Sue? Just go pound sand

PB Post editorial re Greater Bay potential for lawsuit. One of our leaders speaks:

Mayor Jeff Clemens says he doubts that Greater Bay could get financing now anyway. Besides, the city was unhappy with Greater Bay's renovation of the beachfront pool. The city, Mayor Clemens says, was left with a punch list of unfinished work. "If they couldn't finish a $450,000 pool project," he asks, "how could they build a (multimillion-dollar) project?"

Good question. Here's another. If a jury will give you $40 million for a project that didn't get built, why go to all the trouble of building something?

Well, the PB Post sounds as frustrated as most of Lake Worth residents. The point here is that people want something better on our flagship oceanfront property. We are in a public/private partnership with Greater Bay. Public/private partnerships do not manage themselves and can be unwieldy. The Mayor, after joining the Commission in April of 2007, should have acted as if the beach was Job #1. He needed to direct staff to maintain that relationship in a legal and satisfactory manner - he won his office as a "pro beach redevelopment" candidate. In my opinion, he did very little in directing the relationship appropriately. He should have made sure everyone was talking to each other and that deadlines were being met. Instead, his "hands off" attitude let the stronger members of the Commission lead the relationship.

Personally, I think the city's case is weak - best of luck in the courts. $40 million is about the size of our annual general fund budget. Greater Bay, on their part, could and should have done a lot more in terms of public information and nurturing support of the project at a grass roots level. They didn't - which caused an information vacuum that was soon filled by the detractors of the arrangement.

The re-zoning and land use plan change has always been a red herring served up by the opposition. It simply brought the zoning and land use up-to-date with the uses present there. In fact, given the increased square footage of the Straticon et al proposal, the project would have kicked in the need for the same process. It needs the Beach and Casino zoning district to go forward anyway.

Regardless, we are now trying to slap something together by April so that we don't lose the $5 million of county money. We may be in the unenviable position to be fighting a war on two fronts - protecting our backside from Greater Bay's claims and moving forward with something "new." Add a third front if you include maintaining our relationship with the County so that we keep their $5 million.

Didn't someone's campaign slogan say, "Experience...Leadership"...?