A few thoughts...

First of all, I want to thank you all who come here to read the blog and various entries. It's now been almost three years since I began this adventure and it truly has become a passion. In some spare time yesterday, I paged through the various entries here. The amount of information here that accumulates over time astounds me. And, to some extent, I think it can be overwhelming. Please take advantage of the search function located in the upper left hand corner of the blog - enter a keyword and all related posts will be brought forward.

Second, I'd like to remind people why I do this. As we all know, the city does a very poor job at dispensing important information, giving adequate notice and back-up information prior to meetings and does little to report what actually goes on in city government. I hope that what is done here helps make up for that shortfall in someway. Another reason why I devote the time to this is to combat the amount of disinformation and misinformation that passes for fact in our city. This is partly the product of the poor job the city does with informing the public. It's also a product of people or groups of people that go to great lengths to create a mythology - the version of reality they would like others to believe - that sways other people not familiar with facts or real circumstances surrounding a decision or a topic. I guess in a shorthand way, you might call that rumor control.

Third, and this is an unfortunate role this blog plays, is the need to point out the hypocrisies of our elected leaders (primarily) and how the "do as I say, not as I do" rule seems to apply. As much as possible, I prefer to point out fact - like an internal city hall e-mail that is rightly part of the public record and subject to the Sunshine Law - and let it speak for itself without further elaboration on my part. In many ways, I expect that the people that visit this blog to make up their own decisions based on evidence that is presented. I hope you respect that. And, of course, your thoughts are always more than welcome to be posted as comments or e-mailed to me. You will notice that many times recently I have created entirely separate posts for comments that are made that otherwise may not be seen if buried under a comment after a post.

Finally, this is a blog - short for a "web blog" - and is just one of the ways people can interact over the Internet. There are other blogs in our community and I encourage you to visit those as well to gain perspective and to understand the contrast between how some people use these tools. There are also "discussion boards" in our community that serve a function as well. And I think many people use all of these outlets here from one time to another. Be careful of ones that identify individuals and belittle their efforts in bringing information out into the open. In the end, we all live in this town together and tearing one another down does little good, unless your end goal is to destroy and be negative. So choice your information outlets wisely.

Thanks for visiting and let's continue to strive for a better Lake Worth.