Lake Worth Herald editorial, "the hype about selling the beach"

Here is an excerpt from The Lake Worth Herald out this week. Early next week will publish the entire editorial here on this blog. Much of the hysteria has abated, save for a few red signs around town, and as evidenced by public comment at the last city commission meeting. Now it's time for the public debate with the adults in charge.

The message has gotten through to most, it seems, that no one is considering "selling the Beach". The debate centers around the Casino building which has a known faulty business plan, operational deficiencies, design and construction flaws and the long ignored pool complex which need to be addressed. The conditions at the beach have been ignored more due to not wanting to re-hash anything related to the Casino complex, since it was thought to have been a completed project. To critically examine any problems there would necessarily point fingers at those in charge at the time (a previous city commission/city manager) prior to and during the redevelopment of the Casino building.

Here is the excerpt from The Lake Worth Herald:

    Now we see the actual proposals and the hype about selling the beach and a convention center turn out to be highly inaccurate. This hype, perpetuated during a campaign cycle spread untruths to the voting public. 
     Leasing the upstairs of the Casino to a restaurant at the offered twenty dollars a square foot, including common area maintenance and taxes will not help Lake Worth. This figure is much too low to be sustainable. It was said the cost to the city is closer to thirty dollars and even that won’t help pay back the six million dollars loaned from the utilities fund to pay for the building, much less offset the nearly three hundred thousand dollars the city spends to maintain the pool and keep it open twenty-nine hours a week. 
     Leasing to a restaurant will not provide the revenue needed to fix the building shortcomings left as a result of a guaranteed maximum build price. Value engineering is not a good way to build a building that is intended to last many years, especially one sitting on the coastal dune exposed to salt air and spray at all times.

For those of you unfamiliar with "value engineering" here is how it's explained in Wikipedia:

     The reasoning behind value engineering is as follows: if marketers expect a product to become practically or stylistically obsolete within a specific length of time, they can design it to only last for that specific lifetime. The products could be built with higher-grade components, but with value-engineering they are not because this would impose an unnecessary cost on the manufacturer, and to a limited extend also an increased cost on the purchaser. Value engineering will reduce these costs. A company will typically use the least expensive components that satisfy the product's lifetime projections.

While that definition applies to a product, you can interchange building with that word and apply it to our Casino building. We also cannot forget the design flaws in the site plan and the decision to keep the building where it was, rather than move it more towards the center of the property. This was all part of an intentional ruse to let the public think somehow the city "saved the building." We will be living with the fallout from that decision for a long while.

Don't forget the ill-fated decision to change the design of the building to prevent a two-story restaurant as proposed by Johnny Longboats. I can still remember Annabeth Karson, Laurence McNamara and Commissioner McVoy gushing about the beautiful second floor restaurant space and how its magnificent views would be an easy sell to a high end restaurant.

We are still waiting.

And if a restaurant did want to take over the vacant space on the second floor (pay rent and provide a decent return to the city's taxpayers and utility customers), where would all the tables and chairs be stored so that we could still host events in the ballroom? Where would staff work to make sure the Casino operations and property are run efficiently?

Not much thought went into these important items.