Save the Theatrics

Tuesday night I left the CRA meeting and wandered over to the City Commission workshop being held in the Conference Room. I missed every item that was up for discussion. I wanted to hear about our financial condition but as I walked in, they were talking about a Committee for the Casino renovation which would consist of all the City Commissioners and two appointed citizens.

It was debated back and forth and it was suggested that a person from the Lake Worth Alumni Association would be on the Committee. The LW Alumni Association’s entire membership endorsed the renovation/refurbishment of the Casino, so they have a keen interest in this project. The next suggestion was one of the merchants at the beach. I rather liked this idea because who is more familiar with the Casino than any of the long-time tenants there who have supported it throughout the years? Who has had a greater interest in the building and its preservation as well as its future?

The “Dirty Dozen” had their vocal reps in place and spoke for two minutes each on how egregious that entire suggestion was. They both see political conspiracies under every rock even bringing up the fact that some merchants gave campaign contributions to some of the candidates/commissioners that beat them in previous elections. All we are going to do is renovate a building, gals! Like a broken record, with the same message playing over and over again, these two are there at every meeting to cause havoc every chance they can for anything or everything, big or small, in order to put a wrench in the process.

Folks—we have serious financial problems in our city. We had a Reserve Fund that went from $5.2 million that is now $1.6 mil. The biggest reason for the decline was contributions to Pension Funds which lost $8 mil in one year. All of the Pension Funds--General Employees, Police and Fire have declined--big time. We are nearly bankrupt and these two bow to the East every day in support of the Unions (that really control our City) as well as the merger of our police and fire that still cost us small and now bigger fortunes. And they continue to badger city officials and the public.