Our Lake Worth Casino building

Comment Up

Our newly assigned Palm Beach Post reporter had an article published today on our Lake Worth Casino regarding last Tuesday night's commission meeting--Residents want Casino Plan. That was the title in the hard copy of today's paper.

Now, for the life of me, I can't figure out where that title came from.  Residents don't want a plan unless leaving our beach park alone and the city efficiently managing our asset is the plan. We just all approved of a plan several years ago and our casino complex and beach redevelopment is exactly what we said that we wanted in the charette.  No one is "weary" about what we want at our beach as we have what we want. We are weary that a football keeps being thrown at us to change the complex and even consider losing control of anything there. There are still people who want more commercial development at our beach. We really wanted more amenities than we got but had to scale down the "wants" from the "needs" because of money. Can you even imagine if we had spent more than we did?  Maxwell would be having a stroke.

Following are some of the important points that were NOT mentioned in the article:

1.     The $6 million was borrowed from ourselves out of reserves to build the casino. There are people out there who believe we are defaulting on a loan.  We are not.
2.    This commission has voted to delay principal payments because of other issues.
3.    We have paid back $250,000 in 2014 and 2015 and have paid all interest.
4.    The mayor is wrong about our pool.  It IS regulation for high school and college for 25 foot meets.
5.    The city has 100% failed to market our pool or to even let visitors know we have a pool.
6.    We just upgraded our entire beach park of 19 acres with the casino opening in 2012 for $13 million. Maxwell and the CM are not allowing the financial plan to work because the city has not rented the upstairs space and threw into expenses the pool operations that never were included in the financial plan.
7.    The city manager went out on an ITN on his own initiative. It was brought before the commission with no discussion or approval by the public. The CM appointed the Select Committee other than commissioner Amoroso. There was never any discussion on this and if there was, they would have known to keep their hands off our beach.

I could go on and on about this but these are some of the highlights that the article didn't address.