Voters should look to future for real change
When the coronavirus pandemic shut down much of South Florida, cities scrambled to get desperately needed information to residents.
With city halls closed and mayors and commissioners unable to meet in person, most took the obvious step of live-streaming video of meetings. But in Coconut Creek, leaders provided audio only — no video — with no explanation. (A memo to Coconut Creek: It’s 2021.) For taxpayers, the blackout could mean only one thing: The people running the city and spending their money do not like being watched by their constituents.
“Sometimes it’s very difficult to change a mentality of ‘This is how things have been done,’ ” Vice Mayor Joshua Rydell told us revealingly in a Sun Sentinel Editorial Board interview.
This is one of several signs that things have been rolling along too quietly for too long in this Northwest Broward city of about 60,000 people, a well-manicured city bisected by Florida’s Turnpike that’s known as “The Butterfly Capital of the World.” The city is run by five close-knit politicians who usually vote alike, get along splendidly and stubbornly resist change. At times, it looks more like Coconut Clique.
Founded in 1967, Coconut Creek is one of Broward’s youngest cities, yet change happens too slowly here. But now is time, with three of five commission seats at stake in a March 9 citywide election. All voters in the city can vote in all three contests, and they should. The Sun Sentinel recommends voters elect new leaders at City Hall who are willing to challenge the status quo and offer fresh ideas and enthusiasm.
City Commission District B
This seat will change hands because of the retirement of Commissioner Mikkie Belvedere after 12 years, and for voters, this contest is an easy call. The only credible choice is Jacqueline “Jackie” Railey, president of the Wynmoor Community Council that manages the 9,000-resident Wynmoor retirement community, a dominant force in city politics for decades.
Railey, 77, a property manager and real estate agent, has lived in the city for 22 years and is a clear voice on two hot-button issues: She opposes expanding the nearby landfill known as Mount Trashmore and opposes the planned state expansion of Florida’s Turnpike from five to 10 lanes. A spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation said expanding the Turnpike from south of I-595 to Wiles Road is in the project development phase.
Her opponent, Nikitress Lewis, 57, a teacher’s aide and former commission candidate, did not respond to our interview invitation or to three requests to submit a questionnaire. Those are not reassuring signs of how responsive she would be to constituents. For Coconut Creek City Commission District B, the Sun Sentinel recommends Jackie Railey.
City Commission District C
Incumbent Sandra Welch seeks a third four-year term and faces two challengers for the District C seat.
Welch, 72, a retired administrator at American Express in Plantation, is capable and experienced and, to her credit, when prompted by Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Welch followed through and asked her colleagues at a Feb. 11 meeting to consider video streaming of meetings. (The status quo prevailed and no decision was made as commissioners requested a future staff presentation.)
In her Sun Sentinel questionnaire, Welch spoke of her fulltime commitment to the work as commissioner, a part-time post that pays $32,802 a year plus an expense allowance of $600 a month.
Challenger Patricia Duaybes, 52, is a certified drone pilot, area leader of the local Democratic Party and 29-year city resident who’s married and has two grown children. This is her fifth try for a commission seat, she said. That’s persistence. The third candidate, hotel executive Wesner St. Vil, is a five-year resident who has not served on city boards and lacks Duaybes’ grasp of issues and track record of civic activism.
Duaybes criticized commissioners for their 4-0 vote to appoint Joshua Rydell to his old commission seat, after he had resigned to run for state attorney, without advertising the position or requesting applications from residents. “I don’t know how that would be done,” Welch told us in an online candidate interview.
There’s no question Rydell had solid experience, but the way the vacancy was handled reinforced a tired and troubling perception that City Hall is a select club for insiders only. As Duaybes said in her Sun Sentinel questionnaire: “I believe our community deserves a local government that avoids the appearance of cronyism.” She vows a full review of all city contracts if she’s elected.
Duaybes also would be the first person of color to serve in elected office in Coconut Creek in the city’s 54-year history. Residents have waited long enough for diversity at City Hall.
Welch and her colleagues should not have allowed the city charter board to place a staggering 18 ballot questions before voters last November. Four more years of Welch would likely represent more of the same, and that’s not what Coconut Creek needs now. For City Commission District C, the Sun Sentinel recommends Patricia Duaybes.
City Commission District E
This two-person race offers voters a distinct choice between Lauren Linville, 32, a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve, and Joshua Rydell, 39, an attorney, city commissioner since 2015 and currently vice mayor. Like Welch, Rydell knows his community well, is accessible and knows change is needed. But he has not been successful enough in moving the city forward, and others deserve an opportunity that only a political shakeup can provide.
Linville, who is married with two children, has served several years on the city Public Safety Advisory Board, a post that provides valuable perspective as the city rebuilds its own fulltime fire-rescue service this year. Her Coast Guard duties require her to spend six days a quarter at a base in Sandwich, Mass. on Cape Cod, where she is senior ranking officer of her unit.
Like Duaybes in District C, Linville feels excluded from city decision-making, such as the elimination of a city curbside recycling program. “Many of our residents are frankly feeling left out of the conversation,” Linville told us.
