An important milestone is on the agenda for today’s Delray Beach City Commission meeting. That milestone reflects steady progress over the last year on the boring but essential services that the city provides.
Commissioners will approve the contract for the first construction phase of the water plant. It is for roughly $15 million. The full cost, likely to be about $120 million, will be financed from customers under a rate system that the city already has approved. City Manager Terrence Moore said construction will take between three and four years.
Water would be a big issue in any city. It’s an especially big issue in Delray Beach.
In November 2021, the city had to pay a $1.02 million fine to the state for allowing partially treated water to contaminate drinking water. In 2020, the state ordered Delray Beach to test its water for levels of polyfluoroalkyl substances, so-called “forever chemicals” that have been linked to serious illness. The new plant will remove those chemicals.
George Gretsas lasted just six months in 2020 as city manager. He stayed long enough, however, to hire Hassan Hadjimiry as utilities director. Under Hadjimiry, the city just emerged nearly a year early from the requirements of the consent order that came with the fine.
In addition to that problem he inherited, Hadjimiry has had to deal with faulty meters. In some cases, customers were undercharged. In many more cases, they were overcharged.
The issue is not the meters themselves. It’s the relay, which wireless meters use to determine how much water a customer used. Similar problems have been reported with the company, Badger, across the country.
First, the city is squaring things with all affected customers. Each is getting a personal phone call. Warranties are covering replacement costs. And city officials are implementing changes to avoid similar problems.
Also on today’s agenda is authorization to issue the $20 million in bonds for park improvements that voters approved last year. Roughly $4.5 million worth of projects, however, already are in the current budget. Among them are new bathrooms, athletic field lighting and $460,000 for the main beachfront pavilion.
The city also is moving ahead with plans for the $100 million public safety bonds that were on the ballot last year. A new police station will go at the current location on West Atlantic Avenue. There is talk of moving the main fire station, now two blocks farther west on Atlantic, to create a combined public safety complex. There is money for the station in the department’s long-range budget.
Speaking of the fire department, Delray Beach last fall survived a political ambush. Two state legislators ordered an audit of the contract under which the city provided fire-rescue services to Highland Beach. The city and town had been arguing over which owed the other money.
The legislators—one of whom represents Highland Beach—clearly hoped that the audit would resolve the dispute in the town’s favor. Instead, the auditors found that Highland Beach owes the city $2.2 million.
So that’s notable progress on police, fire, water and parks – just about everything that matters most in a city.
What’s fueling Delray’s progress
Why is this progress happening now?
City Commissioner Adam Frankel is Delray Beach’s senior elected official, with 12 years over two stints—from 2009 until 2015 and from 2018 until now. He leaves office this month because of term limits.
Frankel said last year’s election, which brought Angela Burns and Rob Long to the commission, returned the “civility” of the previous decade. “We sometimes disagreed,” Frankel recalled, “but it never got personal.”
He also credited “the executive leadership team” under City Manager Terrence Moore. Remarkably, Moore—with two and a half years on the job—is Delray Beach’s longest-serving manager since 2012.
Frankel and Ryan Boylston, who is completing six years on the commission, both cited “stability.” Boylston said. “When you get rid of the outside distractions and unnecessary lawsuits, these are the types of things you see happen.”
By “unnecessary lawsuits,” he means the litigation that resulted from Petrolia and two former commissioners ending the Old School Square lease with no backup plan to keep open and operate the cultural complex. That happened fewer than two weeks after Moore started and with no public notice.
As Boylston runs for mayor, his main campaign points are that stability and progress. Against that message is one from a slate that Petrolia supports, as she seeks to become the shadow mayor after term limits force her out this month.
That slate includes Juli Casale, who voted to end the Old School Square lease and wants back on the commission. She and Petrolia said they acted to protect the taxpayers, but the reverse has been true.
The city has had to spend roughly $1.5 million from the operating budget to have the Downtown Development Authority run the Cornell Museum and perform other tasks. That amount likely will rise with each budget year. And fully reopening the Crest Theater is estimated to cost another $5 million. Old School Square had been prepared to pay that bill.
That’s the opposite of progress.
Voices against progress in Delray
Against Boylston’s message is the argument that things aren’t good in Delray Beach. It comes from the Petrolia slate that in addition to Casale in the Seat 3 race includes Tom Carney running for mayor and Thomas Markert running for Seat 1.
Carney, Markert and Casale complain that traffic is bad, although they don’t offer ideas to ease it. They complain about overdevelopment, but they don’t cite recent examples of it—perhaps because there aren’t any.
A recent exchange between Boylston and Petrolia summed up the politics of the city and the March 19 election.
It happened at a workshop meeting to discuss historic designations for Atlantic Avenue and the Frog Alley neighborhood. City planners wanted input on possible incentives for owners of property that designation would affect.
Petrolia said she was “disappointed” that the designation will not happen while she is in office. She suggested delaying discussion until the new commission took office. Boylston said there was no reason to wait.
Petrolia went on to claim, in essence, that only she cares about historic preservation. She criticized Sundy Village, the mixed-use project that is incorporating some of the city’s key historic properties and received a unanimous recommendation from the famously rigid historic preservation board.
Oh. And Petrolia voted for it.
Boylston said of the exchange, “She went against everything she’s been for.”
Delray to discuss repealing segregation resolution
One other item on today’s agenda deserves mention, given Delray Beach’s history.
Up for discussion is repeal of a resolution that the city adopted in 1935. It designated one portion of Delray Beach as the “Negro Settlement or Negro Area” and “all other lands lying and being within the City limits of the City of Delray Beach” as the “White Settlement or White Area.”
According to the resolution, it was “for the best interest” of both races to have these designated settlement areas. Black residents, though, could not own property in White-designated areas. Whites could own property anywhere.
Before desegregation, Delray Beach was known as a “sundown town,” where Black residents knew they had to be home before dark. In 1956, Whites burned a cross on the public beach to discourage Blacks from using it. Not long after that, the city adopted a formal policy of segregation.
Despite passage of the Civil Rights Act six decades ago, city staff can find no record of the city “formally rescinding nor repealing” the 1935 resolution. The memo asks the commission to “provide direction” on doing so now.
