
Chaz Stevens at My Acts of Sedition, http://www.myactsofsedition.com/;
Michael Butler at Change Hallandale Beach, http://www.changehallandale.com/;
Sara Case at Balance Sheet Online, http://www.balancesheetonline.com/;
Bett Willett at Blog by Bett, http://blogbybett.blogspot.com/ and myself.

(In case you're unfamiliar with the situation involving my friend Michael being sued by Joy Cooper, the thin-skinned, anti-democratic mayor of our fair city -who calls her political opponents "Nazis" while at Hallandale Beach City Hall- for simply attempting to get some public records, YET ANOTHER story that the Miami Herald and all of the local Miami TV stations have completely ignored, please see the following:
1.) http://openrecords.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/michael-butler-sunshine-troublemaker-of-the-week/

2.) http://weblogs.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/broward/blog/2009/10/mayo_why_are_taxpayers_footing.html )
3.) http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/2009/10/judge_patti_henning_and_mayor_joy_cooper.php )

While I obviously don't agree with them on everything they might say about a particular subject,
I ALWAYS know that they are actually spending their time and energy to be physically present and accounted for when news could be made that's of interest to the discerning and concerned citizens of South Florida.
And they don't lie or intentionally misrepresent the facts.

Both are more than can be said for the large majority of South Florida's sad sack excuse of a press corps, who would be greatly improved if 75% of them were fired toute-de-suite, and simply replaced by some of the plucky and curious kids on the journalism farm at Ernie Pyle, Medill and some other places I could name, where curiosity is a prerequisite.
See http://journalism.indiana.edu/ and http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/

Then we'd see some serious Who, What, Why, When Where and How action in our local media diet, and improved verb subject agreement and proper verb tense, to boot, and less fluff TV stories on liposuction, women's clothes, Rapping Grandmothers, and Grade D celebs and celebutantes making paid appearances at South Beach clubs.

It's exactly like the sad and feeble approach employed over at WTVJ-6 -the News Nobody Watches- "who don't know what's going on, and send a cameraman (without a reporter) to an event at the last minute just so they can maintain the illusion they're a real news operation."

That particular tart quote comes from one of their most industrious TV news competitors, who told me that exact thing two years ago while we were both sitting in the Broward County Chambers for a Broward County Charter Review Commission meeting.

This comment about Channel 6 only served to confirm what I'd long felt since returning to the area from D.C., and when I shared this comment with other industrious reporters and bloggers I know, who have often shared their take on what ails South Florida and its incurious news media, they all seconded that emotion.

It goes without saying that if I knew then what I know now, I'd have perhaps made some different choices when starting the blog, perhaps going with TypePad instead of Blogger, or perhaps some other blogging platform, as many newspaper and TV friends of mine in D.C. had originally suggested. http://www.typepad.com/

Since many of you readers probably don't know this, with Blogger's software structure, unless I remove all the 'anchors' on it at the beginning, the photos and thoughts about the area, I can't physically move my most recent comments up to the top of the blog.
If I could, I'd have done that years ago.
But I can't, hence the upcoming changes.

But even with the changes I hope to make over the next few weeks, I know that I won't be matching the prodigious blog posting and video output of South Florida's number one Watchdog, Chaz Stevens, who surely must get less sleep than anyone in the 954 area code.

FYI, last night and early this morning, I downloaded all the video I shot from Tuesday afternoon's historic Broward County Commission meeting, where the plucky underdog activists from Hallandale Beach brought the Broward County development/lobbying machine to heel, 6-3, and hope to have at least some of it on my YouTube page on Thursday.

My personal take on what transpired yesterday will soon be here, along with photos, now that I'm finally starting to get caught up on all the sleep I've been missing the past few weeks.