She said the commission’s decision to hand Rydell his seat back with no consideration of others is “not good government.” The appointment gave Rydell a major advantage over Linville: incumbency, even after he used his city position as a stepping stone to the higher office of Broward state attorney. When his colleagues reappointed Rydell on Jan. 11, no one bothered to ask why he was so anxious to leave in the first place. During an hour-long online Sun Sentinel interview with both candidates, Rydell made a case for change. “I’ve been an advocate for open government,” Rydell said. “I fight for it every day, and sometimes I lose 4 to 1. … You can’t change things overnight.”
One episode in Linville’s background tested her and suggests the kind of public official she will be. In July 2016, a few weeks after the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, and other acts of extreme violence and death, she posted Facebook comments that were recently excavated by a local blogger.
In the post, Linville wrote: “What is going on with our world? I’m so sick of all these ‘movements’ … Black Lives Matter, ISIS, Radical Islam, LGBT Hate groups, and even this crazy Presidential Race … they’ve done nothing but disappoint, hate, kill and create pain for others.”
Asked to explain her feelings, Linville told us she had recently given birth to a child and was distraught over so much violence in the world. “I should not have commented on anything I did not really understand,” she said, adding that the post does not reflect her feelings today.
Linville could have deleted the post but left it online and accepted full responsibility for it. “How do we learn and grow from something?” she asked. “I’m trying to own it. I apologize for it. I don’t want to hide anything from anybody.” Linville has been active in a Coast Guard task force that promotes racial understanding and diversity. “I feel that Black lives do matter,” Linville said. “It was a mistake.”
It is extremely difficult to challenge an incumbent. Linville’s handling of the Facebook post shows personal responsibility. Her military experience has instilled in her a sense of duty and discipline that are a strong foundation for the rigors of public office, and the inevitable slings and arrows.
For Coconut Creek City Commission District E, the Sun Sentinel recommends Lauren Linville.
Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Dan Sweeney, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.
“I came in expressing a strong spirit of bipartisanship,” President Barack Obama said, “and what was clear was that even in the midst of crisis, there were those who made decisions based on a quick political calculus rather than on what the country needed.”
At the start of 2010, his second year in office, Obama was remembering what he called “the classic example” of Republican intransigence from his first year: He went to share ideas with House Republicans about the stimulus bill, only to find out that their leader, John Boehner, had already issued a statement opposing it.
During the Obama years, Democrats cited incidents like this one to cast Republicans in a bad light. Obama and several other Democrats also complained that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell had announced at the start of his first term that his top priority was preventing a second one. Democrats said they tried again and again to meet Republicans halfway on health care, too, and were rebuffed.
With President Joe Biden in the White House, Democrats are saying that the Republicans’ behavior then justifies ignoring them now: There’s no point wasting time trying to negotiate with them.
The incidents didn’t actually happen, though, or at least didn’t happen the way Obama related them. Before he met with House Republicans in January 2009, House Democrats had already introduced a stimulus bill without any of their input, and Republicans had already made public statements of opposition. In his meeting with the Republicans, Obama reportedly said he was open to changing the bill; the Republicans then voted against the unchanged bill; and Boehner issued a statement saying he would still like to work with Obama on the issue.
McConnell’s remark, meanwhile, was made well into Obama’s term, right before the midterm elections of 2010. He said in the same breath that he would work with Obama if he moderated the way the previous Democratic president, Bill Clinton, had: “I don’t want the president to fail; I want him to change.”
He reiterated the message after the election: While he hoped Obama would cooperate on Republicans’ legislative goals, achieving them would probably require that he lose reelection. It was a statement of the obvious, which didn’t stop Nancy Pelosi from bringing it up eight years later to call it “racist.”
Democrats also overstate how hard they tried to work with Republicans on health care 10 years ago. They are right to note that the Affordable Care Act included ideas some Republicans had earlier favored, such as the individual mandate that Mitt Romney had signed into law when he was governor of Massachusetts. But it also included items they had never shown much support for: It has been decades, for example, since any congressional Republican has voted for tax increases on the scale the bill required.
The Obama administration made a significant concession by dropping the public option from the legislation. But it had to make that move to win sufficient support from Democrats. And it refused to make other adjustments. Adding malpractice reform to the bill, for example, would not have changed any of its basic features while making it more palatable for Republicans. The Obama White House rejected the idea for fear of offending trial lawyers.
Even leaving aside the actual history of the first Obama term, there’s something strange about Democrats’ reaching back to it to justify their behavior now.
Republicans and Democrats worked together to pass a large COVID-19 relief bill last spring, and did it again a few weeks ago. The second one was passed after Biden had won the election and the Electoral College had met. Republicans knew that any positive effect it had would buoy Biden politically, and did it anyway.
There’s no moral or constitutional obligation for Democrats to bargain with the Republicans. Obama came into office with large Democratic majorities in Congress, and had the votes he needed to pass the stimulus and his health care bill without Republicans.
Maybe they will have the votes this time too. But it would be nice if they would stop pretending that they have no other choice.