Cities need to get their acts together | Steve Bousquet

In city after city in Broward and Palm Beach counties, there's controversy and scandal. Columnist Steve Bousquet explains why.

In Fort Lauderdale, City Manager Greg Chavarria abruptly resigned before the Sun Sentinel reported that he was the target of an inspector general’s report that he violated the city charter by not living in the city as required.

The case is likely headed to the Broward state attorney’s office. Chavarria should not be able to evade accountability by resigning and leaving town.

In Pembroke Pines, Mayor Angelo Castillo ordered a police officer to remove Commissioner Jay Schwartz from a meeting because of his boorish and disruptive behavior, and City Attorney Sam Goren said the mayor had full authority to do so under the Pines charter.

“You gonna toss me out?”  Schwartz taunted the mayor.

In Delray Beach, Fire Chief Keith Tomey was fired for allowing on-duty firefighters to play a benefit softball game while collecting overtime, an arrogant thumb in the eye of city taxpayers.

Strike three for the chief was too late in coming. He could have lost his job after he crashed a city car in 2022 and didn’t notify his boss, City Manager Terrence Moore.

In Tamarac, City Commissioner Marlon Bolton raked in $20,500 in political contributions from a garbage vendor seeking a hefty city contract, then unabashedly promoted the firm’s unsuccessful bid and saw nothing wrong with it, even as Commissioner Elvin Villalobos was forced to tell residents that Tamarac “is not for sale.”

The tawdry spectacle prompted Mayor Michelle Gomez to state the obvious and call her city “a farce.”

All of this municipal madness took place in the past few weeks, and you read about these incidents in this newspaper.

But this is what we knew about and could pin down.

How much more dirty laundry is out there?

The answer is plenty, and we need readers like you to tell us about it — anonymously, if you prefer.

Cities and towns don’t get nearly the intensity of news coverage that they used to, and that partly explains this surge in bad behavior. But no city attracts more attention than Fort Lauderdale, and big, bad headlines keep happening there.

I remember the days when Broward had three highly competitive daily newspapers (the Sun Sentinel, Miami Herald and the scrappy Sun-Tattler in Hollywood).

I know it sounds a bit bizarre now, but the Herald had a fully staffed news bureau in Tamarac, when Broward was a much smaller place than it is today. (Try getting gourmet coffee on Pine Island Road at 9 o’clock at night in 1987.)

Young reporters then were assigned to sit through hours of tedious meetings in North Lauderdale and Oakland Park, often with little news to report.

(I briefly digress, but you’ll like it: The Sun Sentinel ran radio ads with the hokey jingle, “required reading for the life you’re leading.” Its reporters turned it into parody: “Required reading, ’cause they held a meeting.”)

“Meeting coverage” was the bane of a beat reporter’s existence, but here is how it’s supposed to work: At commission meetings, the reporter has coffee with the city attorney and city clerk, gets to know the leaders of the homeowners’ associations, and soon starts hearing about lots of interesting things that are not on the agenda. That’s where the real news is.

In a news vacuum, the role of watchdog increasingly falls to taxpayers. Fort Lauderdale in particular has a lot of sharp-eyed residents with the know-how to read contracts and raise questions about inch-thick comprehensive agreements.

Attentive and conscientious citizens still pay close attention to what’s going on, and they need to understand the roles of consultants and lobbyists, P3s (public-private partnerships), RFPs (request for proposals) and purchasing rules.

The byzantine character of local government in Broward seems designed to defy coherent news coverage, with 31 cities (way, way too many), a monstrous school district, an enormous county government, an elected sheriff, and two politically charged taxpayer-supported hospital districts.

Yet, rampant ethical abuses at the North Springs Improvement District, an obscure drainage district in Coral Springs, still made big news, first on the Florida Bulldog investigative news site, and later in the Sun Sentinel and elsewhere, and finally got the state auditor general’s attention.

More than two dozen Broward cities will hold elections this fall. We will research and scrutinize candidates as always and recommend those we consider to be the class of their field.

For the record, we endorsed neither Marlon Bolton in Tamarac nor Jay Schwartz in Pembroke Pines — and now you know why.

Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com or 850-567-2240 and follow him on X @stevebousquet.