Part 3: Jeff Perlman's thoughts about the City of Lake Worth and Delray Beach

"If you find yourself catering to complainers that do not have solutions you are going to face a quick descent."
—Jeff Perlman from his talk in Lake Worth.

First a recap: This is the third and final blog post about the talk given by Jeff Perlman in Lake Worth on June 14th.

• Use this link for the first post.
• Use this link for the second one.

You may be interested to know Perlman wrote a book titled, "Adventures in Local Politics" and the profits from the book go to the charity Dare 2 Be Great.

If you recall, a group of Lake Worth residents joined Perlman in downtown Lake Worth and he talked about his time in Delray Beach as a community leader, journalist, a commissioner and then the mayor. The theme that ran through the entire talk was how important it is to forge your own City identity. One of the things stressed during Delray's visioning process was not becoming another high-rise community like Boca just like most of us in Lake Worth do not want to be a clone of Delray Beach or any other city.

Later in this post he talks about Lake Worth's strengths and weakness. There were other topics he covered which I will get to first.

He talked about Naples and how their Fifth Avenue downtown has gone through many changes and they created a business improvement district. The business district taxes itself and there was an interesting development: now businesses outside the district want to be part of it because they see the tangible results with so many physical improvements and a positive future.

If a business makes an investment the expectation is there will be a return and the same is true in a community visioning process. Change is going to happen and cannot be stopped but rather incorporated in a city's plans for the future.

Regarding education Perlman talked about how poor performing the schools were in Delray  The city created an education liaison specialist as part of the staff. The old high school's physical plant was in deplorable condition. Students would go all day not using the bathroom since they were usually flooded. The Spady School back in the early 2000's was an elementary school surrounded by crack houses. Ultimately they remade the school with a magnet Montessori program.

Improving schools was crucial, Perlman explained, because they were having a difficult time attracting good teachers and it was a hard sell convincing families to move into the city. They built a new high school and the Andover residential development paid for part of the improvements because they were finding it difficult to sell homes. He went on to say the middle school still has issues to address. Perlman made the point a city has to address education issues constantly. Briefly, on charter schools, sending your children to a private school is like a tax on top of what you pay for property values.

On city meetings he remarked about Wednesday morning after a meeting Tuesday night. The day after will provide momentum and impact concerning the issues of the day. If one issue is sober homes, for example, reach out to people that are trying to find solutions in their neighborhood and find ways to help them.

The fight over the Seagate Hotel was an ugly one but in the end it was a catalyst for Delray. A lot of time was devoted to calming the public, overriding all the negativity, rumors, and reminding everyone about their compelling vision. Now everyone loves the Seagate and it's universally recognized as a huge success. (I strongly believe the same will be said of the Gulfstream Hotel in future years. I'll save any more comments about the Gulfstream for a later date.)

Perlman said he used to keep lists of strengths and weaknesses, opportunities, and a threats analysis in his drawer he would update every couple of weeks. There are always things that you can't anticipate like the massacre in Orlando and it's important to get out there and find out how the public is reacting to incidents such as this.

He took a stab at Lake Worth's strengths and weaknesses as an outsider and made these points about strengths:

• Lake Worth has many amenities including a "fantastic waterfront" on the Intracoastal
• A "real downtown" with two main streets
• Historic cottages that remain affordable
• A walkable downtown and our own beach
• An engaged citizenry
• Central location in Palm Beach County

Weaknesses he identified are:

• Crime and vagrancy
• More residential density is needed "which creates more eyes on the street"
• The City needs more downtown housing to support the businesses in the downtown commercial core area
• A lack of industry

And. . . drumroll please:

"Lake Worth always seems to be on the verge but somehow cannot reach its potential."

The biggest threats he said were a resistance to risk-taking and the City has many infrastructure issues to solve. Some of you will recall this from an editorial in The Palm Beach Post:

The editors at the Post were right on in their critique vis-à-vis the LW2020 bond vote in 2014 that failed by just 25 votes.

Then there's this sage advice that needs to be hammered home from Perlman's blog:

"What it takes for an elected official to succeed."

In conclusion I would like to thank Jeff Perlman for taking his time to share his thoughts about Lake Worth. Judging from the positive texts, phone calls and emails he got a lot of people thinking and talking too. That's exactly what's needed to solve our pressing issues in this little City of Lake Worth that has "so much potential".