Randy Fine and the City of Palm Bay are involved in a fight over a good deed.
Fine, who is running for reelection to the Florida House, has been helping organize food give-a-ways for people in the Palm Bay area along side a group known as Farm Share, which helps distribute farm produce to needy people and families rather than letting the produce go to waste.
While we support the effort, in many ways we have seen this as a campaign event for Fine far more than we would like. Most people grew up being taught that you help others with humility and without calling attention to yourself.
Politicians can’t seem to do that and Fine is no exception.
However, according to Fine, the City of Palm Bay, specifically the Acting City Manager Suzanne Sherman, Mayor William Capote, and Deputy Mayor Kenny Johnson aren’t thrilled with the idea of helping others:
Our good buddy and Mayor of Palm Bay, William Capote was at it again at the last City Council meeting, demonstrating that rules and laws are for other people.
The meeting can be viewed here if you want to download it and watch.
The agenda had several consent items that were pulled from the consent agenda, including item sixteen, which read:
16. Consideration of utilizing Parks Impact Fees ($997,473), Tourist Development Council grant funds ($1,700,000), and Fund Balance Reserves ($558,492) for Phase I construction of the Fred Poppe Regional Park campground.
As we said yesterday, Randy Foster is running for Seat 3 of the Palm Bay City Council.
He, like most candidates, have stated they want to end corruption within the City. In fact, in response to some questions on another site, Foster claimed he wanted to:
Restore integrity to Palm Bay City Council and City Government and making Palm Bay to the best city to live in Florida.
Randy Foster is running for Seat 3 of the Palm Bay City Council.
After the debacle of corruption that has plagued City Hall, many candidates are running on an “anti-corruption” platform. They are all telling the voters of Palm Bay that they will work to prevent corruption and not allow it in the City.
In 2016, Foster ran for Brevard County Commissioner and lost. However, during the campaign, Foster received an endorsement from Alcee Hastings who is the U.S. Representative for Florida’s 20th congressional district.
It is impossible for a candidate to control who endorses them as individuals or groups. There have been cases at the national level where radical groups have endorsed candidates. Candidates generally say “thanks but no thanks” to that type of endorsement, distancing themselves from the group or individual and what they stand for.
In this case, Foster gladly accepted the endorsement of Hastings saying that he, Foster, “could learn a lot from” Hastings.
In December of 2016, the Palm Bay City Council voted to give an $18,000 bonus to Deputy City Attorney Jill Jacobs.
(The agenda item for this payment was under “Administrative and Legal Reports” and can be seen here on the City’s web site. Then Deputy City Attorney Patricia Smith, who is now the City Attorney presented the agenda item to the Council in the absence of City Attorney Andrew Lannon.)
The City Council approved the bonus, but there was a problem: (more…)
Palm Bay Deputy City Mayor Kenny Johnson is back in the news for the wrong reason.
Florida’s Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran in a sternly-worded letter chastised the Brevard County School District for failing to report since-expunged allegations against Palm Bay Deputy Mayor Kenneth “Kenny” Johnson Jr. dating from 2015.
On April 24, 2015, Johnson, then an assistant football coach at Bayside High School, was removed from his position for having allegedly “sent a text message to a minor student that contained a grossly inappropriate picture,” Corcoran wrote in the Aug. 20 letter to Superintendent Mark Mullins, obtained Friday by FLORIDA TODAY.
“At that time, Brevard County Schools failed to report allegations of an educator’s predatory behavior to the Department of Education’s Office of Professional Practices Services as required by law,” the letter said.
While the police later cleared that case after the “victim” decided to not press charges, the fact of the matter is that failing to report the incident to the State as required leads to two interesting questions: (more…)
100.3605 Conduct of municipal elections.—
(1) The Florida Election Code, chapters 97-106, shall govern the conduct of a municipality’s election in the absence of an applicable special act, charter, or ordinance provision. No charter or ordinance provision shall be adopted which conflicts with or exempts a municipality from any provision in the Florida Election Code that expressly applies to municipalities. (emphasis ours)
In other words, if a city has something on their books concerning elections, their regulations apply unless the those regulations conflict with the Florida Statutes. (more…)
Aug 19, 2020
Posted by AAfterwit on Aug 19, 2020 | Comments Off on PALM BAY: Police Reforming Traffic Enforcement Unit.
The Palm Bay Police Department has announced that they are “reforming” the “traffic enforcement unit,” for the first time since 2012.
The enforcement [began] Tuesday, with patrol officers monitoring the Malabar Road corridor, including the area around the Interstate 95 interchange.
It begins a week before school buses and other school-related traffic hits the roadways and comes as the city marks the opening of the $28 million I-95 St. Johns Heritage Parkway interchange.
“We’re a busy city and we have seen over the years an increase in aggressive driving with people not following the law,” Smith said.
His officers will be writing tickets.
“So we’ve decided to sift our enforcement back to a specific unit. Our goal is to change the mindset of driving in Palm Bay.”
Officers are responsible for patrolling the city’s 88-square miles, ranging from the multi-lane intersections and commercial corridors such as Palm Bay Road and Babcock Street to neighborhood roadways that cut through vast wooded lots.
We are highly skeptical of this plan for multiple reasons. (more…)
Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.
