Lake Worth (Beach) into the Future

Lake Worth Beach in 2030: City hopes to hit 50,000 residents, keep beach-town feel

When you get planners involved, this is what they envision for our city. We are one of the densest cities around already! On top of that, the city can't manage anything and wants a public/private partnership at our beach. They are posed and ready to do this.

Commissioners continually tell us that we are a city of 7 square miles. We are, but some of it is water. We are under 6 square miles with around 38,000 people living on the land and 10,777 are not even citizens.

Area
• City	6.67 sq mi (17.27 km2)
• Land	5.88 sq mi (15.22 km2)
• Water	0.79 sq mi (2.05 km2)  12.69%

So they want to increase our city by 24%...people living on top of people. Where are the people going to come from? Do they really think they will attract moneyed people who want to live on top of their neighbor? Is this the 'Build it and They Will Come' theory? Where? More structures, more services and more costs across the board that they ignore. But I guess they have that figured out like everything else.

Read about it... You are led to believe that William Waters runs this place but it's the city manager who has all these commissioners dangling on strings who approve everything he wants.

And they want to keep our small town charm?

Palm Beach County says "yes" to developers without weighing the consequences

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Point of View
Palm Beach Post
June 1, 2016

Western development will have unintended consequences

We see the Agricultural Reserve being destroyed by unnecessary development. The local food market is growing, with the demand for locally grown food along with it. Preserving the Agricultural Reserve could provide a viable opportunity to increase locally grown foods and maintain Palm Beach County’s economy.

Yet Palm Beach County is moving to over-develop this area. This is because county staffers do not promote good planning.

The Post editorial on May 22, “County’s smart planning is ignored to give developers OK,” perfectly outlined the problem. Failure to protect the local economy and the environment is a troubling problem. We are focused only on saying “yes” to developers. We have a staff that no longer supports good planning.

The editorial clearly pointed out that we cannot pay for the roads we currently need and that concurrency no longer pays for the expenses of new infrastructure demanded by new projects. So why does the county continue to approve new projects?

It is because we no longer have a model for good planning in the county. County planners are now simply told to present proposals to be approved. It does not matter whether the county can afford the projects because there is never any real discussion of how we will pay for these infrastructure costs.

The public is no longer represented in the County Commission audience. Members of the public don’t attend meetings because the commission no longer listens to them. Commissioners meet with developers before public meetings and have their minds made up when they come to the meetings.

The public does not have the same access and has to wait for the meetings, where they are permitted only three minutes to speak — and sometimes that is reduced to two minutes. Members of the public have to arrive at the beginning of the meetings and wait for hours to be able to address the commissioners.

The county is approving developments that are too far outside of our corridors. They sit beyond the county’s existing road structure. There is no good way of connecting these developments to existing roads.

The other issue is drainage. In Houston, Texas, we have just seen catastrophic flooding. The ultimate cause was too much development and too much pavement, not permitting water any place to go. We may someday have the same problem as we continue to pave Palm Beach County.

Houston went through a great growth spurt where developments were approved without thought to where they would drain. New developments send water into older areas. We may experience the same problem if we continue with these endless developments that are farther and farther west.

DREW MARTIN, LAKE WORTH

Editor’s note: Drew Martin is the conservation chairman of the Loxahatchee Group of the Sierra Club.

LDR's Ordinance 2015-12 - Procedural Error but Residents still in the dark

Good News and Bad News--

The Good news--Someone finally listened. Maier and McVoy did not vocalize their approval or disapproval in a vote on Ordinance 2015-12 on September 15. Even though  Maier and McVoy voted against this on September 1 at the the First Public Hearing,  at the Second Public Hearing on September 15, they were not given a chance to vote. It is now being called a "procedural error" and procedure is not always a top priority of this "visionary" commission. The mayor did not care about getting McVoy's or Maier's vote on the record; she already had her three votes.

The proposed amendments provide clarification, edits and additions to the following sections of the LDRs:

Article 2 - Division 1: Administration, Section 23.2-36 – Rezoning of Land and Future Land Use Map (FLUM);
Article 3 - Division 2: Zoning Districts, Residential Districts, Section 23.3-7 – SF-R – Single-Family
Residential; Article 3 – Division 6: Planned Development, Section 23.3-25(e) – Mixed Use Urban Planned Development..

On August 5, 2015, the Planning & Zoning Board, at its regularly scheduled meeting, discussed the proposed amendments to the LDRs and voted 7-0 to recommend approval to the City Commission. Well, no surprise here.

On August 12, 2015, the Historic Resources Preservation Board, at its regularly scheduled meeting, discussed the proposed amendments to the LDRs and voted 6-0 to recommend approval to the City Commission. Again, no surprise here.

These Boards are rubber stamps for staff and staff can fall back and use their votes as proof that what the city is doing is all above board and in the best interests of the city and that the public got a chance to express their approval or disapproval at their meetings. 

At its meeting of September 1, 2015, the City Commission voted 3-2 to approve the ordinance on first reading and to schedule the public hearing for September 15, 2015. The reason that McVoy and Maier voted against it on September 1 is because this item was agreed to be discussed at a workshop. That didn't happen.  This "visionary" didn't care about discussing this. The matter is way too extensive and if there is one commissioner on the dais that can explain it all and feel comfortable with it all, please come forward. Do you know how these changes might affect your neighborhood?

At its meeting on September 15, 2015, three members of the City Commission voted to approve the ordinance. However, due to procedural issues, staff has recommended that the public hearing be re-advertised and conducted again.

And the bad news is that this really needed to be workshopped with extensive discussion but they just want to get the vote finally finalized and keep the residents all in the dark.

CRA director to address blight in our downtown

As a society, we all have our hands out in one way shape or form.  And the reasoning is, if we don't try to grab the cash to which we may be entitled, then the next guy will get the money. This has become an entitlement country. The grant comes from somewhere, some government entity or foundation--originated by taxpayer money. Maybe the grant is directly from the government or from a wealthy benefactor. Either way, you don't have to repay it.

The CRA just got a $165,000 grant to be used to hire a planning (planning firm--it's hard to take those guys sometimes) firm for the Lake and Lucerne corridors from A Street to Federal Highway.  It seems that Joan Oliva, CRA Director, says we have too much blight in the downtown and she wants the area transformed to art-related businesses. I agree with her on blight from A Street to Dixie Highway but not Dixie Highway to Federal on Lake and Lucerne Avenues, our major downtown corridor.

In our downtown, empty store-fronts happen because the rents are unaffordable or the businesses can not attract enough customers for their services or goods. Calling the downtown blighted is a big stretch. Dixie to A Street (I don't think of this as the downtown) has been taken over by immigrants and many blocks here have a lot of crime, slum and blight because we do not enforce laws here and essentially ignore this area. Their decision to paint the Shuffleboard Court Building in garrish colors did not help eliminate the blight and probably encouraged it.

Now as I have said before, the world is full of starving artists.  We have plenty of them in this city.  Everywhere you turn around, you bump into an artist or an occasional comic book writer.  And why would the CRA Director say anything  else--she wants more artists in our downtown and in the CRA district because you can get grants for art related endeavors. She needs the lucrative downtown tiff money in order to even keep her doors opened and pay her big salary. And this grant might solve it all, and possibly down the road, it might solve our Third World blight from Dixie to A Street on Lake and Lucerne, but it will be years in the making.