County offifficial: City can rename road for Obama
County engineer says Riviera doesn’t need an outside OK.
RIVIERA BEACH — Riviera Beach offifficials don’t need Palm Beach County approval to rename the section of Old Dixie Highway that runs through their city in President Obama’s honor, Count y Engineer George Webb says.
Riviera Beach City Council members voted 4-1 Wednesday night on what they described as a recommendation to the county that the highway be renamed in the president’s honor.
They said Wednesday they believed they needed county approval for the name change.
Webb, however, said Friday that no coun- ty action is required to rename the road.
“The call is 100 percent theirs,” Webb wrote in an email to The Palm Beach Post, which reported that the county had fifinal say in renaming Old Dixie.
Efffffffffffforts on Friday to reach Riviera Beach Mayor Thomas Masters and City Council Chairwoman Dawn Pardo about the city’s next move were unsuccessful.
So it’s still unclear whether Wednesday’s vote means Old Dixie has now been renamed President Barack Obama Highway.
County commissioners had begun getting calls on the topic, and Webb wrote them an email to make the rules clear.
“The County is not involved in any renaming inside a municipality — other than a coordination role, given our Countywide mapping function and involvement with 911,” Webb wrote to commissioners.
“State Statute confifirms that the County has the responsibility for naming roads outside municipalities. County Administration, Planning, Zoning and Building and Engineering have been working closely on this for the past few months.
“The road is the maintenance responsibility of the County (since 1982), and it will remain our responsibility. The County does have overhead street signs at our traffific signals along the road, and we will be working with the City to coordinate when and how they should be changed. All other ground-mounted street signs along the road that require changing will be the responsibility of the City.” wasn’t inclined to throw out the entire panel.
The judge said that because they’d started with 220 prospective jurors and by Friday were left with 68, there was no way to know whether the jurors in question were still in play.
“Odds, are, they’re not still here, but I don’t know,” Miller said, later adding of the reporting juror: “Why she didn’t report it in a more timely fashion, I have no idea.”
Ultimately, lawyers on both sides agreed to keep the panel and move forward, but the judge quizzed the remaining jurors again on whether they’d done their own research in the case. None of them had, they responded.
By the end of the day, attorneys chose a panel of 12 jurors and two alternates for the case, which is expected to end in early September.
Earlier this week, Miller dismissed several prospective jurors after someone reported that a male juror was making disparaging jokes and comments about one of the prosecutors as well as Klein during a break in jury selection.
Klein, Jeffff George and Theodore Obermeyer, one of Jeffff George’s childhood friends and the offiffice manager at East Coast Pain Clinic, were charged in Bartolucci’s death as the only state piece of a larger federal indictment dismantling the George brothers’ operation. Authorities at the time said the twins’ illicit pill ring was the largest of its kind in the nation.
George and Obermeyer both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder charges in Bartolucci’s death in exchange for their cooperation against Klein and others charged in the federal traffifficking cases.
Neither of them have been sentenced in the state case, but prosecutors agreed to cap their potential punishment at 20 years in prison.
Klein faces a life sentence if convicted.