Getting ripped, politically: City-county battle over gyms reopens old wounds
The air is unusually thick these days in Broward County. There are exaggerated threats of throwing people in jail for lifting weights. The city of Fort Lauderdale accuses Broward County of being a “banana republic.”
The politics of the pandemic have driven a new wedge between two old adversaries: the city and the county. People can’t work out, and the politicians can’t work out their differences.
The latest trouble erupted when the city gave the go-ahead for commercial gyms to reopen Monday subject to a series of 10 safeguards and in accordance with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ full Phase I executive order.
Then the big bad county balked and said those gyms should remain closed, that the governor’s executive order gave the county the power to override the city. Things got crazier when the city’s mayor, Dean Trantalis, fired off an email that made a sensational allegation against County Commissioner Steve Geller.
“Commissioner Geller contacted the sheriff just now and asked him to arrest me tomorrow over the gym issue,” Trantalis wrote. “The sheriff, of course, refused to get involved. This is the mentality we are dealing with.”
Dead wrong, Geller said. “Absolutely untrue.” Showing tremendous restraint and clearly mellowing with age, Geller replied with a lengthy note in which he wrote: “I don’t think that we should attribute to malice what could be a misunderstanding.” He offered to take a screen-shot of his iPhone call log to prove that he hadn’t spoken in weeks to Sheriff Gregory Tony.
“I’m trying to tamp things down,” Geller told the Sun Sentinel. But it would be an exercise in futility.
Geller told the Sun Sentinel that sheriff ’s deputies could shut down the gyms for violating a county order, but he never suggested arresting people. He believed the gyms needed greater health protections than the city had ordered, such as mandatory masks for patrons as well as workers and dividers between individual workout stations. Geller invited Dr. Stanley Marks, medical director of Memorial Healthcare System, who endorsed those ideas at Tuesday’s commission meeting.
But the fight isn’t so much about gyms as it is about intergovernmental animosity that has festered for decades between two crotchety old neighbors who just can’t get along, to the detriment of civic progress. You could widen Broward Boulevard to 100 lanes and it would still be too close for comfort for these two, with their halls of government separated by a few blocks.
As the gyms faced potential threats of fines, the city wisely suggested they close, a temporary action. But the city’s badmouthing of county government continued late into the night Tuesday at City Hall at a live-streamed City Commission meeting.
Trantalis repeated Geller’s fictitious threat to arrest people. “You cannot quiet dissent through police action. This is not a banana republic,” Trantalis said he told Geller on the closed-captioned video, as these words flashed across the screen in all caps: “THIS IS NOT A BANANA REPUBLIC.”
The mayor ticked off a litany of grievances. He accused the county of plotting with the Florida East Coast Railroad behind the city’s back over a controversial fixed train bridge over the New River. He said the county put up needless barriers to a COVID-19 testing site east of I-95. He said the county won’t put up a promised $500,000 or work in partnership with the city to reduce homelessness downtown.
“All they do is exercise the politics of ‘No,’ which gets us no place,” Trantalis said at City Hall. “All we get from the county is attitude.”
Trantalis suggested that the city reconsider the idea of a joint $420 million citycounty government and public safety complex, a project that’s been on the drawing board for several years.
Then the mayor was challenged by City Commissioner Robert McKinzie. “You’re wasting my time with personal, petty stuff,” McKinzie shouted at Trantalis, as he visually stormed out of the meeting. “Good night and good riddance!”
Trantalis was right about one thing. The county bureaucracy is viewed as a big, cold, faceless force that throws its weight around. But words matter, too. When the mayor tosses around words like “banana republic,” it makes for a good headline but it also leaves lasting welts.
The city needs to tone down the incendiary rhetoric, and the county needs to be a more cooperative, friendly neighbor. As the mayor also said: “Our communities do not want to see our governments infighting, because nothing gets done.”
Things were just starting to cool down Thursday when Trantalis’ chief of staff, Scott Wyman, fired off an email to county commissioners that said Broward Health CEO Gino Santorio approved the city’s plan for gyms as following CDC guidelines. Taking aim at County Administrator Bertha Henry, Wyman wrote: “The county should be ashamed of themselves. Bertha should have had these protocols in place so we didn’t have to have what turned into a public showdown.”
Indeed. In the meantime, the county might consider relocating the seat of government to friendlier confines, perhaps way out there along Alligator Alley.