Show us the results -- Lake Worth CRA

The future of the Community Redevelopment Agency will be on the July 20, 2009 Agenda at the City Commission Meeting. Will the Commission allow the Board to remain as is? Will the Commission take it back and appoint two Lake Worth residents to serve along with them? What exactly will happen?

Unfortunately, the present CRA gave out money like it was candy to any Tom, Dick or Harry who applied. Having been founded in the 1980’s with its original focus on the downtown area, it has been a total farcical Board in recent years. It is impossible to see where tax dollars have gone. The City is blighted in nearly every segment. Don’t get me wrong. The CRA operated legally in the decisions it has made under an approved redevelopment plan. It had the authority to do what it did. The question really is, were the decisions they made in the best interest of Lake Worth? Did the decisions help eradicate blight? Did the Board really do a thorough background check on some of the applicants for public money? Should they (the Grant programs) have been redefined and revised? The questions abound.

Just to consider the wasted money through the years even on various merchants, the recipients of thousands of dollars some of whom were and are members of the CRA, but it is the debt they got us into on The Gateways. We are obligated to spend nearly a million dollars a year in principal and interest. It is all mind-boggling and now the brakes have come to a screeching halt.

The reason that the existence of the CRA as a volunteer Board is in jeopardy is not just its disrespect for public money but its disrespect from some of its members to the very people who appointed them in the first place, the City Commission. No one is trying to grab power on the City Commission. I am rather confident that not one commissioner needs any more work or wants it, for that matter. The reason to have volunteer Boards is to free up some of their time with people they can trust to make good, sound decisions for the City.

This is a “volunteer” board, yes, that’s true. But you don’t publicly attack the very people who put you in office and call them “un-objective as a body,” get a waiver on a lien and then turn around and bad-mouth the Commission. This is the sort of behavior that got this Board in trouble. Instead of trying to kick Wayne Marcinkoski, the most outspoken member of the CRA off of the board with the excuse of him missing a meeting because he was out of town, the CRA should have censored some of the other members or asked some to resign for being disrespectful and not focusing on its goal—that of “utilizing appropriate private and public resources to eliminate and prevent the development or spread of slum and blighted areas within the city pursuant to the adopted redevelopment plan.”

The citizens have not seen any significant changes within the City and Code Enforcement personnel are working very hard just to keep up with all the slum and blight. When you are an organization with over $3 million of tax money each year, the people are not saying, “show me the money; they are asking “where are the results?”