Lake Worth puts $63.5 million bond on August ballot | www.mypalmbeachpost.com

Click title for link to Eliot Kleinberg's report on what happened at last night's meeting. I expected more people to attend and talk on the topic. There will be a video of the discussion up soon if you weren't able to catch the meeting live. Here is a bit from the article:

The city would tack the bond costs onto residents’ property tax bills: an extra $1.66 per $1,000 of a home’s taxable value for each of the first two years, $2.33 in years three and four, and $3.18 in year five.
Residents would continue to pay after that, but the per-year amount could be reduced, or any of the bonds even paid off early, if the city is able to refinance them or get some grants, or if revenue rises as property values continue to recover. The full payoff is estimated at $130 million.
Tuesday’s lone “no” vote: Commissioner Christopher McVoy.
“I don’t think we’re ready to put this before the voters,” McVoy said. He said the city should first assess its vulnerability to climate change and sea-level rise and how that could, in the long run, counteract the millions in improvements.

Commissioner Szerdi had some good responses to Commissioner McVoy's concerns. He pointed out that the Casino building was not built on pilings and is just laying there on the sand to be washed away in a big storm. It's behind a seawall of questionable integrity. It once had a tunnel that linked the building to the beach. That didn't seem to be a problem to Commissioner McVoy at the time, nor does it now. Huh, so much for resiliency.

The fate that awaits our Casino building?

And let me say this too. Commissioner McVoy has a Phd from Cornell and works with large water/soil projects, so it would seem. He surely is around civil engineers. Those civil engineers are licensed by the state and certified so that they can seal civil engineering plans. By doing so, they put their very livelihoods on the line. Remember too that the city's existing infrastructure was designed to what 1940, 1960, 1980 standards? Who knows what engineering assumptions were made years ago for our aging, existing infrastructure. Even if it were designed to a certain standard, does its current condition still allow it to do what it was originally designed to do?

If you were a licensed, certified civil engineer involved in a public infrastructure project of this scope for a community in south Florida, you surely would take into considerations current data and projections in the design of your infrastructure. It would certainly be better than who knows what we have been designed to right now. Doing nothing would not improve our position in terms of increased chances of more and stronger storms, for example. Commissioner McVoy knows this. He has to. But he continues to beat this drum since it plays to his peeps. His protestations are really disingenuous.