Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Pembroke Park voters need newcomer while Coconut Creek should stick with experience
Nestled in north-central Broward County, Coconut Creek, the “Butterfly Capital of the World,” is home to more than 61,000 residents.
It’s a quiet and affluent community with little drama but for the longstanding worries over Monarch Hill Renewable Energy Park, better known as “Mount Trashmore,” a massive foul-smelling landfill that has been a sore spot for the city and its suburban residents for decades.
The March 12 election also lacks much drama. The five-member commission members are elected at-large, but each commissioner represents one part of the city.
This year, there’s only one contested race: District A. The contest will come down to whether voters in this bedroom community want a new face on the dais or a familiar one with years of experience.
The experienced candidate is Rebecca “Becky” Tooley. She lost her first commission election by 105 votes in 1999, but ran and won a seat in 2001. She was re-elected in 2004, 2007, 2011 and 2015.
She says she’s known as “Miss Coconut Creek” because she’s everywhere about town, talking to residents at softball and soccer games, at the local community center and in the supermarket.
Her top priorities are keeping an eye on the Florida Turnpike expansion in the southern part of the city, where state officials want to expand it from six to eight lanes. She says the project will have “a negative impact,” especially on the city’s minority communities. About one in four city residents is a minority.
Another key issue is public safety. She wants the city to join Coral Springs’ 911 emergency response system — and depart Broward County’s system — because it would be shared with only two other cities, clearing the channel for law enforcement authorities to better communicate. She said the county system is so outdated and dysfunctional that her home address was not even in the current system and she’s lived in the same home for decades.
Like everyone in the city, Tooley worries about the air and water quality in the areas surrounding the infamous landfill, which has grown to a height of more than 225 feet. When it opened in the early 1960s, it was barely 10 feet high.
Her opponent, Ryan Ross, challenged Broward County Commissioner Mark Bogen in last year’s August primary. Unlike his race against Bogen, Ross tells us he has no serious qualms with Tooley. In fact, he said voters would do no wrong in re-electing her.
But as a young father with a 5-year-old daughter, Ross said he wants to see a more responsive local government to the city’s changing demographics. The average age of local residents is 40, down from 65 a couple decades ago.
“I want them to feel connected to the city commission,” said Ross. He says he has given out his cellphone to everyone he meets because he wants people to know they can call him about any issue. He said his goal is to make personal contact with 10,000 residents before election day.
Ross agrees with Tooley on the 911 system, the Florida Turnpike Extension and the landfill, but he wants the city and the commission to take on bigger issues. He wants to help young parents pay for daycare and buy their first home. (He said he got a $35,000 no-interest loan from the city to buy his first home). He also wants to see the city chip in to assist students cover tuition at Broward College.
He said those kind of investments will keep people in Coconut Creek for years, and create a vibrant and engaged community. “I want (residents) to feel a sense of community and that ‘the government serves me,” he said.
Tooley said the issues raised by her opponent are more the job of the county, state or federal government. And as she rightly notes, they are beyond the pocketbook of a city like Coconut Creek.
Given her wealth of experience, Tooley is the better choice for the Coconut Creek Commission.
[Editor’s note: A judge last year dismissed a lawsuit Ross filed against the South Florida Sun Sentinel. He had wanted the judge to declare that he had not violated state law and had not “surreptitiously recorded” his joint candidate interview with the newspaper’s editorial board. Ross had posted audio portions of the interview online, but stopped after the newspaper threatened legal action.]
Pembroke Park
Pembroke Park has a little more than 6,600 residents, but this tiny town near the Miami-Dade County line has some huge problems.
Last year, the Broward Inspector General’s Office released a scathing report that found its former town manager and other high-ranking officials had engaged in gross mismanagement and misconduct over a period of 16 years by failing to put engineering projects out to bid.
The Inspector General accused the town of breaking federal, state, county and city rules regarding the awarding of contracts. It found that the town paid one engineering firm about $3.3 million in taxpayer dollars for 22 projects between 1999 and 2015 without putting the projects out to bid, as required by law and in violation of its own ordinance, according to the report.
Town commissioners blamed the town manager, Bob Levy, and his staff for the contracting problems. Levy, who earned a staggering $300,000 as town manager before he retired last year, claimed the commission was using him as a “scapegoat.”
The town has since hired another town manager, Bob Vitas, but did not extend his contract, so the position remains vacant, along with several other positions. The town is a fiscal disaster.
This working-class town — where almost one in four live at or below the poverty line — needs a straight-talking commissioner who can bring order to the dysfunction.
Two candidates are running for the one open seat, District 4: Reynold Rey Dieuveille and Francine Sutherland.
We wish we could tell you about Dieuveille, but he did not complete a candidate questionnaire or respond to our invitation to meet with the editorial board. Neither could we find any trace of his campaign online.
Sutherland answered our questionnaire with detailed responses and attended the interview to discuss her decision to run. The 54-year-old rental apartment manager has more than 25 years of managerial experience. Her priorities, if elected, would be to fix the town’s finances, explore new police and fire rescue contracts with other cities (the town’s current contract is with the Broward Sheriff ’s Office), and go after state and federal grants to make needed improvements to sewers and roads.
“Pembroke Park can recover and come out the other end in the right light, stronger than ever, but they must be open to change and accountability,” she said.
The road to Pembroke Park’s recovery begins with electing Sutherland. Town residents need her voice on the commission. She’s got a business background and is above petty politics. She gets our endorsement and deserves your vote March 12.
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, Sergio Bustos and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.