Jeff Perlman and my visit to Downtown West Palm Beach last night.

“I’m in the boat, pull up the ladder” is not a strategy for economic sustainability.
—Jeff Perlman, community activist, author, and former mayor of Delray Beach.

and. . .

“If you find yourself catering to complainers that do not have solutions you are going to face a quick descent.”
—Use this link to learn more about Perlman’s much-talked-about gathering in the City of Lake Worth last year.


I journeyed to Hullabaloo (the sub-culture “gastropub”) in West Palm Beach for what is called “Bourbon Sprawl” put together by Joe Russo and other downtown folks. They bring in a personality every month for an informal talk about cities, politics and trends. This month’s speaker was Jeff Perlman and a good friend of Lake Worth.

Check back tomorrow and I’ll share some of Perlman’s remarks. Today just want to share some pictures from downtown West Palm Beach last night.

There are electric vehicle charging stations in some of West Palm Beach’s parking garages. Here are two more pictures that show a little more detail:

“Rethinking Paradise for a Green City”

Charging a vehicle (pardon the pun) is not free. You pay with a credit card.

Then I got on the garage elevator to go down three floors. Usually such trips are not that fun and fill the senses with the wrong sorts of odors — not so here — very clean. And they opportunistically use the back of the elevator door to advertise current West Palm Beach related events. We can only dream of such timely and routine outreach in an elevator here in Lake Worth.

We don’t have a downtown public parking garage in the City of Lake Worth. Or a hotel either. Yet.

On the way back I just happened to discover why there wasn’t the usual parking garage elevator smell and why the garage was so clean.

Look who was coming to work!

“Now this is how you run a railroad”, errr, I mean a City parking garage.

Speaking of railroads the Brightline station is nearly finished. In fact, I am part of a group that will be touring the station at the end of July, prior to regularly scheduled running of the trains. You’ll see this in more detail after our visit.

Again, check back tomorrow for more on Jeff Perlman’s chat.

A view of some in attendance at the “Bourbon Sprawl” last night at Hullabaloo.