Two of three candidates for the open Seat B on the Boca Raton City Council have loaned themselves a combined $55,500 for a job that pays $28,000 even with the voter-approved raises.
Emily Gentile has loaned her campaign $30,500. Andrea O’Rourke has loaned herself $25,000. For now, Andy Thomson is loan-free, based on a review of financial reports through November.
So even though Gentile lists $49,000 in total contributions and O’Rourke lists $57,000, Thomson can say that, with nearly $40,000, he has raised the most money, since all of it comes from contributions. The candidates’ sources of money reflect their bases of support and their approaches.
O’Rourke, for example, is the former editor of BocaWatch. She has received $1,000 from Yvonne Boice, who is married to BocaWatch Publisher Al Zucaro. BocaWatch championed the deceptive waterfront ordinance that got onto the November ballot after a petition drive led by James Hendrey, who wanted to keep a restaurant off the Wildflower property. Hendrey lives across the Intracoastal Waterway from the site. O’Rourke got $1,000 from Hendrey’s wife, Nancy.
She got $250 from Jack McWalter, who has been a BocaWatch contributor, and other donations from residents of the Golden Triangle, where O’Rourke lives. Sentiment there runs high against downtown development. O’Rourke received $1,000 from John Gore, who is president of Boca Beautiful and has donated to the BocaWatch political action committee.
Thomson has fewer, but larger contributions. He received $3,000 from developers with projects in the growing northwest part of the city. He got $3,000 from Penn-Florida, which is building Via Mizner and University Village, and related interests. He got $1,000 from the Weiss, Handler & Cornwell law firm and another $1,000 from a Tallahassee-based political action committee to which Weiss & Handler is a major contributor. He got $1,000 from his law firm, Baritz and Colman.
Other donations to Thomson include $1,000 from Bonnie Miskel, the attorney who represents the developer of Mizner 200, $250 from the project’s architect and $500 from Marta Batmasian, whose Investments Limited opposes Mizner 200. He got $3,000 from officials of Boca Raton-based Hollywood Media Corp.
Most of Gentile’s contributions are smaller, though she did receive $1,000 from Miskel and $500 from architect Derek Vander Ploeg. Gentile lives on A1A and got donations from other beachfront residents. After a slow start, Gentile raised about $7,000 in November, just a bit less than Thomson. O’Rourke reported only about $650 for the month.
Qualifying for the March 14 election is next month. For those candidates who qualify, that’s when the fund-raising rush really will begin.
Mayor Susan Haynie unopposed?
At this point, Mayor Susan Haynie is back to having no opponent for re-election. Marc Allen Brown, who had filed paperwork, has dropped out.
Seat A incumbent Scott Singer also is unopposed, but he’s acting as if he has an opponent. Singer has raised about $46,000, and on a recent Saturday he was walking my neighborhood of Camino Lakes.
Mizner 200 receives some opposition
Mizner 200 will make a second informal appearance tonight before the Boca Raton Community Appearance Board.
The 384-unit luxury condo project made a similar presentation to the board last month, after which the developer postponed a scheduled presentation to the planning and zoning board two nights later. The project would replace the Mizner on the Green rental complex across Mizner Boulevard from Royal Palm Place.
Based on numbers, Mizner 200 complies with the ordinance that governs downtown development. The issue is whether the project’s architecture complies. The community appearance board offered suggestions, which the architect pledged to incorporate.
The most significant is to break the project into three buildings, as happened with Via Mizner on Federal Highway north of Camino Real. Mizner 200’s second design had far more sightlines through the project, but it remained one building. The board also wants the project to be more compatible with the neighborhood. The developer is trying a second informal appearance in hopes of getting a recommendation for approval at the formal appearance.
Opposition has come from Royal Palm Place, which might propose its own residential project and wouldn’t want Mizner 200 to block the views, and the BocaBeautiful group. Its president, John Gore, lives in Townsend Place, just south of the site.
I’m told that Gore doesn’t speak for all Townsend Place residents, with whom the developer has been negotiating. Still, BocaBeautiful this month took out two anti-Mizner 200, full-page ads in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. The first was a straightforward criticism of the project, which BocaBeautiful has dubbed the “monster on Mizner.” The second repeated the false narrative that “all those new apartments and hotel rooms in Boca’s new ‘urban center’ “ have made traffic worse. “Better allow an extra hour or two,” the ad said, when driving to the beach.
In fact, the city’s traffic consultant has shown that the main reason for delays between Interstate 95 and the beach are traffic signals and train crossings. Traffic on Palmetto Park Road is far under projections made when voters approved the downtown development ordinance in 1993. Increased traffic on Dixie Highway, the downtown bypass, comes from drivers going through the city, not within it.
