Code Enforcement in the City of Lake Worth: “This is not the quality of life I want for my family and neighbors”.

Remember not long ago when, almost weekly, there was a story about the City’s Code Enforcement by the Post beat reporter? The last one on the ‘booting’ of vehicles was reported by The Lake Worth Herald as well and summed up quite nicely with this quote: 

“We don’t want your money. We want your compliance.”
—Vice Mayor Scott Maxwell. 

Interestingly, it’s been over a month now and there haven’t been any more Post stories on Code. Why would that be? Maybe because of what happened at the Lake Worth City Commission on June 20th?

Read about that at the end of this blog post.

“Fed-up neighborhood wants help with crime, code issues”
—Excerpt from The Palm Beach Post (see clipping below).

Briefly, some background:

In 2008, under the leadership of former mayor Jeff Clemens, PBSO took over responsibility for law enforcement in the City of Lake Worth. From 2010 until late in 2011 the Code Enforcement Dept., under instructions from certain commissioners at the time, was “gutted” under a former City manager.

Then in April of 2012 Michael Bornstein was hired to be the city manager and tasked with trying to turn all of this around. Use this link to read an article by City Manager Bornstein titled, “Code Is Moving Forward”.

The first article about the City of Lake Worth by the latest beat reporter from the Post was published in May 2015. Following has been a long string of news articles about the City’s Code Enforcement Dept., many of them very critical and others just outright inaccurate and misleading.

Without further ado:

Palm Beach Post article from October, 2005.

Click on image to enlarge:

Fast-forward 12 years later. . . at the City Commission on June 20th, 2017, there was a proclamation for “Code Enforcement Officers Week”. Those in attendance from the Code Dept. received the biggest applause I’ve heard in a long time at City Hall.

They deserve it.