The Commission and the Community Relations Board

On Thursday, March 8th, The Commission will hold another Special Meeting to talk about the functions and functioning of the Community Relations Board.

It's more than a little ironic that an advisory board instituted to foster amicable relations within our Community has itself been at the center of rancorous debate throughout our Community, almost since it's inception three years ago. That debate has been fueled and sustained by comments from the current board chairman, as well as action by former Commissions, starting with the 2010 Census. 

In an effort to establish Lake Worth as an entitlement city with a population of 50,000, the Commission budgeted and allocated $20,000 to encourage un-documented residents, part-time residents and others to respond to the federally mandated 2010 Census. This amount was roughly equivalent to the total amount that all of Palm Beach County spent for the same purpose. 

The newly constituted CRB responded to the Request For Proposal (bid request) issued by the City. This seemed to be the perfect solution; a volunteer board designed to integrate and serve the under-served, under-counted and un-documented population in Lake Worth would be responsible for getting as many people as possible to fill out the Census questionnaire. 

The CRB plan was to spend all of those 20,000 tax dollars on community outreach and events designed to promote awareness and compliance. Two private individuals also responded to the RFP and their plan was to take that $20,000 as salary and have the City cough up another $6,000 to pay for "expenses".  

The volunteer Community Relations Board proposal was rejected. The two private individuals who were awarded the $26,000 contract have yet to present a final report before the Commission despite being asked to do exactly that three times in the last year alone. Perhaps that's because FEWER residents answered the 2010 Census than ten years before. Perhaps that's because not one invoice, showing how the $6,000 in expense money was spent was ever provided to the Commission or the public, from whence, by the way, it came.

By any measure of accountability, the Census Count Committee and the effort of the two private individuals who made up that committee, was a failure. Could the Community Relations Board have done better if their proposal to voluntarily reach out to the Community had been selected? Would the Community Relations Board have refused three "requests" by the Commission to present their final report? 

We'll never know what might have happened, but we absolutely know what did happen - the CRB was relegated to the trash heap of advisory boards with no clear purpose, no clear direction and no relevance to any of the Commission mandated goals and objectives.

This left the CRB wide open to devolve into a personal platform for any board member who was subsequently selected by the Commission to serve. And devolve it did, to the consternation of other board members and the public who objected to repeated allegations of Lake Worth Residents as genocidal white-skin privileged bigots. 

Nor did other CRB board members and members of the public appreciate the characterization of PBSO presence in Lake Worth as tantamount to a "mafia-esque police state". One wonders if Lake Worth was home to a large population of un-documented Italian immigrants, would the same ethnic slur have been applied and gone unchallenged by those in Lake Worth devoted to global harmony? 

I know, that's ridiculous. And yet, those very characterizations were made, in public, at the podium in the Commission Chamber on September 6th 2011, by the Chairman of the CRB and in writing, by the current chairman, signing AS the Chairman of the CRB, on October 10th 2011. Those remarks have remained unchallenged by the current Community Relations Board members and the past and current City Commission acting as a body. 

The CRB has very recently made an attempt to address the controversy but not until the public repeatedly asked that they do so. The Commission likewise has ignored the controversy until now and even now, those specific allegations are not on the agenda for "discussion".

So this Commission will take the functions and functioning of the Community Relations Board into consideration once again. This is a Special Meeting and  the Commission may therefore vote if a motion is made and seconded. Or the Commission may simply make recommendations to the CRB on how to end the rancorous debate and promote amicable relations in the Community. Funny, I thought the CRB was supposed to be making those kinds of recommendations to the Commission - not the other way around.