Even if Mizner 200 gets that favorable recommendation from the community appearance board, the planning and zoning board is another hurdle. Mizner 200 likely will be a decision for the next city council.
Arts Garage makes a strategic retreat
According to the president of Arts Garage, the group’s decision last week to cancel the season’s remaining theater productions isn’t a sign of trouble. Marjorie Waldo said, “This means the opposite.”
As we spoke, the Arts Garage staff was contacting people who had bought tickets for “Blues in the Night” and “Breadcrumbs” to see if they wanted to swap those tickets for a music production or get refunds. Another option, Waldo said, came from Louis Tyrrell, who runs the theater lab at Florida Atlantic University and offered his productions for ticket exchanges.
To hear Waldo describe it, she ordered what amounted to a strategic retreat. Arts Garage sustained a “huge loss” from theater productions in October and November. Given that, the cost to stage “Blues in the Night” – Avery Sommers was to have been the featured performer – “made it impossible. We need to pause on theater.”
Waldo said the losses could have stemmed from public attention being focused on the presidential election, a lost weekend when Hurricane Matthew threatened South Florida, bad choices in what to stage, or a combination of all those factors. Whatever the causes, Waldo said theater at Arts Garage “needs to pay for itself. We have to evaluate all of our programming. We need to redesign our business model. We need to build a budget with expenses that can be recovered.”
To that end, Waldo is cutting staff and re-examining contracts. After the departure last spring of former President Alyona Ushe, the Arts Garage board installed a two-headed management system with Keith Garsson in charge of programming and Daniel Schwartz in charge of finance. Schwartz remains, but with theater shut down Garsson is gone.
Waldo didn’t get hired until late October, but didn’t waste time evaluating the organization. Despite the difficulties, Waldo likely is pleasing the city commission with the thoroughness of her review and her willingness to make changes. Arts Garage pays well below the market rate to lease its city-owned space and gets an operating subsidy from the Community Redevelopment Agency. Waldo supports the commission’s goals of making programming more diverse and increasing educational outreach.
Fortunately, Waldo said, the music — usually one-night performances – is doing well, with profit up from last year. Those offerings may increase. Returning to theater in September is “reasonable,” but with the knowledge that “we have a 168-seat venue. We are not a 300-seat space.”
As Waldo puts it, “This is the beginning of my act. I am cutting everything that I can think of, and we’re not quite finished” when it comes to staff and contracts. “We’re going to be just fine,” she said, though “not tomorrow.”
Former FAU professor and conspiracy theorist takes FAU to court
It is fitting that former Florida Atlantic University professor/conspiracy theorist James Tracy hasn’t been able to persuade a federal judge about the alleged conspiracy that got him fired.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenberg dismissed several claims in Tracy’s lawsuit against the university, administrators and faculty union representatives. Rosenberg, however, gave Tracy “another, final, opportunity” to refile his complaint and lay out his case. His deadline is Dec. 28. FAU then would have 10 days to file its response.
Tracy became known for his posts on a blog not affiliated with FAU that the massacre of 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School, along with other very public mass-casualty events, didn’t happen. Parents of one victim accused Tracy of harassing them. A Florida woman was arrested last week on four charges of harassing the same parents.
In an ideal world, FAU would be able to fire any supposed teacher who dispensed such nonsense, whatever the forum. Tracy drew part of his online credibility from his status as a college professor, even if the website was independent of FAU. What parent would want to pay tuition for a son or daughter to study under someone who disputed what so clearly was true?
FAU, however, fired Tracy for failing to complete a form on which faculty members had to list all outside activities, so as to avoid conflicts of interest. Tracy contends that the form is unconstitutional and was part of an attempt to deny his First Amendment rights to make what Rosenberg called “controversial comments” but what the evidence shows to be lies.
Of course, fake news became a big part of the presidential election. President-elect Trump’s White House political advisor runs a website that specializes in fake news. So if Tracy loses his lawsuit, maybe there’s a job for him in the new administration.
The irony is that Townsend Place was supposed to have had a third tower where CVS was built. When it’s said that Mizner Park would have never been able to be built today because of CAVEs, developers ain’t lying.
If Breitbart is fake news, the mainstream media must be blasphemy when it was proven by WikiLeaks that they were in the tank with the loser presidential candidate. Is it misinformation? The other side certainly didn’t think so when WikiLeaks dumped military documents in the early part of the decade (time sure flies), so double standard much?