Political muscle
For you today, a county commissioner makes his pitch, a mayor cancels a dinner date and Stet Palm Beach brings home an award. Plus the president is coming.
$100 million question
You could argue that the county saved downtown West Palm Beach.
The downtown resurgence of the 1990s started with county decisions to invest in downtown in the 1980s, drawing the public and office workers to a center that had been depleted by suburban growth.
What happened: Downtown is so popular, packed with nightlife, storefronts and new apartment and office buildings, that traffic clogs the roads and the city ended decades of cheap parking with prices as high as $4 an hour.
Downtown may be a victim of its own success. It’s difficult now for residents to obtain county services or attend county meetings.
It got County Commissioner Mack Bernard thinking.
Before embarking on a $100 million upgrade of a 40-year-old administrative building on North Olive Avenue downtown, he asked county commissioners last week, why not consider moving?
With the renovation cost jumping from $70 million to $100 million, he fears eventually commissioners would be paying $150 million to fix an aging building.
“My thought process was as we’re making decisions on renovating a building, let's take a look at something else,” he said in an interview.
In a six-point memo, he suggested moving into the low-income Westgate neighborhood just west of Interstate 95 between Belvedere Road and Okeechobee Boulevard.
Westgate would offer the public easier access to government offices that include the tax collector and the property appraiser.
It also would boost a struggling neighborhood, as the county did downtown.
Yes, but: His suggestion coincides with movement toward a huge redevelopment project along Belvedere Road in Westgate. The Palm Beach Kennel Club is under contract to Palm Beach-based builder, the Frisbie Group, The Palm Beach Post has reported. Under consideration: a mixed-use village with 2,000 residences.
Bernard also suggested moving the car rental center just west of the Kennel Club across Belvedere Road to the airport property and building another hotel at the airport.
The county’s two blocks near the waterfront downtown? It could be worth $100 million for residential towers, commercial real estate broker Neil Merin calculated.
That could pay for a new admin building, Bernard said.
🔀 Gutting or reorg?
But that’s not all Commissioner Mack Bernard suggested at Tuesday’s commission meeting.
He wants commissioners to wield more power.
Bernard is completing his eighth and final year as a commissioner as he campaigns for the Florida Senate. The changes he’s suggesting would outlast him.
Hire a consultant to review the county’s organizational structure.
Require commission consent to fill key positions, including deputy and assistant county administrator.
Put the county finance and budget director under county commissioners, not the county administrator.
All can be viewed as reducing the power of County Administrator Verdenia Baker, whom Bernard has clashed with, as well as any future administrators. Baker, who has been in the job since 2015, recently announced the appointment of Patrick Rutter as her chief deputy after the job went unfilled for more than two years. Bernard was among commissioners pushing to evaluate Baker publicly for the first time.
Commissioners embraced his suggestions, putting Vice Chair Maria Marino in charge of overseeing the consultant, not Baker. Marino is running unopposed so far this year and will become mayor in November if reelected.
Past practice: While the commission must approve department heads, it doesn’t exercise similar authority over Baker’s executive staff.
If the commission is unhappy with the administrator, the solution is simply to fire the administrator, former longtime Palm Beach County Administrator Bob Weisman said.
“It’s hard to ask administrators to do the job without giving them some authority to hire the people they need to do the job,” he said.
Even worse: The head of finance reporting to seven bosses rather than one, Weisman said.
But the commission doesn’t want to be blindsided again by major shortfalls in the capital budget, as it was last fall, Bernard said. It’s not to degrade anyone, he added.
“It’s always with the idea of how do we improve and work with the administrator … to provide the best for residents,” Bernard said.
🚫 Ascension denied
From the Lessons in Political Retribution Department comes longtime practitioner Keith James, the mayor of West Palm Beach.
The city canceled its purchase of two tables for the Black Chamber of Commerce’s Feb. 10 Ascension Awards when James learned that Malcolm Cunningham would be the keynote speaker.
Who is Malcolm Cunningham? He’s the local attorney who is suing the city over its failure to award his client, Vita Lounge, the contract to operate the refurbished but still-shuttered Sunset Lounge in the city’s historic Black downtown neighborhood.
And how do we know about this? Cunningham filed the mayor’s email exchange Jan. 12 in court documents to buttress his case to find the city in contempt for failing to negotiate a contract with his client nearly a year after a court ordered the city to do so.
The exchange started at 2:51 pm Dec. 18, when Sandra Hammerstein, a compliance officer in the city’s Office of Small & Minority Women Business Programs, emailed the mayor and City Administrator Faye Johnson. Hammerstein also copied her boss, Frank Hayden.
She wondered if the mayor would be attending the chamber event and informed him that the city had bought two tables.
The chamber lists tables at $2,200 for members.
“Who is the keynote speaker this year?” the mayor asked seven minutes later.
Hammerstein responded, “Malcolm Cunningham.”
“As in the lawyer who is suing the City over the Sunset Lounge?” James replied.
“Yes, sir,” Hammerstein said.
“Rescind the purchase of the tables. The city will not support any event at which he is the keynote speaker,” the mayor wrote back.
An hour later, Hammerstein sent a letter from Hayden to the chamber, rescinding the ticket purchase.
“This action is based on the selection of the keynote speaker,” Hayden wrote. “I warned the group last year that this would cause a rift between the Black Chamber of Commerce and the City of West Palm Beach but apparently that was not important enough because the group selected him again this year.”
