Michael Bornstein City Manager Evaluation

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It sure is a strange mix of who is in charge in our city. One minute you think the city commission is jerking everyone around and the next minute you just know it is staff. In the end, you end up believing that no one knows what's going on and everyone is jerking everyone around--that they all believe that everything will work itself out.

It is a fact that no one knows a thing about our electric utility and that is why the entire matter has been shuffled off to the Electric Utility Advisory Board whose main motive is to sell it. No one has ever asked the key question--why has LW reached the point that some vocal individuals are clamoring for the city to divest itself from the bureaucracy known as Lake Worth Electric Utilities, an asset that has been here for 100 years? The other thing that the public has determined is that the city wants to get every law suit off its plate to make room for the next one that they will also settle. They can't even fund our library and are exhausting trust funds to do it. The list goes on.

The city continues to believe that if something is not working properly, get rid of it instead of taking the same amount of time to identify the problems and fix them. It can be the simplest of things such as an 80 year old tree determined to be diseased (cut it down) or our most valuable asset, the electric utility (sell it). As someone asked, "Wouldn't it be more prudent to improve the viability of the utility now and put it on a sustainable path, as the sale of the utility is not an absolute outcome? If the process begins now they have a much higher probability of achieving their stated goal of putting electric rates on a parity with FPL." But the Utility putters along and is still the black hole.

Tomorrow night, the city commission will evaluate Michael Bornstein's performance after his first year as city manager. As he is a compatible and likeable guy, there will not be any problems in his evaluation. There is a love fest going on and he is trying to accommodate the majority commission in every way.  It always helps to get great reviews when your employer likes you.

As Mr. Bornstein never gives a city manager report and we have no idea what he's up to or whether he's been effective, this first year's evaluation might be a revelation...we actually might learn what he's been doing--but don't hold your breath. Even the evaluation matrix is not in the back-up nor is Michael Bornstein's self-evaluation. It's all a secret. This too, will most likely be the shortest evaluation in history to go right along with the short agendas and the belief that the public has no need to know.