Hillsboro ready to ask voters for professional town manager
Among Broward’s towns, only Lazy Lake and Sea Ranch Lakes are smaller than Hillsboro Beach in area and population.
HILLSBORO BEACH — One of Broward County’s smallest municipalities is poised to increase its population by one — at least in the daytime. A town manager. For the first time since Hillsboro Beach was incorporated in1947, the Town Commission is taking the plunge toward a town manager form of government.
You can’t run a $6 million-a-year operation without a go-to person, says new Vice Mayor Deb Tarrant, who handily won election in March after campaigning on the issue. So last week the Town Commission decided to ask voters to change the town charter and hire a city manager in a November referendum.
A second reading on the matter will held at the commission’s May meeting.
“We don’t have anyone driving the train,”
be said Tarrant, who Beach since 1997.
Until now, overseeing the seaside town’s affairs has been divided among the five town commissioners. Mayor Richard Maggiore, for example, directs the town’s administration and police department.
The state’s Sunshine Law prohibits elected officials from speaking to each other privately. And that’s made projects such as beach renourishment more difficult than
has
lived
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Hillsboro they have to be, Maggiore said.
“It certainly doesn’t work in this day and age with all the rules and regulations,” Maggiore said.
Among Broward’s towns, only Lazy Lake and Sea Ranch Lakes are smaller than Hillsboro Beach in area and population. And the town, with 0.3 square miles in land mass, is definitely the smallest to have its own police department.
Adding a town manager has been a matter of debate for a decade. Robert Mearns said Hillsboro Beach hired him in 2006 when he responded to an advertisement for “town manager.” But he quit three months later, when he found that he was more of a clerk than a manager.
“I wasn’t too happy with that,” said Mearns, who now works as a consultant advising municipal managers and other city staff.