By leaving seat unfilled, Delray commission betrays citizens
The Delray Beach City Commission has embarrassed itself — and left many minority residents feeling aggrieved — by failing to agree on a candidate to fill a vacant temporary seat.
After two meetings, the commission has remained deadlocked, with two members supporting Yvonne Odom and two backing Josh Smith, both retired educators and activists from Delray’s African-American community. Neither side is willing to budge.
It means that the city’s highest governing board will limp along, one member down, until the March 28 municipal elections.
At Tuesday’s meeting, nearly two dozen residents showed up in yellow shirts in support of Odom, many singing her praises during public comment. There were 75 to 80 phone calls and emails on her behalf as well, Mayor Cary Glickstein told the Post’s Editorial Board. On the other hand, no one spoke up for Smith — a “deafening silence,” Glickstein called it.
Glickstein and Commissioner Jordana Jarjura voted for Odom. Commissioners Shelly Petrolia and Mitch Katz went for Smith.
Petrolia told the Editorial Board that she sent out questionnaires to the 10 people who originally applied for the seat and spoke at length on the phone to nine of them, Smith and Odom included. She used the findings to rank Smith near the top of her list, Odom near the bottom.
Even though Odom had vigorous support in the community that Smith and Odom are both part of, that choice didn’t match Petrolia’s own measure of qualifications. She said she wouldn’t be swayed by “pressure ... from members of the community who believe they know better than me” what’s good for the city, Petrolia told the Editorial Board. Katz, equally adamant, said at the meeting that he wouldn’t give in to unspecified “threats.”
Making this impasse more absurd: Odom pledged not to run for a full term in March. She’d serve only about three months.
This is a citywide seat, not the possession of an individual area or minority group. But by tradition, at least one minority representative sits on the commission — and Al Jacquet, who resigned after being elected to the Florida House in November, was most recently that person. The African-American and Caribbean-American citizenry of Delray Beach had a legitimate expectation of being heard by its city government on this appointment.
Many of Odom’s supporters saw Smith as a puppet recruited to help Petrolia, and felt that politics were being considered over fairness and merit. Petrolia vehemently denies any such machinations or that she was seeking some pliable ally on the commission. “I’m not trying to put another Shelly Petrolia up there,” she said Thursday.
By doing nothing, however, Delray will now be in violation of its own charter — which requires a special election within 60 days if commissioners can’t agree on an appointment. A February election, so close to the March elections, is so impractical and expensive that it’s an “impossibility,” said City Attorney R. Max Lohman.
African-American residents, whose history in the city includes long periods of second-class citizenship, feel affronted. “When you have a community speaking in one voice for one candidate, and then those talks go completely unheard ... (it’s) a slap in the face,” Jerome Weatherspoon, 61, told a reporter.
Glickstein sympathized with that viewpoint. “Local government should be the front-line example that citizen engagement is worthwhile,” he said Friday by email. “It’s not good when a group of citizens takes the time to engage and speak up about representation (and) is dismissed.”
He’s right. This was an opportunity for the commission to show that it listens to the minority community. And the commission blew it.