Hayden is a Black Chamber of Commerce board member. Cunningham did not speak at the 2023 event.
Minutes later, James wrote to Johnson, his city administrator:
“So Mr. Hayden KNEW it would be a problem BEFORE the tables were purchased??”
She replied: “This is totally unacceptable. Are we brain dead or just don't give a d—-? Wow.”
🫡 A salute to journalism
Stet Palm Beach was in good company over the weekend with our fellow award-winners at the Florida Press Club’s statewide Excellence in Journalism Competition in Clearwater Beach.
The club awarded its two top prizes to South Florida journalists.
The Palm Beach Post’s Katherine Kokal won the Lucy Morgan Award for In Depth Reporting for stories about health reporting requirements for female student-athletes.
The Sun-Sentinel took home the Frances De Vore Award for Public Service for its investigation of human trafficking.
Why it’s important: The decorated work led to changes in a state rule and a new law.
Stet contributor Joe Capozzi won first place in community news writing, general news writing and sports features. His detailed account of the tragic death of Carol Wright on the Royal Park Bridge took second place.
The Coastal Star, which has featured the work of Stet reporters, took home 13 awards, including a first place in education writing.
Stet earned the second-place award for newsletter writing.
The award-winning newsletters covered local elections, a hate group in West Palm Beach and the history of segregation at the West Palm Beach public golf course.
The South Florida Business Journal’s Ashley Portero won first place for her MiamiInno newsletter.
Congratulations to all of the Florida Press Club’s winners. And thank you to the readers who support them.
🍊 The juice
Packed with news.
✈️ Expect travel delays near the airport sometime this afternoon as President Joe Biden makes his way to Palm Beach for a fundraiser. Details are scarce but the FAA listed restrictions at Palm Beach International Airport from 11:45 am to 4:30 pm today. (WPTV Channel 5)
🍹 A contract calling for Riviera Beach to lease land to Margaritaville Hotels for a 150-room hotel at the city’s marina will be discussed at 6 pm Thursday at a city Community Redevelopment Agency meeting. (South Florida Business Journal $$$)
Two Riviera Beach council members, Doug Lawson and Tradrick McCoy, engaged in fisticuffs after Wednesday night’s meeting, prompting a sheriff’s probe. (WPBF Channel 25)
🎷 Rudy's, the popular Lake Worth Beach music venue, will expand upstairs into the Bamboo Room. (ByJoeCapozzi.com)
📸 The Palm Beach Photographic Centre eviction from Clematis Street could meet its final test today. The Palm Beach County Commission considers a staff recommendation to require West Palm Beach pay back $250,000, half the amount of a 30-year grant that would be ended after 15 years. The city voted Jan. 22 to return the money. It sued to evict the photo centre and the grant was the last impediment to the deal. (County Commission agenda)
🖼️ ArtiGras has unveiled its 2024 poster, a work by Aaron Reed. The art festival produced by the Palm Beach North Chamber of Commerce is Presidents Day weekend in Palm Beach Gardens. (ArtiGras)
🕶️ ICYMI: National attention for Class of Palm Beach, a social media account that features designer-label-laden outfits spotted around town. (New York Times)
🏡 561 flashback: How a Chicago charity shaped Palm Beach Gardens
The vision for the development of northern Palm Beach County laid out by the foundation founded by insurance tycoon John D. MacArthur was a “blessing and a curse,” former County Commissioner Karen Marcus said last week.
Why it’s important: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in the 1980s and 1990s plotted the path forward for Palm Beach Gardens and Jupiter.
The foundation sold land slowly to ensure it commanded top dollar, resulting in today’s dominance of upscale, gated communities.
That money poured into the respected $8 billion-dollar foundation.
How the Chicago-based charity shaped the city that MacArthur founded and how it tried but failed to build a city in the pristine wetlands known as the Loxahatchee Slough formed the basis of the discussion sponsored by the Palm Beach Gardens Historical Society.
For the first of three public forums at Palm Beach State College in honor of the city’s 65th anniversary, Marcus was joined by former Gardens Mayor Mike Martino on a panel moderated by Stet Palm Beach’s Joel Engelhardt.
What happened: In 1991, the foundation proposed a city of 35,000 residents in the Loxahatchee Slough on land the city annexed in 1990.
The plan preserved half the slough, not nearly enough for environmentalists.
Florida Atlantic University signed on to build a campus there.
In June 1991, the Gardens City Council approved the plan, 4-1.
Martino noted that the landholder had been talking to FAU for as long as a year and a half before approaching the city.
The slough development collapsed under opposition from environmentalists and state regulatory pressure.
“FAU went out there and saw how wet it was,” Marcus said.
The county eventually paid $12.7 million to preserve the slough. It is the largest county-owned natural area.
The FAU campus ended up at a north county site where the MacArthur Foundation formed a partnership with Cypress Realty to create Abacoa.
Marcus said she insisted the property be annexed into Jupiter so leaders who lived nearby would guide it instead of county officials with less insight into north county. Today, Abacoa is considered a Jupiter showpiece.
Coming up: The next historical society forums are “The Turning Point: Life After MacArthur,” 6:30 pm Feb. 22 at Palm Beach State College in Gardens, and “Growth, Traffic and Mobility,” 6:30 pm March 28.
See the panel discussion here.
Long read: Joel’s 2005 profile of John D. MacArthur for The Palm Beach Post.
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