MAYOR HELPED DEERFIELD GROW

Jean Robb, the feisty, plainspoken mayor of Deerfield Beach for 17 years — a woman who helped oversee the city’s redevelopment efforts and who most recently drew government scrutiny to some of her dealings in office — has died. Robb, 85, died Monday after a “brief, but fierce, battle with cancer,” according to an obituary released on her family’s behalf by a funeral home. She decided not to run for re-election earlier this year, citing her illness. Her candid spirit earned her fans. “She told people what what was on her mind — that’s for sure,” said Jim Mathie, former division chief of the city’s fire department, whose tenure coincided with Robb’s years in office. “Her fans liked that and were intensely loyal. Other people, it rubbed

them the wrong way.”

She and her husband, a general practice doctor, moved to Deerfield in the 1950s. He was one of just a few doctors in Deerfield Beach at that time. She managed the medical practice while raising six children. Then she got involved in city politics and brought a certain style to the proceedings.

“I am not a go-along, getalong,” she told the Sun Sentinel in 1993, explaining that berating city workers and the city manager was her way of getting things done. “I may be abrasive and I may be tactless, but I do my job. I’m not there for everybody to love me. I’m there to protect the taxpayers’ interest.”

The city hit some milestones during her mayoral tenure: a $50 million redevelopment of the beach over the last three years and, in 1981, the founding of the Northeast Focal Point Senior Center, which has grown to include an Alzheimer’s adult day care center, a preschool and thrift shop.

She was on hand to dedicate the city’s first Habitat for Humanity home on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1992.

“As mayor, Jean was passionate about expanding economic and cultural opportunities in the city,” according to the obituary from her family.

Longtime Deerfield Beach resident Sandra Jackson recalled Robb’s willingness to fight for the city’s black community. Robb tried numerous times, for example, to restore funding to the Deerfield Beach Packer Rattlers, a youth football league, after the majority of the commission decided to go in a different direction.

She also was a champion for keeping taxes low, Jackson said. “She was one of the smartest ladies I’ve ever seen,” Jackson said. “She had the best memory.”

She was elected in 1980 and served four terms until 1993. Against the odds, she returned for another run for mayor in 2013 and won.

During her hiatus from politics, in 2002, she selfpublished a book under her maiden name, Jean Buonanno, called “Secrets of a Small Town: Small Town Mayhem.” It was a story of secrets stolen from a local doctor’s office in “Palm Cove” — a small town 40 miles north of Miami. Some saw many similarities to Deerfield — and some of its characters.

“She definitely knew many of the secrets of a small town,” Mathie said.

During her latest turn as mayor, Robb also drew the attention of a county watchdog agency.

The Broward County Office of Inspector General found in 2014 that she had misused her office in five instances that involved getting a beach parking sticker for her pastor and telling code enforcement to back off a business that donated to charities at her request.

And the State Ethics Commission found probable cause for those same charges last year. The next step was pending — an administrative hearing that could have resulted in her exoneration or punishment, ranging from public censure to removal from office.

David Bogenschutz, the Fort Lauderdale attorney representing her in the case, last year predicted she would be exonerated.

The case will be officially closed with her death, Bogenschutz said Tuesday. Had she physically been able to make the State Ethics Commission hearing in Tallahassee, she would have been cleared, he said.

He called her death “the end of an era in Deerfield.”

“She gave her lifeblood to Deerfield Beach,” he said. “She wasn’t always right, but she always believed she was right. You can’t ask much more of a public official.”

Amie Kay Tanner, past president of the Deerfield Beach Historical Society, mourned her death.

“She loved this city,” Tanner said. “She was from up north, but once she moved here, she was from Deerfield Beach.”

Her husband, Dr. Leo Joseph Robb Jr., died in 1984.

She is survived by her two sisters, Marie Ferrante of Ormond Beach, and Barbara Scheer, of Cape May Court House, N.J.; and six children, Judith Robb Bullock, Leo Joseph Robb III, Loretta Robb, Teresa Robb Glennon, Michael Robb and Barbara Robb.

A burial Mass will be at 9 a.m. Saturday at St. Ambrose Catholic Church, 380 S. Federal Highway in Deerfield Beach.